From Robinson Crusoe

Chapter 55: Wall Completed
Happy times are always so short.

Although fried meat is delicious, the amount of rice is limited.

After the amazing feeling of the first few pieces wore off, the feeling of fullness became stronger and stronger, and Chen Zhou gradually felt that the seal meat was becoming greasy.

There are no spices such as chili powder, pepper, garlic, onion, etc. The taste of the seal meat itself is purely based on the taste, and you can't eat too much.

The first half of the flat copper pot serves Chen Zhou himself, and the second half serves Lai Fu, Xiao Huihui and Tizi.

It is said that a dog's stomach cannot hold two taels of oil. Considering Lai Fu's health, Chen Zhou did not dare to feed him too much fried meat.

Although cats are pure carnivores and can fully digest food, their bodies are too small and they cannot consume much meat even if they eat as much as they want.

After the dinner, when the flame in the stove went out, Chen Zhou, holding the oil lamp, lay down and looked at the white mud in the stove that had been baked by the fire.

Different soil types react differently when heated.

The stove made of yellow mud does not need to be completely dry before it can be lit.

Stoves covered with cement must be allowed to dry before they can be used, otherwise the cement will crack and fall off on a large scale after being exposed to fire.

Chen Zhou was too impulsive before and started the fire to fry the meat before waiting for the white mud to dry. He actually had no confidence.

After finally finishing his meal, he hurried to check the stove, worried that the white mud in the stove would crack and affect its structural strength.

After the fire had been burning for more than two hours, the inner wall of the stove was no longer the grayish white it had just been built, but was instead stained with a layer of black from the smoke.

Chen Zhou poked the inner wall with a branch and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the white mud was firmly attached, with no cracks or falling off.

……

On February 2, after waking up in bed early in the morning, Chen Zhou suddenly thought of an interesting question:

Is 1660 a common year or a leap year?

In fact, this problem will not affect the challenge.

Assuming that there are 28 leap years in these 7 years, and if he treats all these 7 leap years as ordinary years, the error will be at most one week.

The time of the rainy and dry seasons on the island is not fixed, and in extreme cases it can be more than ten days in advance. To know what season it is, you mainly rely on observing the weather, and even if you know the time of the week, it is of no help.

But Chen Zhou is a very stubborn person.

For some problems that he cannot understand or cannot fully understand after studying them, he will give up without hesitation.

But he couldn't put aside those things that could be figured out in a short period of time, which made him feel very uncomfortable.

I vaguely remember learning how to distinguish between ordinary years and leap years in elementary school, but that formula has not been used for so many years that I just can't say it.

This feeling of remembering and yet seeming not to remember was very painful. Scratching his messy hair, Chen Zhou hurriedly got up from the bed, found his notebook, and wrote and drew on it.

"Normal years, leap years...

2026 is an ordinary year, and leap years seem to occur every four years. If we go back further..."

As he was writing, Chen Zhou felt that the calculation based on every four years was not right, because he remembered that the formula had more than four words, which meant that leap years must occur more than once every four years.

Staring at the paper with the years written on it, he thought for a while while biting the feather pen, then he wrote "a leap year every four years" on the paper, and then wrote two more lines based on his feeling: "xx is not a leap year" and "xx is another leap year".

Scratching the back of his head again, Chen Zhou reminded himself that it was time to find a barber, muttering to himself.

"Ten years? A hundred years?

There is a leap year every four years, no leap year every hundred years, and then there will be another leap year every four hundred years! "

“It seems to be this formula!”

After checking several leap years in his memory and confirming that the formula was correct, Chen Zhou calculated that 1660 was a leap year.

"That means there is a 2th in February this year. Hurry up and write this information down so you don't forget it later."

I solved a "problem" as soon as I got up.

Chen Zhou was in a good mood. He closed his notebook, put on his clothes, and walked towards the kitchen.

The curtain opened on February 2th.

……

After three days of continuous construction, by February 2, the outer wall of the bedroom was finally built to the top of the cave, supporting the sand and gravel layer above.

The entire stone wall is extremely wide and thick, with yellow stones used for the foundation and blue-gray stones used for the part exposed above the ground.

Chen Zhou originally wanted to carefully select building materials and imitate Xu Sanduo in Soldiers Assault, using blue-gray stones to build some geometric shapes to add some artistic flavor to the wall.

However, the ideal is very full and the reality is very skinny.

Without a stonecutter, it is really difficult to find the right color from this pile of strangely shaped stones and fill them into the right position.

Xu Sanduo's stones are used to build roads. All he needs to do is ensure the color is correct and put the flat side of the stones facing upwards.

His three-dimensional stone wall has high requirements.

If you only pay attention to color and not shape, even if you build the wall it will be a shoddy project.

After patiently picking up stones for an hour and looking at his pitifully slow progress, Chen Zhou gave up the idea and went to work in the mud.

On top of the blue-gray stones, he used flat, highly adaptable white stones for the top portion.

From top to bottom, the entire stone wall is a white and slightly protruding eaves, a main wall made of a mixture of dark gray and light blue, and an ochre-colored foundation buried underground.

The cracks in the stones are filled with smoothed white mud, which appears gray because it has not dried yet. After it is completely dry, the color will be much brighter, like natural zigzag stripes, which accidentally form irregular geometric patterns.

If you look closely, it's a bit rough, but at first glance it looks pretty good.

In addition to the wall itself and the eaves protruding about 20 centimeters above, Chen Zhou also completed the installation of door frames and window frames during the wall-building process.

He originally wanted to open a door in the center of the wall, and then open a window on each side of the door. He drew a rendering on a notebook and felt that this design would turn the entire wall into a surprised expression. Although it was formal, it looked too funny.

So Chen Zhou changed his mind and installed the door frame on the left side of the wall, and installed two window frames next to each other on the right side of the door frame.

He also built a windowsill with white stone slabs under the window frame, so that if he wants to grow some green plants in the future, he can place them on the windowsill.

Work is too busy now, and Chen Zhou thought that after he finishes all the work he needs to do, he will catch a few beautiful parrots in the forest and hang them under the ceiling to raise.

Then you can transplant a few delicate and beautiful flowers and plants and place them at home, or build a fish pond next to the farmland, catch a few colorful fish and breed them in it, which is also a kind of fun.

……

On February 2, the bedroom exterior wall entered the final finishing touches.

The wooden doors and windows carefully selected by Chen Zhou were installed on the door and window frames.

After closing and closing the doors and windows several times to make sure they were functioning properly, Chen Zhou walked into the room and the light suddenly dimmed.

The sun, wind, rain and even the smell of the sea were all kept outside the house.

“No more worrying about being woken up by the wind blowing in from under your feet while sleeping.”

Sitting on the bed, looking at the faint light coming through the small piece of glass on the window from afar, Chen Zhou lay back in the quilt, feeling sincerely proud of the wall he had built.

But this is just a small step in the long process of building the shelter.

Kitchen and storage room exterior walls, doors and windows, wall buttresses, interior load-bearing walls, interior partition walls, floors, ceilings...

They all require a lot of materials, time and manpower.

After resting for a while, Chen Zhou got up from the bed and started to make indoor lighting.

If he had not caught the two seals, his best option would have been to build a few bonfires with stones and rely on charcoal for lighting, since lamp oil was limited.

Now that there is plenty of lamp oil, he plans to make a bracket for the oil lamp and place the lamp on it so that he can move it wherever it is needed.

The lamp stand is easy to make. You just need to cut a piece of wood that is thick enough, install three brackets on the bottom of the wood, and then dig a groove from the top of the wood to fix the oil lamp in it.

Each of these lamp stands weighs more than 40 kilograms, looks crude and clumsy, but is very quick to make.

It only took Chen Zhou three hours to make four lamp stands.

He placed the lamp stands in the bedroom, lit them all, and looked at the warm yellow light that filled the entire room. He nodded with satisfaction - this was the feeling of home.

To celebrate the temporary victory, after turning off the lights, Chen Zhou gave himself an afternoon off, took Lai Fu out for some fun, and replenished the food for the little chinchilla.

……

Chen Zhou has been so busy lately that he has no time to milk the goats after getting up in the morning and starting work.

He finally got an afternoon off and went to see the female goat.

Sure enough, not a drop of milk could be squeezed out.

The little goat has grown up and now doesn't like to get close to its mother goat, so it is becoming increasingly difficult to catch it.

Chen Zhou estimated that if this trend continued, in another month or two, the little goat might leave its mother and go find a large group of goats on its own.

But tying them all up is not a solution. Not to mention anything else, it would be a hassle to fetch water for them every day.

Looking at Lai Fu rolling on the grass slope, he sighed.

"It would be nice if you could help me herd the sheep while I work, Laifu.

I don’t know if such a big dog can be trained as a sheepdog…”

In order to prevent the little goat from running away, Chen Zhou coaxed and tricked the little goat into catching it and tied two ropes to it.

Although the trip rope cannot restrict the little goat's desire for freedom, it can slow down its speed. Once the speed slows down, it will naturally be difficult for it to run away.

Even if it runs away, it cannot keep up with the pace of the flock and can be easily caught.

“I should go look for the sheep when I have time. I must expand the size of my flock to ensure that they don’t disappear for no reason.

Moreover, the milk production of one or two sheep is too low to provide me with daily consumption, and I can’t make milk tofu or butter at all.”

Sitting on the hillside, letting Lai Fu and the tripped goat play, Chen Zhou's eyes were wandering.

He was wondering where this flock of sheep had gone and why there was no news of them after they left the platform.

……

Before the sun set, Chen Zhou brought Lai Fu back home and fetched some water while there was still light.

After an entire dry season, the flow of water flowing out of the cracks in the rocks at the source of the mountain stream has become smaller, and it takes more time to fill it with water.

Boil some water, wash your hair, and take out your razor.

Facing the wall, he wanted to shave his hair, but without a mirror, it was too awkward to shave by feel.

After hesitating for a long time, Chen Zhou only cut off a few strands of long hair on his forehead that affected his vision.

As for the rest of his hair, he planned to move the two large mirrors inlaid with brass frames from the foot of the mountain and take care of them later.

Shaving your head in front of a mirror will always give it a cleaner and neater look.

Although his hairstyle is bald, if his head is not shaved cleanly and a few patches of hair are left on the bald head, it will be uglier than other hairstyles.

　Thanks to: Book friend last number 4834, Gluttonous Feast is Coming, Toxic Milk Powder Player, Dr. Strangelove, Book friend last number 2791, Zuo Xian, Handsome Otto Hou Guoyu, Live!, Moldy Fishbone, Book friend last number 6259, Lulu Ares, Holy Light Wave, Create Sandbox World, Jia Lingzi for their monthly tickets. Thank you all for your support!

　　The double update on 5/15 has been completed.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)