Technical Difficulties

As you may or may not have noticed, I didn't post yesterday. I worried that you all might think that something major and bad had gone down here, something terrible enough that I was unable to take a few minutes to write.

It didn't. In fact, things here have taken a moderately good turn, but I'll get to that in a minute. The problem yesterday was that the people at Google got hit with an early summer storm and it knocked out a bunch of servers. Since The Fall, Google HQ at Mountain View has been running solely on renewable energy. That means that they've only been able to power a fraction of the servers they once had. Enough to keep communication going, some email services. Certainly enough for the small percentage of people who've managed to survive.

It took a while for them to get everything running again. Hell, I'm just impressed they managed it at all. I know there has to be a ton of work and expertise involved in doing everything they do on a daily basis to keep people in contact. I'm nothing but happy to have them.

I will say this, before I move on--it was strange and frightening not to be able to blog. I know I take days off on Sundays and occasionally during the week, but I still CAN write to all of you if I want. Knowing that the possibility existed that the blog might be completely gone, and unable to return...that left me in a cold sweat.

So, on to some good news.

Our hunting parties have been joined by our scout parties in order to range out and try to bring in a lot more game. All told there are about thirty of them out in a given day. Yesterday they got pretty lucky. They brought in six deer, two wild pigs, three turkeys, several dozen squirrel and about ten rabbits. We've also got a few groups of people doing some fishing on the river as well as in Benson creek. It's net fishing, which is mighty unfair to the little fishies. But we gotta eat.

The good news being that we're bringing in just enough extra food right now to keep from lowering rations. It's exactly what the folks who were threatening to strike wanted, and frankly I think most people are very happy with this outcome. It does kind of suck that we don't have scouts out there looking for new caches of supplies and the like. Honestly, though, I see the strikers' point--without adequate food, people just aren't going to be able to work effectively.

I'm not naive enough to think that this solves the problem and we can just forget about it. We had a good haul yesterday, and we're hoping to keep that up. The creek and river are pretty stable sources of fish, but we can't feed everyone on what is caught. I know that the situation could become critically worse with even a week of bad hunting. We're just going to have to make sure to spread our efforts out over a large area so as not to scare off or over-hunt the local populations.

One thing that does make me worry is that the zombies around here have been living off of animals for a while now. We've seen a marked decrease in the deer population that can't be wholly attributed to our hunting practices. The damn things breed like rabbits in Kentucky at least. Hunting used to be the only thing that kept the deer population in check. Even our community isn't big enough to have caused such a dramatic dip in numbers...

Right now, the zombies eat animals because their primary choice for meals, us, are too hard to get a hold of. I worry that we're going to run into herds of zombies that are after the same prey we are. Scary thought, trying to hunt while being hunted.

For now, we're ok. That's all we can ask for.