bits - kick my tail, imaginary time

had some reflective 'I should kick my own tail' thoughts today that I have several more small stories and books and I just haven't been able to drag myself to work on them but then I go and spend a few hours here and there in Minecraft building a huge empire that doesn't exist - which imaginary world is more productive? It is all 'imaginary time', like dreams, but a bit more tangible.

 

I have another Mikki story I had half-realized - and several others, and then a few more popped into my head today and I captured an iota of it... and yet I sit here staring at what I sent myself on my lunch break and saying 'Do I really want to work on that or do I want to go build a road to nowhere in the game' again...

 

Both past times can be done at midnight or 3 am...

only one of them will ever amount to something in my publish queue....

 

  

 

Mikki Mack - the quite pretty small grey cat with the glorious long fluffy tail 

 

I worked on a few simple illustrations and thoughts for that story.  And I thought about tomorrow, which is the Solstice.  I have to work tomorrow, and it will be early.  What if, instead of walking all the way up to the road and watching the first light and walking all the way back down, I made coffee and an egg and watched the red day lilies light up in the garden?  I think that would be good.  And Saturday will perhaps be a hard day, starting late at the post office and as long as it takes to get it done - and not a route I run often.  There won't be a lot of time the next few days to do much leisure / thought process.  Sunday I have not volunteered, though - and I hope it won't be a call in situation, so we can all go to the store.

 

bits, japanese forest village in Minetest

 

Not much, studying Finnish on both platforms, working at clearing a large area for a village in the Japanese forest in Minetest, which is difficult, as the trees are so close together and it is slow going to clear all the bits to make the leaves fall.  The one nice feature of the Japanese forest is that the leaves are good for fuel - and you get stacks and stacks of the leaves when you try to clear it out.  I've been burning the bricks and clay and making bread with the full stacks of leaves and not had to use much coal or wood for that.  Another nice feature is there is plenty of sashimi and racine to cook and eat that you naturally pick up along the way.

Plus, this is another of those long narrow islands, and leveling enough for several houses is a second challenge. It is in the other picture,  behind me here the land goes UP, and there are several deposits of interesting minerals but I will have to climb for them.  And behind the travertine brick house is a very deep deep cave, which I spent a good amount of time in pulling out that travertine and a few other minerals, lots of clay, and the blue granite which is the first I have ever found in this world.

 

 I had found grey granite, black granite, green granite, white granite and red granite but had only seen the blue in the resources guide.  
 

 

It is my birthday in a few days, although I have to work at the post office that day.

reminder : they opened up a new bookstore/cafe in town, but I am not sure when I could ever get to it.. at least they are open until 5 pm, so there is a chance. 

from here the land goes UP.  I've been to that little spot on the right there that is tallest, and there are three different minerals right there at the peak.  I came back down to empty my inventory and will have to go back up and get them - jade, serpentine and blue limestone.  There is also some sodalite down by the shore there that I didn't get a chance to mine out yet as it is beneath a layer of grey granite.

the bits and spelunking in Minetest

 

 

a sort of 'townhouse' in the middle of the jungle near the cave system

 

Another whole week went by, it doesn't seem like it was that much time... but we've been busy.   Esme made meatloaf last weekend, and it turned into lasagna spaghetti in the midweek, and we ate up all the leftovers.  I've made some ramen and stir fry as well, and used all of my sushi rice and adzuki beans taking bento boxes to lunch.   

I've been studying Spanish, French and Japanese - and actually got to use some of the Spanish at my job this week several times.  I still find it much harder to get my brain to switch into Spanish gear - even trying to remember thank you (so simple, you would think)  the German or the French gets in the way and I have this awkward pause where my brain is saying 'danke schon' and I am actually saying nothing until I can remember 'gracias'.  

 

Why is Spanish so hard for me?  I even remembered some Czech one day first (dekuji) instead of the Spanish - it's like having eight cards for everything you want to say and having to throw away the first four until you get to the right language.  It's not a problem exactly of too many languages - but that Spanish is that far down my 'queue'.  C'est la vie, que sera, right?  They say it climbs up that queue the more you actually have use for it.  We'll see.  

We're thinking still about getting a new outdoor shelter for the goat and cats (beyond the ones they already have, which are several), but haven't went down and looked at it in person yet.  I still have postal route tomorrow, and it is going to rain all day.  I've also had poison ivy on my arm for days and it is getting to be quite annoying.  I've been trying to get myself to sleep every night before I actually want to fall over, and have been waking up even a tad bit earlier in the mornings.

 

In Minetest, I've somehow wandered all the way from my northern almost tundra alpine climate area down to the south jungle again where the cocoa farm is.  I don't know why - I hung around the cocoa farm for a long time and built five more houses and roads in all directions, and the cocoa still did not grow.  And then, when I thought maybe I'd go and get tomatoes and papyrus and bring them all across the southern continent in a development sweep - I fell into a cavern in the jungle, and discovered an absolute rabbit warren of natural caves, full of clay and other minerals (no ores, though), and have been popping out of this entrance or that one like whack-a-mole for several days, bringing up hundreds and hundreds of blocks of moonstone, silver sand, limestones, amber, amethyst and more.  

Every time I think I've found all the little holes in the landscape where this cave comes to the surface - I find more - and I say 'Hey, I can see (name of site) from here.  I can see my house from here!'.  I made one true base for the cave system where it comes out into the ocean on the shore near another major jungle site - and I have been collecting up the resources there - and trying a different little building style as well.  After a bit longer, I will go off back to one of my cities across the ocean from this and see if I can pick up the tomatoes and papyrus. 

 

 with the papyrus and tomatoes (still growing)

 

bits

 My mail truck was not fixable, so at 338,000 miles, it was done for.  It's been a week at work that was shortened by Memorial Day, but feels like it should have already been Friday today.  Getting things done, but my anxiety is up a little.  The dentist came back with information for me and an estimate - it will be a big thing to get my entire top denture done and it still feels like I'm not ready for that - but there are four big teeth to pull before that, too.  I need to schedule for the first half of those to happen sometime soon  - the estimate is to work on it over the course of a year - I'm sure that is their financial idea and they actually intend me to do it much quicker, but with my reduced healing, it might be wise to take it slow, maybe not that slow, but slow.

 

Doing Japanese, and French-to-Spanish.  Studying small bits more of Japanese cookery.  Needing to get myself to bed so I can do work and get the animal feed and something for Mark on the way home tomorrow.  

 

but I want to rant a moment on motivation, and how that relates to 'reality' 

I've heard others talk about how hard it is to get out of bed at all in the morning - how they want to stay in bed and call in sick.  They say this like a joke.  And I'm always doing my alarms in the morning so I can turn my hips and knees and shoulders over and eventually get them centered and feel right to get up and not jar anything.  Some days I feel that much more fragile than others - and sometimes I am so focused on what a dog is barking about that I get up anyway without doing that... and pay for it for a while afterward.  But no, I don't think about calling in sick.  I think about moving my body forward and making it do the things it has to do - and seeing if it cooperates and what must be done to make it do so. 

What I've found works really best, besides the turning back and forth a few times - is to imagine what time it is, and what an hour or an hour and a half from now should look like.  Where should I be?  I imagine that future me looking back at this me and saying 'hey, we're here because you got your a** in gear and did the things it takes to get here', and then I lay out what those things are, superfast, like a trail leading me to that future if I just make all the hops and hoops.  And then usually that visualization - which I often call 'kick my tail', or 'hike my tail', is enough to get me to do the next things, and the next.. until it really is an hour and a half later and I am driving, or sitting at my desk, and saying 'yep, did that, check...'  

This is especially helpful on mornings like this morning, when I've had intense vivid dreams that were not reality the night before and it is so hard to break out of what was unfinished etc.. but it's not real, it was the past, or a conglomeration of multiple bits of my past (oh how fun the 'you don't remember your login and you work at a place that calls itself something familiar but is a conglomeration of three places at once, joy - fun - take a few minutes working out what detail is from what and what the simulation has in store to try to stress you with!  Will this be a dream where nothing works right no matter how hard you try, or one where you can circumvent the laws of physics to solve the problem, or both?)..., or a different dream like Aladdin's Cave or etc..  Aladdin's Cave is a common dream of mine as well, the Cave of Wonders - a store or a house or a library, some place that is full of interesting things for sale or for the exploration etc etc.. and I feel I can choose this or that or nothing at all, and I wonder where all of those things come from that I see so intricate and detailed in those dreams, the books with titles and stories that do not exist, necklaces, contraption machines, statues, clothes, trinkets, maps, globes, dishes, stones and minerals and other artifacts etc etc...   

The helpful bit - and my reason for ranting on - is that my visualization of what will really happen in real time can come true - I can look back and see myself in the real past from the real future.  When I am in those dreams and attempt that - I realize that it is futile, and that the dream is fleeting and immaterial, and that I cannot plan a future within it or see it's past.  

 

The only exception to this are the 'million miles' dreams, where, for some period of time in the dream, I am in 'another world' - still not real, but it is lucid to a point much greater than Aladdin's Cave, or the Great Library, or wandering through supermarkets or such... but those dreams also slip through my fingers and most of the million miles dreams -dreams of another life down to the toothbrushing and dish washing etc, fade away with only impressions that remain afterward, but when I am in within it I can think of what I did 'yesterday' in that place and what I might do 'tomorrow' in that place, if I remain there - and usually at about those times that I am thinking deeply about that, I realize that the time is still illusory there and that I do not belong to that world, somethings are just slightly not real enough, the memories are not quite complete enough - and someone pulls the weft out of the weave and it begins to fall apart - I am capturing only a few images of myself on my fingers - that self - but maybe still remembering the map of the city, the way the room looked, the textures of the fabrics, the iron railing at the window, the fireplace, climbing those stairs in the city and looking down again at the sidewalk, those 'tastes' remain and sometimes return, days, months, years later - I will be in that place again, but not that self.  

I call these 'million miles' dreams because I wake up feeling like I've traveled, lived days and weeks and months away, and then suddenly it is only the next morning here, in reality, and I am not older, perhaps not wiser, but I do appreciate a lot of things more, for the feeling of 'having been away'.

 

But in the real world, the real real world, I kick my tail, and turn off the alarms, and crack my unruly knees and put my feet into slippers to gather all my clothes and pick my way down the stairs one by one, each second following each other one in correct order - until the hour turns around again and I look back at myself and say 'Well we did that one, on to the next'

some random

 I made adzuki beans from dry beans yesterday, and it took forever, but it was worth it.  I also made sushi rice with the sugar and rice vinegar and white sesame seeds mixed in.  More on the adzuki beans in a minute.

Today, I just made some spicy egg salad, to go with the leftovers from yesterday.  I haven't been out to the garden and really expected it to rain all day today - like it did yesterday - it has been overcast and cold, but not much rain.  Everybody is playing on their games, and I intend to do Japanese on one profile and French-to-Spanish on the other sometime today.

The egg salad : 4 to five eggs, boiled and peeled.  A tablespoon of real mayonnaise, a big squirt of brown mustard, a half? teaspoon of paprika, and whatever other seasonings I wanted today (I used garlic parmesan seasoning this time), and a little extra salt. 

One of our chickens has been laying huge double-yolk eggs - it is one of the green eggs, and it is almost double the size of the others.  Poor girl!  This is the third time we've gotten one of them, and they've all been green, double-yolked and very good inside.

The problem I've had in the past with the adzuki beans was :

Last time, I had let that other bag sit for a very long time before using them, which made it more difficult to bring them back from being older and drier?  I can't really control that, as there is only a single place around here that even sells them and it is an hour drive to Camden.   Because this is a forseeable problem with it, and I had some in the cupboard left, I decided yesterday was a good time to attempt the endeavor, which ended up taking me about three hours total.  

I had not thought about it the night before, and I did not soak them overnight.  This makes them take longer, when I have not thought about it beforehand.  I compromised and soaked them for about an hour and a half on the stove, thinking I would take a look at them and decide if they were going to be cooked in the afternoon or the evening.  I chose the afternoon, and a longer cooking time.

 After you've soaked them (or forgot) and drained the water, then cover them with new water and bring it to a boil, then let to rest for a little bit, and then bring the pot back to a boil and turned to a simmer for about 40 minutes.  If they have not been soaked beforehand, this could be much longer - more than an hour.  That makes for a very long prep time.  

I put a tad bit of baking soda in the water this time for the first boil and rest - which I had read could help break them down.  When I brought them back to the second boil, I put in a teaspoon or so of the rice vinegar, and that turned the water a different color immediately - so something was going on there.  They turned out really good this time - I took one out every once in a while and smashed it on a plate with a spoon until I found that they were well-cooked, then drained and smashed them all up into the paste with a bit of mirin and a small spoon of brown sugar mixed in.  Then I layered it hot into my glass dish and smeared a little bit of salt with a spoon all over the top of it.  Since I am intending to put this in the center of rice bowls for the week - it works really well. 

 The harbor outpost with the railroad started.  I didn't have enough to make powered rail, but by sitting in the cart and hitting the ground it will go up small bumps enough that I can make it from this harbor to the inland place where the road splits to to of the other cities.  It is the first railroad I've made in the game.  The other thing I had to look up was to push the left shift and the left mouse button to pick up the cart instead of just hitting it and making it move.  That took a few tries to get it right!

I had intended to move in Minetest from the small outpost I had made on the sea, near three other farms I had made before that were a bit further inland - two of them which did not have harbors - and then make my way to where the cocoa farm is and see if I can hang around long enough to make it produce.  But I never made it to the cocoa farm today.

I had this bright idea that I would dig down and collect some stone and coal for a little bit, harvest the garden there a few times in between, and then go on my merry way.   And then I broke into a cavern that was a geological wonder - three geodes (huge glass/crystal rooms surrounded by three layers of different material in a spherical fashion, and lots and lots of iron, copper AND tin scattered everywhere.  That pretty much pushed my 'only 100 ingots of iron in the entire world' to over 500 - and now the world is definitely in the 'Iron Age'.  

So I spent most of the morning there, and then played with the railroad a little, as I had made enough iron, and then made a second outpost nearby that was needed on the map between two points, and had a bit of a mining expedition there, too - but not for any of the ores, just lots of different minerals in a huge network of above-ground caves that I explored there.  I ferried a lot of crops and saplings from the one mining place to the other and got them both working very well so that I can spend a good long time there making food, lumber, paper and other things in between mining expeditions.

 

The minimal mining post - all around in these hills (and the ones behind me) are small caves that have a multitude of different minerals in them - I've filled a chest's worth of slots already with small amounts of different things.  Sygilite, Ivite, Howlite, Covolite, Chrysophase, Yellow Travertine, White granite, Black Granite, Grey Granite, Lapis Lazuli, Pyrite, Chalconthite, Crocoite, Jade, Tuff, Pumice, Columnar Basalt, Quartz, Smokey Quartz and so much more.
 

 I also found something called 'glow ruby' and 'glow ruby ore' but there are no recipes using them - and I think it is just one of those hanging loose end 'pretty' things someone put in the game.  They were in the caves underneath the volcanic sulfur environment - although I hadn't meant to dig that far underneath there from the place I was.  There was also a 'mold' environment there underground, and I just poked at it and said 'no thank you' and left all that stuff there.

 I verified that sand, stone and ores all burn at a ratio of 13 of the item to 1 coal.  I don't know why I hadn't thought to check that before, and it is the sort of thing I just check out instead of going to look up.

 

 

Fire slimes!

 

This was me saying 'no thank you' to the fire slime.  I think they are attracted to torches - it would make sense.  I did a small test and held a torch out and it turned towards me and started coming towards me - but stopped when I held up something else.  I put out a few torches and it followed them down the sand - leaving fire in it's wake.  I climbed out of the mine back the way I had come and came back later - and the torches were gone and the slime was back to playing in the lava flow.  I smacked one a couple of times with the iron sword and it didn't faze it, so I ran away.  That worked well on the bears, btw. the iron sword over the stone sword.  I might have to avoid these for a while, even though I'm armored up now.

 

 

 

On types of sites

 First off, in real life, I have two days off for the first time since Christmas/New Year's... and I'm still up at 3 am.  Hmm.  I went and did the dishes and scrubbed the sink and made some coconut flavored coffee.  I've been enjoying making some more Japanese type dishes, after finding mirin in the store, and buying new rice wine vinegar, and some very tasty seaweed strips with chili in them.  I've got some new stir fry noodles, and some dashi and wakame are coming in the mail as part of my birthday present (which is early, but I decided the big birthday present could be part Mother's Day, and it is a garden item, so why wait).  I've been studying Japanese and one half of the French-to-Spanish set.  The Greek was short-lived review, but good for the week or so I did that.  

 

Oh, that's dark in the alpine night.... but pretty

This was Rimanta, an alpine place I built a farm and then on another mountaintop nearby, a warehouse development center.   There were so many islands around this that had minerals in them I spent a long time fighting bears, collecting wood and minerals, beets, potatoes and carrots and it quickly turned into a place that will be a development center for the entire area around it.  There was over 500 blocks of black granite and I'm not done with a few of those veins.  Not too far away was the place I had first found the salt - Strabo, and it remains a 'farm' but it will likely trade materials and crops with Rimanta until they both have everything the other does.

Volcanic sulfur 'forsaken tundra' biome.  The white and brown blocks are 'volcanic lava rock' and there are yellow blocks that are sulfur.  The ground smokes. Nothing here was particularly harmful, although I used caution walking through and around it.

These blue spots in some of the rocks is 'etherium dust', which is a magic reagent I have collected some of, but haven't used yet.  One of the things that uses it is a flight potion.

 

 I was musing to myself, over waiting for the coffee pot, about the two hundred and fifty some locations that are now in my Minetest world.  Mark has asked me 'well, really though, how many of those are you ever going back to?'  The answer is, not all but quite a few of them.  And they break down (geekily) into a couple of categories.  To mention geekery - I've started up a spreadsheet in LibreCalc about what places have what things, so yes, it's getting to a point where I'm using a map AND a spreadsheet.... it's extensive.

The categories, not that they matter to anyone else, are this:

 

Waypoints : Usually just a spire, three or more easily-identifiable blocks that are not natural to the environment, with a sign and a torch to tell me I'm going from one place to another.  I might actually pass by these frequently, but there aren't sufficient resources or reason to make them into anything else.  Not every waypoint is counted on the map.  A waypoint might turn into something bigger later, after I continue to pass by it again and again - like a set of little islands I kept passing by and then saw a bunch of minerals on one side of it and set up a small farm / mining outpost there which pulled out 1400 blocks of jade.

Harbor :  A waypoint that is on the ocean that I make a specific docking area for a boat, with a spire and torches that can be seen when sailing by.  There might be a chest and a furnace - and I have recorded it on the map.  This might become an outpost or a farm almost immediately, but it's still a harbor because I was sailing along and said 'that looks like a good spot to tie up for a minute and bounce around'.

 

an outpost, up on the flat part of an otherwise quite vertical island, the only things I found on the whole island were a kiwi bush, rye, peppers and a cotton plant
 

Outposts : A simple house with a foursquare interior, chest and a furnace.  These are map points that were important enough to make note of them and build a structure and ensure simple survival (small garden).  I might not ever return here - and yet, there is something to remark upon that might bring me back.  

 Farm : This place is an outpost that has multiplied food resources in several gardens around it, a house with a furnace and multiple chests, and maybe some fences and other homey features.  I've usually lived here for a while- and there was enough resources of some sort or other nearby to keep me busy for that time.  I might have found a wayfarer chest that had interesting things or brought resources from other places, papyrus, cotton, trees of certain types, blueberry bushes, whatever was important, to this place over time, and intend to return here in the future.

 

Owontic Development center.  Those are non native red acacia trees and jack pines that I brought in to provide enough wood to continue making gardens and mining the caves nearby.  There is a small harbor behind me, and the road continues off to the West to the place I crossed a large canyon to get here  - which required a lot of stone but after building the canyon bridge, I thought I had to make something worthwhile nearby and this place seemed right.
 

 Development Center :  This is a farm, or an extra larger building right near a farm, that I have expanded and has enough resources that it now supplies extra materials to other farms in the area - it has many gardens and chests and most importantly I use these places to multiply and/or collect resources to bring to other places. This might say 'Warehouse' on it or development center, depending on what I'm up to.   The first development center was a place I brought six types of saplings with me to see what would grow there and multiply.  I have others specifically for papyrus, or coffee, or cotton - because it grew so well there I made huge fields of it.

 Another harbor, began as a passage through while sailing - but the only thing that is growing fast here are onions - the cotton is twice as slow as the place nearby.  The rye is almost as slow.  I've imported some jack pine tree saplings that are easier to chop down than the native redwoods.  There are some good mining options nearby and because of the geography this is the easiest place to pass from one ocean into a major river - but not without bumping up on the land there first.

 

Mining Outpost : Not enough of anything to be a development center, but has lots of mining opportunities that I want to return to.  Some of these don't even have houses, but I do intend to return here maybe bringing enough external resources to make it liveable in order to make it a development center and mine out the resources I've scouted.

Cities : I have several cities - and the main point here is that they have many, five or more, buildings and specialized storage centers and production.  There might even be a library, blacksmith, research center or city hall or such, depending on how long I lived there.

 Castle : Basically a farm that became a building project and I built something huge there and began to specialize the rooms inside after I built it.  I might not intend to spend much more time there after I finished the building, or might use it as a development center for nearby areas.