Minetest Mineclonia house with kelp garden

 

 In the Mineclonia version of Minetest, kelp can be grown on sand or gravel in water - not dirt - and the deeper you make the pool the taller it can grow.  When harvested, you must pull the entire strand and collect the extra, then replant.  Here are some kelp gardens built beside houses by the sea - each of them able to produce kelp, which can be dried in a furnace and used as a food source.  Once you find the other type of soybeans in the game (the brown ones, not the green ones) you can make baked tofu, and use the kelp with that to make other food.  This is part of the vegetarian plant based foods mod.

 

You can also find, as part of the Italian foods mod, these little Italian village gardens in some places in the world - it took me a long time to find one - but they have basil and the 'other' type of tomatoes that can be made into tomato sauce and is used to make pizza and lasagna foods.

 This shows what the basil and the other type of tomatoes looks like in your inventory.

Also, really weird thing - the blueberries, not in those gardens but just growing out in the world, can be made into lapis lazuli.  No explanation why.  Put a blueberry on your crafting board and it turns into a shard of lapis lazuli.  Put nine shards together and they become a block.  I haven't found it anywhere in the mining, and only found this by complete accident.  The lapis lazuli shards can also be used for making blue dye. 

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.

 

 

Jade pyramids, tree farming and spire mapping

 

This is basically because I found 1400 blocks of jade in an island near here - and well, what do you do with that much jade? The pyramid was built over a cavern entrance and still didn't use up even half of my new stash of jade.  So, I started seeing what else I could make with the blocks.

 They are sort of like ziggurats, more than pyramids - but the little house ones were an interesting puzzle to solve.  I had never had REASON to make glass stairs before, but having seen some in a loot chest a while back, I had a light bulb that they could work really well to put a window in each of these little houses.

 

   

The little pyramids are fully viable houses in their own right, with furnaces and chests in them, each having a window and a door.  The floor is sunken one block inside with a stair from the door - although it didn't have to be it made it feel more like the regular house size inside.  The regular house is in the background above.

  

the inside of the small jade pyramid houses

Aspen farming : when you don't have enough trees, similar to this that had been a treeless plain full of vegetable plants and animals - aspens are a great go to.   Each one will drop 2 to 6 saplings, more likely 4 to 6.  Acacias are pretty prolific, as well, but a bit harder to plant near each other as they spread out more.  Cherry (sakura) trees also have that sideways sprawl.  Aspens grow most always straight up, and only require about 4 to 6 spaces between them to drop full saplings when you cut them down. (no leaf overlap, which can cause problems with some trees).  Silver birch trees grow straight up, and quite tall, but the leaf overlap means you might have to cut down three or four of them before they begin to drop their leaves into saplings.  Juniper trees are a great wood type - and drop lots and lots of saplings, you'll have stacks and stacks of saplings, but the trees only have 3 to 4 blocks of wood in each one so you have to really want juniper wood as your material.  Lemon, orange and banana trees do not grow well in some biomes.  You can quickly turn an area into a forest if you work at it with the right kind of saplings, and have plenty of wood for any project that you might need, pick axe handles, torches, bean and grape supports etc etc.  Since there had been no wood in this location when I arrived - I made the house here with dirt, and a willow wood roof that I had left over blocks from the last place.  

Island life and the living is easy...

 I kept passing these three little islands grouped together, and the largest of the three had a lot of minerals showing all over the sides of it as I zoomed around it in my boat.  This was a mid-point between four other places, so eventually I gave it a name and a spire with the directions indicated just so I could remember that yes- this is the place.  Then I saw the minerals, and pulled the 1400 blocks of jade out of just one of the sides of the caverns - along with seven other minerals in different amounts, and there is even more in there.

I made a little 'island life and the living is easy - the sea is full of fish' base and decided it didn't even need a full house - just a roof and a small garden.

 

How the spire mapping system works :

When you get to a really interesting place it gets a spire, 4 to 12 blocks high, with a torch on top hopefully, and then a sign with a unique name on it.  The sign on the spire that faces the actual feature, where a house might be built, has the name of the place on it.. for example 'Shurl Island'.  The sign on the opposite side says both the name of the place and 'cross (Place)' with the name for the place that is exactly opposite.  IE: If you see the sign, turn around and go straight in the other direction - you end up in Place.  And of course, the other two sides of the spire are also 'cross (Place)' for where you would end up if you walked / boated in that direction.  

 

Building an actual road between the places is the best - but sometimes the terrain is such that you cannot easily build roads and bridges, or you do not have enough resources to build a road between two good points but still need a good way of navigating a long distance between them.  This spire system helps you not get completely and totally lost while exploring the known Universe - everything has some sort of constellation relation to each other like breadcrumbs, and you can track your way back or realize you've somehow gone in a circle.  Some spires have all directions marked with 'cross' as well as the location name - and it gets really useful when you do lose your way and have no idea where you are, but then pass a cliffside with a spire on it that was founded on the other side.   Ah, that is where I am - but how did I get here?  And then you can complete the circles and know how to get from one place to another easier.                                      

In this world, I came across blindly from three different established places and hit the same long narrow island with jungle trees.  I did not know that the Tidaris island was so large - and had started two different houses with small farms and mines.  But, because I had a spire with a torch on top in the second location - I saw it when I climbed up the roof on the other house and was able to realize that it was all the same place, and yet, still large enough for both locations to exist (one with a good mountain to mine and harbor straight across from the city, the other with resources of bamboo and clay and a flat inland route that led through to another biome).

Some places will also have signs with arrows that indicate a string of places that are in that direction, in the order of appearance.  This particular world has maybe seventy named places, not all of them with full towns and gardens in them.  This little island itself was a rarity in that it was a named place for a very long time, that I came through often, but had not seen any reason to settle it - until I saw inside one of the caves on the back island and saw a whole shelf of blue covelite (which looks like lapis lazuli).  Then I saw a jut of purple sygilite, and some silver sand (which makes lovely silver sandstone), and the jade, and blue limestone and a wall of coal and a wall of shale etc etc..

Luanti Minetest Asuna brushland biome ranch house and garden

 

Brushlands - very liveable area - which have hazelnut trees (hazelnuts) and blackberry bushes (edible blackberries) and rose bushes (that have edible rosehips)  - and I imported some of the Mediterranean pine saplings from the next island over (with the pueblo).  The house is made of the pine wood and some yellow cobbled travertine for the roof.   I also found the mese trees with the mese fruit for the very first time, way up on the top of the mountains - they glow, until you pick the fruit.  That is pretty cool - the wood is a bright golden color, even more yellow than the stone I ended up using for this roof. 

Around this area I found : cotton, hemp, onion, grapes, sunflowers, parsley, strawberry and spinach.  In chest hampers and a dungeon chest I found planting carrots, pumpkin seeds, garlic, bell pepper and pineapple.   The grapes were way up on top of one of the  mountain hills here, and the cotton was near that.  The strawberries, onions, spinach and parsley were growing down in the valleys.   There is a savannah a long way back behind those hills, covered in sunflowers.  Usually the pumpkins are on the savannah as well, but I had never gotten seeds from one so far.   There are chickens and eggs, sheep and pigs, and of course as there is cotton growing naturally it would have been easy to make the fishing rod and live off of fish.  The spinach was a nice surprise - I only found that in one other place in the world and I lost that first house - so I hadn't seen it since then.  It doesn't look like much growing wild, but I broke it anyway as I didn't remember what it was, and it was spinach!

It  seems in order to make any use out of the pumpkin I will really have to go back and get my barley plants from the alder swamp and hope I can propagate them further out -- I still haven't done that as I almost lost them twice from bad propagation there.  But, that was before I had my bucket of water and could plant more.  It's also a long way back along the road - halfway around the circle, maybe.  I've been hoping to find barley naturally again since that first bit was from a hamper chest - but I haven't yet.

 

// In real life: Rolling along, getting the work done and the bills paid.  Ordered some spices I had once before, because Mark wanted a computer part as well.  I made fried rice with water chestnuts, red pepper, onion, zucchini and green peas last night for Esme and I, using the last bit of the beef with rice from this last Monday's dinner.  Studying Japanese and Finnish.  

We bought a big butternut squash at the store and I showed Esme how to peel it and chop it into small pieces to freeze for use in meals.  I am thinking about making something like pasta carbonara on Sunday, but with a different cheese.  

I have to kick myself to put more coolant in the car when it is not hot - as at idle it has been going a bit over the center again and it started doing that a bit before it really needed coolant last time.  I've got it in there, but I need to do it.  The Haynes manual for that car came and lo and behold, it has a picture of the undercarriage in it - with the transmission items labelled in the picture - I couldn't find that anywhere when I was trying to figure out what to call a certain part talking to the mechanic.  

The weather is finally nice, I should repair that hose in the yard and plant my kale and other seeds that I ordered a few weeks ago.  It's going to rain quite a bit this week.  Four years ago I had edible big leaves already from planting kale early.

Pueblo type city structure in Luanti Minetest Asuna mediterranean biome

 Rolling along.  Doing Japanese and Finnish, mostly.  Still spending a few hours some nights exploring and collecting more plant types into my gardens.  I finally made a 'circumnavigate' road that goes all the way through every place I have been and then circles back (don't ask me how, I didn't plan it) - so I have been backtracking some to spread the important plants through the gardens.  And then I shot off a bit away from the origin point and explored this Mediterranean biome with the olive trees a bit more.   I put up a sign here that says 'Olive Pueblo.'

I really liked how this 'pueblo' type village started turning out - and I found amethyst and amber in the rocks nearby.  Each little 'pueblo' house has a chest of its own and a furnace, and whatever food I collect in the gardens I was distributing amongst the nearest houses.  One house has become the soy milk processing and bakery, while another is where I have ended up storing extra seeds etc etc..

 The natural olive tree that is growing here is not the right kind of olive for making olive oil.  I don't know why there are two types of 'olive' wood trees and saplings - and haven't run into the other type yet.  This type is good for eating the olives, but not for making oil.  You would need that oil to make pasta with wheat flour.  I'm hoping, like the seaweed situation, that there really ARE two types, and not one that was replaced by the other and the other recipes for it are now broken.  Looks like rice has another version, as well, but I have been able to use the rice I have for most of what I need it to do.

The plants I've collected here or 'to here, from a nearby place' are :

blackberry and hazelnut trees (both drop saplings and berries / nuts for food)

palm trees which drop coconuts

kiwi trees (which grow really well here, I found the kiwi very hard to propagate elsewhere - would drop fruit but just wouldn't drop any saplings, but now it really is doing well and I am expanding it up higher on the mountain into a grove.  I am not certain if it makes a difference but I am digging underneath it to harvest, and then chopping the trunk down and waiting in that spot for all the leaves to drop, and getting 1 to 3 saplings off of each one when before - at the original banana house - I was not getting even one)

lemon and banana tree (which have not grown yet, this might not be a good biome for them, but I thought lemon and 'mediterranean' would go well together...) 

garlic, wild onion, rice, oats, bell pepper, tomato, soybean, cotton, chili pepper, potatoes! and parsley

other foods : kelp and raw oysters are nearby in the ocean, fishing with the fishing rod (which is why I went back and got some cotton seeds from another farm, and the rice, as it makes sushi with the fish) and eggs from both chickens and songbirds (which the game makes little distinction between)

I dropped through a hole up the hill a bit and landed in a white marble brick 'mineshaft' type room, with a chest and the only thing in it were a few 'planting potatoes' - which are the special seed type of potato.  It was pure luck, and I'm trying to grow them out slowly here as I almost lost them in another location from not harvesting them at the right time.

 The white brick can be made easily with the white rock, but if you make stairs out of it they cannot be broken again with a stone pickaxe.  That was a bit annoying when I was working, so I started using wooden stairs just in case I messed up a placement.

 Lots of rocks!  : amethyst, jade, amber, yellow travertine, red granite, sygilite? it's purple, orange agate, celestine, chrysoprase and a few others   I've used the yellow travertine for one of the roads and the jade for the spires. There is desert cobblestone and brick as well as marble brick in the caves nearby that I haven't collected too much. There are mediterranean ruins and columns scattered nearby as well.

 

bits and bobs

 Got up this morning and did the dishes, some laundry, gave Charlotte a bath.  Several of the animals were commenting on how the dog blankets smelled like Daphne still, Loki was curled up in one for a good while today (he's a cat), but Sweetie gave herself 'a sad' as Mark said, and I gave her a new blanket and we washed the ones that were in front of the heater.  I had not felt Daphne was healthy enough to be lifted in and out of the big bathtub the past week - and thus, Charlotte hadn't gotten a bath, either, as we usually did them at the same time.  So, she needed one and got it today, while it is still warm enough to not be freezing afterwards.  Then I played a few too hours too many of the Sims game that I finally got working again with the update packs on my computer.  Not sure how to categorize this, but playing games is one of those upside-down curves for me - it's fun to a point and then well, I know that time could be used better somewhere else and I feel like I've wasted time with nothing to show for it... and the Sims is doubly so on that, because of all of the household tasks the Sims get either annoyed at or happy about finishing... it's kind of like a box within a box effect.  

It's mixed feelings - - I'm having a 'fun leisure' day in real life, but using it playing a game, which 'gets nothing done'.  I get annoyed that the Sim on my screen is 'making progress' but I have wasted four hours that was supposed to be fun, and maybe it was, maybe it just kept me from doing other things I should have done.  Should I have cleaned?  Should I have baked?  Should I have learned Japanese for an extra hour?   It was a bit too easy to do the game for the extended period of time that could have done many things in real life otherwise.  The game was lower-energy expenditure than many of those things, but that is only a benefit when I consider something like I could overwork my muscles cleaning or etc. instead of resting.  And for being lower-energy, it is almost zero output.  And this is why I rarely play games that are more than a few rounds of Tetris or Duolingo.  Duolingo IS a game, but I do feel that perhaps I get something out of it that I can bring elsewhere, in translating the languages.  Whether or not my Sim learned how to make food without burning their house down is not an accomplishment that transfers much.  Mark and I have talked about that is something that was hard on our generation and that the younger generations don't have it as much - we were taught 'if you're having fun, something has to be wrong' and also lots of pressure put on productivity and 'monetizing time and hobbies'.

I did do some Japanese language learning.  And I already hurt from 'something' the past few days that I haven't put my finger on.  Not sure if it is sitting in my chair wrong playing the game, sleeping in, much grocery-shopping on Friday, climbing the stairs, the rainy weather outside or the postal route coming back at me from yesterday - but my hips definitely hurt today as well.  I did the yoga routine two nights in a row but skipped last night because I had already done so much on the postal route.  I've stretched a little today, and have climbed the stairs many many times of course, but I told Mark 'It's like I'm getting old'... one definite thing about hyper mobility is that you benefit most from variety of movement.  And, counter-intuitively perhaps, repetitive things, even 'sedentary' things like sitting slumped in a chair wrong or tensioning your leg muscles constantly while sitting forward, all of that adds up in weird ways.  

The yoga type is 'restorative' or 'vinyasa 'flow'', style - for spine and flexibility.

bits of nothing much

Well, Friday was a bit frustrating, but it ended well.  Our mechanic brought the mail vehicle to us around midnight, and a loaner battery for us to get the other truck to town to have a new battery installed in it at our convenience.  And I got to work on Saturday.  Because I hadn't known if I would have a vehicle working, I didn't volunteer for Sunday and here I am, with a Sunday off.

And I'm playing a game - Stardew Valley, that has had a new update and Esme has been playing it for a while and chatting with me about little bits here and there.  I'm playing it in French, and trying to read the wiki in French as well and with lots of new things, that is a learning experience.  You see lots of words that you normally wouldn't - and wonder if they are just translation oddities or if that is the way it would actually translate to French.

my new farm and house have a long way to go, but I spent some time on it already.  Some new crops are carrots, summer squash (yellow) and broccoli.  And there are some very strange new events, like 'Green Rain', in which large fiddlehead ferns grow as tall as trees and moss grows on everything.  You'll also find Demetrius (the local scientist) outside his house in a Hazmat suit doing experiments.

Those are 'tomates marinées' (marinated tomatoes) and I just since those pictures got my little chicken coop with two chickens.  

I've been to my studio table the other day, while I waited anxiously for the mechanic to arrive... and just messed around a little with pens and then with paint.  With finishing the one language course, and feeling generally stressed - I've been doing French on both Duolingos.  However, because of algorithms, that doesn't stop my FB and emails and ads from showing up in everything from German to Greek.  I still find that hilarious.

 

Yes, there are a million other things I could be doing other than playing a game.  My brain reminds me of that every other ten minutes or so.  And yet.  //fall on floor in starfish formation (yoga, ADHD stuff)  Yes, it's been a hard week. 

3pm //we've gotten the new battery... it'll be a family effort to install it

Build a stone house in Minecraft

 

I am going to show you how to build a simple stone house, like the ones in my  town here, with these four materials.  You will need lots of plain cobblestone, wooden stairs of whatever type you like (I've used oak), glass pane, and a door of your choosing.  It will probably take several stacks of stone and stairs to do any of these houses.  I'm going to show you a large house I built.

  

Start out with a flat building space 

Lay out a square on the ground, leaving a space for which way you would like the door to face.  You can place the door anywhere you want, but I tend to put it in the middle or a few blocks away from the corner, as shown.

Start to build your walls up, leaving a two-high opening for the door, and if you use 4 high walls, two-high openings for your windows.  In smaller houses, you might use three-high walls and one-high windows.

Finish completing the walls to the same height.  Now, have your stairs ready, and more stone, as we are going to begin to make the roof.

The thing about using stairs is trying to keep what you see happening in the above picture from happening.  If you are too far to one side, the stair you are trying to place will come out as a corner.  You will need to be more 'head on' and aiming towards the bottom of the last stair, to place them properly.


As you move farther up the roof, you will place more stones into the side wall to meet the height.  You can leave a couple of gaps in the side wall to add more windows later, and it will bring more light into the room.


In some houses like this, I will choose a place to make a second story, and build stairs up to it.  The second story will then be an attic room.

Continuing to build up the roof

Make sure to place lots of torches inside the bigger houses, to keep monsters from spawning.  Where there is no light there can be spider!

On this house I stopped the roof at this point and finished off with polished andesite.  You can change this up and make your houses all a little different, or all the same.

Good luck building your town!

Esme 'on the phone'

I didn't get a picture of this, but it was very very cute. Esme was sitting with a block to her ear and babbling at it, then would put it up in front of her eye/nose and wait a second, then babble into it some more. I realized she was 'talking on the phone.' This is maybe the first time I've seen her pretending something was something else as a game, and not as a symbol to tell me what she wanted.

Mark saw it too and it was unmistakable. I asked her if she was talking to Grandma and to tell Grandma to send pizza. She held the 'phone' away for a second and then looked at me, looked at the 'phone' and then babbled happily into it again. I was on the phone with my mom the other night - and Esme was sitting nearby playing with a toy.

Sometimes she grabs our phones and runs off with them. She gets in trouble when she throws them or loses them. She decided the block was a safer 'phone' to play with!

Other Creative play: Found a washcloth on the floor and was pretending to clean windows with it.

Pacifier Update: Still signing for it, not getting it -- but has been entertaining herself a lot all morning. Lots of 'RAR' heard while she looks through her 'Dinosaur ROAR' book.



A drawing that is nearly 100% Esme. I drug a red crayon on it a little bit to indicate to draw on the paper - and she went to town with three different colors.

Pogo says: Get em' Daddy!

Click to Enlarge
I nearly fell over laughing after getting this series of pictures. Pogo jumped up into Mark's lap while he was playing Grand Theft Auto and, as a chase ensued, seemed to be saying 'Get em' Daddy!'


I finally got to the point where the circular needle fits!
There were twelve double-pointed needles before switching over.

Oh, and yes, I did go with the red stripe ;o) thanks Susan!

Mark's mother's rose bush bloomed

A Puck on the Ice and then into a Hole

Check the comments for a new 'weird things' meme response.
During the warmest part of the day (49 degrees), we went down into the woods near the lake to look at the ice.


Puck watching Mark throw a branch out onto the ice


Ear Deep in a Hole
digging for moles near the lake


Monkey-see Monkey-do
(enlarge to see Puck walking ahead)


Some pictures of the semi-solid ice

It makes interesting shapes in the cracks on the surface.