She Only Cares About Cultivation-Chapter 860 - 798: Famine Era 39 (4000 Words)
Ye Huan first went to the cafeteria to have breakfast, cornbread with pickled vegetables and cornmeal broth, with an egg. Rare things are valuable, and it costs ten cents for one, just an ordinary boiled egg in plain water, which she didn’t buy because it was too conspicuous, not that she couldn’t afford it.
Currently, her monthly salary is twenty yuan per month, and every month she receives 24 jin of food stamps, 4 liang of oil, 5 liang of meat, and 20 jin of coal. Although she doesn’t cook now, whenever she has the time to go out, she needs to buy some coal with her Coal Tickets and store it in the space, so that she can cook there in the future when there’s no firewood.
Aside from this, military personnel also receive toothpaste, toothbrushes, shirts and workwear as subsidies, so the welfare benefits are certainly much better than those of ordinary workers.
Tong Zhan’s salary is even higher, at least three or four times hers, and he also receives mission allowances. Other food stamps are also doubled or tripled, and he also receives an Industrial Voucher from the military, which can be used to buy cigarettes and alcohol. In short, their combined salaries are enough to ensure they can live comfortably in this era.
Even before the introduction of food stamps, she had saved quite a few good items. Eggs, like food, even if they’re expensive at 50 cents per jin, she still buys them.
So now, there are at least one hundred jin of eggs in her space, adding up to three or four hundred jin of mixed and fine grains, but there’s no meat.
Because meat is really scarce, and her job doesn’t allow her the time to queue early for it.
However, she has bought quite a lot of fish from fellow villagers, accumulating about thirty to forty jin, both large and small, all fresh from the river.
In this era, Northern people might only be able to eat kelp and can’t even think about other seafood.
If the cafeteria doesn’t have eggs, she can cook them in the space. She can’t drink the milk, but eating an egg every two days is still maintainable.
Among her colleagues, although not all her female colleagues are military wives, at least 80% are.
Since their men are not usually around, they naturally need to live frugally. An egg costing ten cents is too extravagant for them, so she always eats the same as them in public, at least when it comes to food, so they can’t tell any difference.
Considering there are still a few years until the Famine Era, she hasn’t let any of her monthly food stamps go unused, converting them all to food.
It’s not just hers; she also uses the portion Tong Zhan hands over, aside from his expenses at the base.
Thirty percent of what she buys is stored in the cellar at home, and the rest is preserved in her space.
Tong Zhan hasn’t had to worry about anything on his end, as the supplies left for his daily expenses are sufficient.
As the food stamp system was only introduced in August, many people haven’t adapted to this model yet.
Eating requires food stamps, sugar requires a sugar ticket, buying meat needs meat tickets, alcohol needs liquor tickets, cigarettes need cigarette tickets, and even buying matches requires match tickets.
Food stamps are also divided into fine grain tickets, coarse grain tickets, and mixed grain tickets.
Rice ticket, bean cake tickets, Rice Tickets, Japonica Rice Voucher, glutinous rice tickets, flour tickets, flour tickets, Strong Flour Ticket, corn tickets, corn grits tickets, etc., are all available. There’s nothing that can’t be printed or categorized; there are at most three to forty varieties.
Fruits are generally local seasonal fruits, and those like apples from other regions are unavailable. To exchange for rare tickets like meat tickets, cotton tickets, liquor tickets, cloth tickets, biscuits, pastry, and candy, she has to secretly trade fruits.
Fortunately, the speculation and profiteering rules haven’t been introduced, so she still has a chance to exchange.
If she works a day shift, she’ll take a stroll after work, but of course, she has to disguise herself.
If the other party doesn’t have much money, occasionally she can get silver coins and jade, even though the appearance isn’t that great, at least they’re antiques—who can have fake goods in these times?
They are undoubtedly more valuable than her fruits.
This might also be her main reason for insisting on staying in the city; if she were in the mountains, what could she get? She wouldn’t even have a place to trade.
The greatest advantage of being in the military is saving on clothing, even for a Military Doctor. They wear a uniform with a white coat over it every day, which easily gets dirty because the bloodstains on it are hard to clean. Although the hospital washes them uniformly, they’re never clean. She has tried many methods, since washing agents aren’t much.
She eventually learned from experienced predecessors to wash with light salt water, then clean with soap or a ten-percent potassium iodide solution.
Some even recommend using White radish juice or mashed carrots with salt, which are also effective.
No matter how it’s cleaned, it must not be washed with hot water, only cold water, because heating the blood causes a chemical reaction, making it even harder to clean.
