I awoke from my extended overnight 'meditation' session, feeling refreshed and ready to go to work.

Then I really woke up, and I'm not as refreshed, but I have bills to pay and people counting on me, so up I get anyway. I really hate those kinds of dreams. They take what little fun there is out of getting up.

A few minutes later, with my morning ablutions accomplished, I walked in to join my family for breakfast.

"We've got to hurry, dear, big shipment coming in today."

"Mmmhmmmm."

"I don't think that he does 'hurry' in the morning, mom."

Surprisingly, I actually managed to dodge the playful swat my dad attempted with his hastily rolled up broadsheet.

"I tell you what, young man, " he quavers, " back in my day, we really knew what hurry meant. None of this namby-pamby newfangled mechanical assistance. We hurried on foot. You youngsters…." He loses his composure, coughing to disguise his laughter. "Harumph!"

Standard dad-level humor. After two worlds and being on both sides of the jokes, I still think they're funny. Apparently, so does my dad.

I sit down to a large bowl of billnut gruel and inhale it rapidly, then wash it quickly in the basin.

"Anything we need from the store, ma?"

"Nothing urgent, but we could stand to stock up a bit more preserved items for the winter since we're all eating more these days. If you want to pack in some more dry goods, beans, pasta, rice, oats, and some unshelled billnuts that'd be handy."

"OK, I'll work that out with Henrig, ask if we need to put in an order to get extra for the next bulk delivery. Bye!"

Work is work. The trip to work was somewhat muddy, because some of the roads aren't cobbled or filled in with sufficient gravel, but the rains did stop overnight.

Some idle chatter with the customers and Henrig helps to pass the day pretty quickly, and Henrig and I quickly figured out the timing for the bulk purchases. Ultimately, given the quantities I'm purchasing, I'm going to end up working almost exclusively for the food for the next month. It sounds a bit exorbitant, given prices from the last world, but transport isn't cheap, there's lots of labor in making these items, and those sacks will provide enough of the plain staples for three people for a season, without anything extra. So, although it is nearly 60 thaler, I'm getting a really decent price, courtesy of an informal employee discount plan.

Spices, sugar, honey, and other items would improve the taste of the basic food, but with no refrigeration, you basically eat what's in season and won't keep, which is why we have to shop every tenday for fresh items. There's canning and pickling and smoking and drying and several other preservation options, but mostly you do those yourself, swap with friends or family for variety, or purchase the really expensive versions in prepackaged tins. Canned goods are a luxury item. Which just seems odd to me. Anyway, that item is handled early on Oneday, and the rest of the tenday goes fairly smoothly.

On Fiveday, I had some time in the store to myself, and I used it to check my telekinesis again, but it's not really changed from the half-stone point. That seems like it should have changed more, since I'm now able to keep full Woodman for nearly 30 minutes. My best guess is that the practice is attuning me to the imagery and focus, providing some skill gain, but my use of the skill I have is much more efficient for that particular application. There's not been a corresponding increase in skills or stats that I'd expect from more than tripling my original time before exhaustion.

On Sevenday, the deliveries are all in for this tenday, and my order is ready.

"Hey, Henrig, can I borrow the delivery cart? I'd like to get all this stuff home in one trip. I'll bring it back in the morning."

"That'll be fine. Just bring it back cleaned up, and we'll call it even."

"Thanks!"

That was fair. Intermittent rains and muddy roads are one of the standard hazards of the fall season, so I'd already cleaned the cart once this season while on the clock. Since it was getting a bit caked with mud again, it needed another cleaning. Additionally, deliveries were not normally free for customers, so bringing it back clean neatly balanced out the free loan of the cart. I could clean it in the garden with limited tools and a bit of time. I kinda wished for a pressure washer, which would have made the job really fast, but a brush and bucket will do the job well enough.

Hauling a half-dozen bags, each of which contains about four stone of goods, is hard work, even with a hand cart. There's a reason that you don't see lots of overweight people in older pictures. Limited caloric supply and doing almost everything by hand consumes more energy than most modern people appreciate. The closest I came before my rebirth was having used a hand saw to cut down a small tree. Here, nearly everything is handmade still, there are some factories, but those are mostly assembly lines full of people doing manual tasks. Maybe there's some fully automated systems in one of the more advanced countries.

Anyway, I get the food home just fine. I unloaded some into the pantry and the rest into the cellar. For practice, and to keep myself mud-free, I decided to clean the cart with telekinesis, grabbing hunks of mud in my "fingers" and tossing them onto the pile of shame, which has mostly disintegrated in the rain. It takes a while, but I have it mostly clean without the mess getting on me. The rest took elbow grease, water and a brush, just as I had expected.

Eightday was more of the same daily grind for thalers and bits, but I needed to recoup my 55 thalers that I've invested in the foodstuffs. At supper, we made plans for the enddays, then I went to bed early. It'd been a long tenday. More experiments tomorrow, and hopefully more progress for the parents, too.