The next day was exactly as I feared. A non-stop parade of meetings, reports and petty squabbles; welcome to governance.

I had woken up wrapped in the arms and legs of the beautiful Mouse, but it was very obvious that ‘Hanky-Panky’ hadn’t been part of our bedtime ritual. Hell, I still had my pants on and it was starting to become obvious to me that ‘consummation’ would definitely not include intoxication.

I wasn’t hung over, but I was close enough to it that it kept me from being a ‘bright morning cheerful.’ I did get a moment to visit with Brin and Lunch before the meetings started, but breakfast call was also the call to my first meeting of the day. A day of very long meetings and endless lists followed. I had to figure how to kill all reports and just get an executive summary from someone absolutely trusted. The meetings dragged on; I was buried in reports, verbal and paper. There were so many details flying at me that it was impossible to keep up.

Fun this definitely was not, I had to 'restructure management' to support the larger group that we now were. More importantly, we needed to focus on supporting our growth which explicitly meant self-defense and preparation for winter. We could spend time over the long winter arguing plans for spring the caveat being we had to survive that long winter if we wanted to see spring.

To get construction fully underway, we needed get our base industries working; lumber was already half-way there and bricks had to come next. We had a lot of folks who had made hand-made bricks before, but we needed a manufacturing process. I pulled in our three engineers and tasked them with sorting out the most efficient procedure to produce the most reliable masonry. We needed brick to build the efficient kilns to create iron and steel.

Once the masonry was running and we had reliable production, we could work on construction and start to build our town. Lumberjacking was an entirely separate effort and would employ a large section of our group just to clear the land for our homesteads and fields. Clearing and stump removal were brutal tasks, but we needed the land and we needed the lumber. Heck, we simply needed a lot of things and while buying them would remain an option we still needed to build for now.

The real fun was in knowing that a week from now I’d be hearing squabbles about staffing and who got who for what. I also knew I needed to focus on recruiting and gathering more talented people. Right now, I had a total of two people who might be able to do the patent work I needed. Without that work, we’d lack the long term cash flow we needed, so I’d have to run that team for now.

I laid that all out (well, except for the patents) to the council in as agreeable a manner as I could come up with. We did take several votes and the most important was that Commodore Timmons was to start the supply runs from St. Louis as soon as possible. We had a lot of stuff warehoused down there and we needed it ASAP.

I made hay-cutting our top priority. We’d be shifting most every person onto hay, for the first cutting in a couple of weeks. We needed that hay to survive the oncoming winter, every day that went by I felt the pressure of those icy cold winds blowing on my soul. I guess I was truly a child of the Great Plains.

Just as we went to close the meeting and get on with the party, Pete decided to remind us that the buffalo would be here soon and we needed to prepare for the hunt. I had to second that and then I sent for our butcher.

We finished up with what was meant to be a quick riding tour of the improvements that had been made in my absence. ‘Quick’ turned into kinda of a joke. Half the folks on the Council weren’t horse savvy and just getting them all in the saddle took the better part of an hour. Lunch and I were ready to go in minutes, after that we merely pranced around waiting for a chance to get out together again. Lunch had two stages of happiness; unbridled and racing free across the open land, or saddled up and racing together for fun. Standing around waiting was not in Lunch’s personal plan of happiness.

We eventually got on our way and I ignored all of the complaints and curses behind me. This was the 1820’s on the frontier you know – riding a horse is simply part of life. The reality is that most of the trade folk were town folk also, wagons and carriages were more their thing. I personally preferred a Ricaro racing seat in a high powered sports car; since I couldn’t have that, I’d just enjoy my time with Lunch while we waited.

There were a lot of minor improvements to see, the Council had done a pretty bang-up job of keeping priorities on track. At the same time, there was a lot of detail to be finished and a lot of little, yet important, things that weren’t being followed up on. What this really pointed to, was a leadership and management problem on my part, I had to make some changes and needed to figure out those changes first. But before that, I needed to see the Lumber Yard and Wood Shop, two areas that would be vital for our continued growth.

Both sites were high on my immediate need-to-see list. The amount of land that had been cleared in the downtown area made it obvious that they had worked from sunup to sundown in our absence but the scope of that effort became very clear when we reached the lumber yard. The wood shop came first on the street, but you couldn’t miss the amount of wood stacked up and aging in the lumber yard. Holder was beaming with pride and it was easy to see that he had led this effort. The logs were only stacked three high but that couldn’t have been easy without a gantry to help with the lifting.

We had at least two acres of logs and another acre of brush piles that had to be managed at some point. I knew for a fact that we had people in town who knew how to make something useful out of anything, so I wasn’t too worried about that. The good news was, when it came to wood, we weren’t in bad shape. The lumber would all take a while to cure and what we’d burn this winter wouldn’t be the most efficient of wood, but maybe we could focus on charcoal to make up that difference. Regardless, wood kilns moved up on my ‘must build’ list.

While the lumber yard still had just a simple shack for shade, the wood shop next door was large and spacious, even if still under-tooled. We’d have our tools showing up soon enough, but for now this was a good start. They even had a small conference room to use as an office or lunch room, not bad thinking. Both sites had their own outhouses and wells were being dug, in the case of the wood shop, the well was being dug in the corner of the largest room in the shop. They had even set up a manually-operated lathe to start turning wood. It was crude but it worked for rough jobs. More good news.

The final stop on this whirlwind tour was the new boatsman lodge. It was a typical, if very large, Pawnee-type lodge. At the moment, it was cramped quarters with all the boatmen in town, but it was way better than tents and it was a place the single guys could call home. Everyone involved knew it was a vast improvement over sleeping rough.

Whirlwind tour complete, it was time for a party.