bits

 cucumbers came up in the seedling pots, put them in the garden, bought some tomato plants and put those in the garden, getting a few strawberries every day, the kale and arugula have grown to the point where I can tell them apart at a glance now, which is good

 

Found this 'forsaken desert' biome today, very odd hollow trees - and in the distance there was a three story house with a chest at the top, but not much in it.  There is another biome next to this called an 'ethereal desert' and it has red grass and a strange red wood bush.  It also has flowers that bite you back when you try to hit them with a pickaxe, and obsidian and lava here and there.  There are a LOT of rocks / ores and minerals in the desert - and I've put up two posts simply for the mining opportunities, so I can get back there and pick up the minerals that I couldn't fit in my inventory.

Reached over ninety named positions on my Minetest map, and used an online platform called 'Desmos' graphing calculator to put in all the coordinates and make myself a good map.  Why did it take me so long to find out that F5 showed the coordinates?  Mark said you know - there are graphical programs made for Minecraft / Minetest that will take your save file and do that for you, nicely in graphics and everything.  If you used one of those, would it take away all the fun or something?  I don't know, my response was that I don't need other people to draw the Last Supper for me with a stub pencil, but for some reason, it's fun when I do it that way.  

I took this picture to show Mark and Esme where I fell off a cliff so 'unexpectedly' the other day - and now I've put up a fence.  I was up on the top of the mountain only 86 blocks up, acc. to the coordinates, feels like more - and looked down and saw the little fence and said 'oh yea, that is the place'... 

I was growing five types of trees here and starting a 'lumber and development company', along with a mining shack further down by the water.  It actually took me a very long time to add this to the map because it is in the middle of an area I was doing a lot in - but I just hadn't been back through the middle or recorded much of it.  Once I was doing the map, I had a good idea where it 'should' be and eventually found it again.
 

Using my map I found the 'Northwest Passage' around the dead Enverness biome that has no food, just 'miles and miles' of dead white stone, enverness sand and pools with an occasional house / temple and empty pottery jars.  It was tough to get around/through that but now that I have done that I've made several more connections and harbors and can get around pretty easily between the places I want to go.  I have coffee beans planted at one place and they are multiplying, but I need to hang around the place where I have cocoa longer if I want that to ripen.  Another task I might want to do is sail up and down more of the rivers - as I've found a few more travel routes that way that I hadn't really thought too hard about before.

Also, related, drawing the other night I realized I don't have the endurance that I once did in my hands to draw for so long - and I used to, I used to make engraving like drawings with little Micron pens over huge sheets of paper.  It is just that I don't get the practice anymore.

I want to remember that I bought that book about the retired mobster that buys a little cottage with a garden and then learns how to take care of it.  I haven't read past the first chapter because it is an online book and I keep forgetting about it.

Need to get to sleep, and remember to take the clothes out of the dryer in the morning...  We did Grandma's big grocery run today, and it was raining off and on and colder than it had been.  Have been doing the Spanish-to-French and French-to-Spanish still, although I'm thinking I might switch and do Japanese for a day or so.. will see what I think tomorrow.