Tsu'na came back from last night's mapping happier than I'd seen her since coming here. I guess we were hurting more than I thought from poor communication. After all, we're married, we're life partners, we really need to be able to work together on understanding the world.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I don't know what I'm doing. I haven't been in the doing-the-impossible business very long. I don't know what qualifies as "best practices." I want to be scientific about it, controlled experiments, blah blah, but this isn't exactly a lab, and my wife certainly isn't a lab rat.

Maybe I should be looking at history. Babbage and Curie worked out of their homes...how did they balance and manage things? Of course, they probably weren't worrying about blinded experiments.

Still, communication is key. Kind of ironic that people have gone from weirded out about Tsu'na to concerned and sort of protective about her, which means a town of a hundred or so people communicate about us faster than we can communicate with each other. Guys at the Pit last night were asking if she was coming in, if she was okay, if there was anything they could do and so on. Not what I expected from plaid-wearing career beer drinkers.

Sam found us a wiring guy. We met at the shed this morning. His name was Trevor. "So, the shed's got a line running to it from the bar, but that's just for lights an' stuff, and it looks like it was a crap job, so I can run a new one. What-all you looking to have in there?"

"Ceiling floods, power tools, window AC, space heater, maybe a mini-fridge. Thinking we'll build a worktable and island with power strips, plus wall outlets. Possibly a ceiling fan."

Sam smirked at me. "Thinkin' 'bout movin' in?"

"Might as well cover everything. So, new breaker box?"

"Whaddaya mean new? Sam's still got fuses. Yeah, breakers. Power strips are up to you. I can do wall outlets and a floor outlet. Just gotta mark out where."

"Sounds good. How much?"

"Couple hundred for materials, day's work if I push it...call it eight hundred."

I saw Sam grimace and give me a small headshake. Little did he know.

"Think I can handle that. Will you take copper?"

"What, you mean like pennies?"

"No, copper." I pulled a copper ingot out of inventory and offered it to Trevor.

He took the ingot, examined both sides, and looked up at me. "The hell am I supposed to do with this?"

"Sell it for scrap? I hear it goes for three dollars a pound."

"And you've got three hundred pounds of copper lying around?"

Quick adder. Cool. "Yeah, my wife's into metalworking. We used to make jewelry for the renfest crowd. But there just isn't a market for it anywhere around here, so we've got metal we're not using."

"So why don't you sell it?"

"Eh, the wife's in denial about it. If I sell it, she'll get mad because I don't believe in her. But if I give it to you and get a workshop out of it, I'm supporting her. Women, you know?"

Trevor stared at me. Sam did too, with his patent-pending "that's weird" look, which I pretended not to notice. Finally, Trevor said, "Four hundred."

"Dude. That's four hundred over your quote."

"Yeah, well, my quote didn't include haulin' a bunch of metal. You want me to take this shit, you're gonna make it worth my while."

"...Three fifty?"

"Four."

I tried to look resigned, but it was going much easier than I'd feared. "Yeah, okay...that just about cleans us out."

"And I'll need a hundred up front." When I looked at him, he said, "Gotta buy materials. And see if you're full of crap about the value."

"Yeah, sure, okay. Wait here."

I went into the shed, leaving Sam and Trevor to gossip about me. I'd made a couple dozen steel ammo boxes (since they stack), so I brought out four and dumped twenty five ingots into each. I carried two boxes out and set them in front of Trevor. "Got two more. And I'll need the boxes back."

"You shittin' me?"

"Those are twenty dollar ammo boxes."

He looked down at the boxes. I could hear the beads clicking on his inner abacus. "Three fifty and I keep the boxes."

I gave a beaten-down sigh. "Fine." I fetched the other two from the shed and we loaded them all into Trevor's truck.

As we watched Trevor drive off, Sam asked, "So where'd ya get the copper?"

"Would you believe we mined it?"

"That what ya want me to believe?"

Probably not. "Okay. You know we go camping, right?"

"Yeah...?"

"Well, one time we find a house out in the woods. Door's busted, windows broken, looks like it's been empty for years. We spent the night in it, then next day we stripped out all the copper."

"That's pipes 'n wires 'n shit. Where'd those bars come from?"

"We melted down the copper we found."

"How?"

"Build a fire under a porcelain sink. Make molds out of mud."

"An' where's this house?"

"Sure couldn't tell you. I mean, show me a map, maybe I could narrow it down to twenty miles..."

"How'd ya get the copper back here?"

"Well, you know, we're pretty strong..."

"Four hundred pounds? Twenty miles?"

Shove it in inventory and Return. Piece of cake. "We found a trailer behind the house. We might've borrowed it."

"Where's that trailer now?"

"Ditched it in the woods."

Sam sighed and squinted off into the distance. "Make it fifty miles. Can't narrow it down to a county that way."

I nodded slowly. "Okay. Thanks."

"An' ferchrissake keep it simple. More dee-tails, more you can get wrong."

"...Yeah."

"Miz Tsu'na comin' in tonight?"

"Yeah, it's her shift."

"'Kay. You take care o' her, y'hear?"

"Always."

Sam nodded and went into the bar. Something had changed, and I'm not sure what or when.

But I think we're gonna be okay.