Monday, October 10, 10:00 PM. Brewer.

I went into Dallas today to check on the City Hall checkpoint. I took Trevor with me for company and to get him out of the house. I can’t remember if I wrote down that I set up the message box there in case people saw my signs on the freeway. The signs are holding out fine. I had brushed them on with traffic striping paint, so they should last for years. I didn’t see any signs in reply and there were no messages in the box. Not yet.

Trevor talked a mile a minute. He’s actually fascinated with the horses, reading every book about them he can find, though he’s scared to ride one. I don’t blame him one bit. Claire’s been teaching me to ride and I’ve had a couple of close calls already. You’re higher up there than you look, and falling off would not be pretty. Trevor’s already got one arm in a cast. We don’t need another break. I’m not in a hurry to get anybody else riding until we have a better mastery of all the ins and outs of these creatures.

Trevor talked about the ham radio quite a bit too, which stations had disappeared and which are still going. We talked a while about Legos, though there’s not much you can say about them, but they’re on his mind a lot. He’s fascinated by gears—how they go in opposite directions and how big ones make small ones go faster—by gear ratios, in other words, though he didn’t have that term. It was a good little trip and I think we both appreciated the time with just the two of us.

At home we have a tanker truck of propane that we are slowly transferring to the house’s tank. We’ll eventually use it up. I’ve been looking for a larger depot that we could use to refill the truck when it runs empty. I wasn’t sure what a large propane storage depot would even look like.

Today on the way back we found one. There were some long white tanks in a fenced off area beside a railroad. I think I’d even passed it before but didn’t know what I was looking at. We went and checked it out. There are six 60,000 gallon tanks, labeled “propane,“ that I’m pretty sure are full.

As we were driving back I asked Trevor to help me do some calculations. Here’s what we came up with.

Our tanker truck holds 11,000 gallons. If we burn about 3 gallons per hour (usually it’s less), that will last us almost half a year. If I can figure out how the fittings work without blowing myself up, one of those big depot tanks can keep filling up the tanker for two and a quarter years. So right here within easy reach we’ve got 14 years of propane.

That’s assuming it doesn’t go bad. I haven’t found any books or magazines that say whether it does or doesn’t. On this matter the Almanac is silent.

For our cars and trucks, we’re still dealing with gasoline either by siphoning from one vehicle to another or by taking new vehicles when old ones go empty. I’ve thought about bringing a gasoline tanker truck home but I don’t really want more explosives around. Our system is working fine. Eventually I may set up one of the gas stations in town with its own electricity, power the pumps, pump gas like we did in the old days. But gas and electricity together? I have a feeling that’s going to be complicated.

Claire was crying this afternoon when we got home. One of the kittens had died. He was the runt and Amy said he’d never really thrived. Eventually they checked him and he wasn’t moving at all.

Claire is devastated. It’s awful. What do you tell a kid who’s just lost an animal, especially after so much loss? There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Hard to imagine what good will come of it. But I guess it will.

We buried him down in the woods. Claire and Trevor set up a rock for a gravestone and wrote “Chip” on it. Then they said a prayer over his little grave. They held hands, which I haven’t seen them do in a while.

The two other kittens are fine.