Whitemountains, winter of 172 (22nd year of the fort, i think).
The duchess gave birth to yet another child, she's up to 23 by now, although several are adult and off-site. The swordsdwarfs seem to have caught a training snag, there's just no sparring going on, so it'll be another five years or so until the second one turns elite. Grrr.
I fiddled with my two bytes of minecart memory. I had forgotten one plate-to-hatch link in the display of the buffer, and now i've added another lever so a byte can be returned to zero _without_ changing the buffer's state. I had at first only implemented a "read" operation, but since this actually produces its output as a side-effect of _clearing_ the adressed memory, it just took another bridge and an extra link to a hatch cover to remove all effects on the buffer and turn it into a plain "clear memory". There's still a problem in that bits acquiring a zero in the "read" operation can trap the cart in a hatch-covered pit, which will spontaneously activate the bit if the (global) input for the bit location goes live again. I'll have to see if there's a timing window that results in a proper switch-off. But not today.
The bowyer's workshop finally caught up with the bone stocks, after making about 3000 crossbows. I've sold about 2000 already, especially to the elves (i can't see the harm in selling them crossbows, after all, i'm not selling them any _bolts_). And the most recent child mood produced a unicorn bone weapon rack, with cheetah bone, obsidian and yellow zircon decorations, rated at about 50.000☼.