Saturday, March 19, 2011

Gassing Up

I'm out of the compound right now, doing a little exploring with Jamie and a squad of scouts. It's a lovely, crisp day to be out dodging zombies and enjoying the sunshine. You'd think that in all the time we've been searching Frankfort for food and supplies that we'd have hit pretty much everywhere, but that isn't the case.

We're all taking a lunch break right now, and as we're right at the edge of a cell tower's reception I thought I'd take a few minutes and post.

There are a few places around the county that we've ignored up until now. Most everything else has been easy pickings, but the need to conserve fuel and the limited amounts of things we can bring back because of that has made us stay relatively close to home. Unless we're out on a longer trip out of town, of course, but those tend to be well worth the time and effort we put into them.

Now, though, we're able to manage a little better, and we're heading out into the Bald Knob (and no, I'm not making that name up) area of the county. It's all country out there, lots of farm land and heavy woods. We're hoping to find some livestock that we can slaughter, and maybe keep some to bring back to the closer farms for breeding.

How are we able to use fuel with such casual concern? Because we're all a bunch of dumbasses, that's why. Especially me.

You might not think it about Kentucky, but this state leaned pretty heavily in the direction of green technology before The Fall. You might think otherwise considering how dependent our economy was on coal, but the heavy cost of lives in the mines over many years combined with some very sparkly federal incentives meant a healthy dose of green technology here in the capital and elsewhere.

Any one of us natives (well, I moved here when I was seven. Close enough.) should have thought of it sooner, and I really can't believe I of all people didn't. It's my job to come up with solutions to many of our problems, and I'm a self-proclaimed green tech nerd.

Oh. Yeah. You probably want to know what the hell I'm talking about. Sorry. I ramble.

One of the big chunks of federal money we got a few years back was to upgrade the fleet of state cars. There are all kinds of them around town, several large state parking lots full of everything from sedans to vans, pickups of all sizes and even a few really big trucks. I counted two tractor trailers this morning when the thought hit us to take a much closer look at the vehicles stored there. Because many of them are flex fuel vehicles that run on 85% ethanol/gasoline (or in the case of a few of the really big trucks) ethanol/diesel.

And we're in the middle of a town with several full-sized breweries. Of course, we've spent a lot of time distilling most of the liquor we find down into pure alcohol. It's just damn useful stuff to have around, and we've got a few hundred gallons of it at this point.

Yes, we all feel really, really stupid for not putting two and two together before now. Stop judging me, I can feel your hate.

Sorry, I'm just a little playful today. This is awesome for us. It gives us the ability to stretch our fuel supplies for a much longer time, and given the HUGE quantities of liquor available for us to distill down and purify at the local distilleries, just there for the taking, we're confident that our supplies will last us for quite a long time. That's ignoring the many, many other such facilities all over the state, and the fact that there is a fuel refinery in Boyd county that, while all the way across the state, probably has more fuel than we could bring back with us.

We've had a lot of bad mojo the last few weeks. I'm just happy to share some good news.

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