I stopped upgrading Minecraft about a year ago, when Mojang started adding a whole lot of stuff that threatened to take what I enjoy out of it. Then, yesterday, Wonderful Husband read me the stuff that's been implemented in the newest update.

I'm pretty sure it says something unsurprising about me that adding carrots and potatoes to the game made me interested in playing again.

So I updated today, and for the first time started playing in a shared world with Wonderful Husband. I have ranged afield, nearly starved to death, learned how to do a HUD of coordinates, grown grain/cacti/pumpkin/sugar cane/giant mushrooms, lured a pair of cows over hill and dale, bred them, bred their offspring, and baked pumpkin pie.

I have plans for the luring of chickens, so that we may have eggs and chicken meat and feathers. I have hopes we can find another spider (they're being intriguingly difficult to locate) so we can get its silk to fashion a fishing pole. And I would like to find one of those NPC villages so we can trade some emeralds for the aforementioned carrots and potatoes. And then grow more carrots and use them to lure a breeding pair of pigs....

It's like 3-D Agricola! ^_-

Wonderful Husband, meantime, is building enchanting tables and exploring the Nether dimension....

I'm having a good time, which is a nice change from some of the days I've had this week.

So there's this little-known game that Wonderful Husband and I enjoy playing. It's called Minecraft. Perhaps you've heard of it? And it's a rare thing for me to enjoy video games. The last two I enjoyed playing were Oregon Trails, and Tetris. (Yes, totally dating myself and revealing my geek-retard status. Shut up.)

Then there's this little thing called MineCon (AKA "join Notch on his vacation") which is in a couple months, in Las Vegas. Which is... not too far from us, actually. And $99 for a two day convention... isn't too bad, actually. Except for where that would be times two. Plus hotel. Plus food. Plus transportation (either a godawful long drive, or a pair of roundtrip plane tickets). In Vegas. Where quite probably the only thing I might enjoy would be catching a Cirque du Soleil show (more money), since I've never enjoyed gambling, and everything in Sin City (at least the last time I went) smells of cigarette smoke. I suppose there's always the option of getting my geek on by seeing if I could do a tour of the Hoover Dam, not too far away....

But I do my mental math and add up time and money and energy and decide I can't afford MineCon.

Even if Wonderful Husband has been mining lots of diamonds recently.

A good portion of today was spent doing up the ton of tomatoes I had harvested earlier this week. Well, more like cleaning off the kitchen counter, which is much the same thing, really. So I have six sealed quart jars sitting on the counter, as well as one quart jar and two pints that didn't seal... which are going to get reprocessed hopefully tomorrow. I also have a sieve full of the yellow tomatoes sitting in the sink waiting their turn, and four cuttings from the Yellow Pear plant in a jar on the window, rooting. The monster plant itself gets pulled and composted tomorrow.

In any case, doing up the jars I did meant that I used up the last of the new quart jars I had in the house, so I went out to the garage and brought in the plastic milk crate full of jars I've bought (90% of the time sitting dusty for years in garages) at estate sales. Washing those was an adventure! But I now have a full dozen more quart jars ready to go, there's a box of a dozen pint jars still out in the garage, and I have over two dozen half-pint jars all told. (Mind you, I'm just counting up the empty ones.) I was very pleased to find that in the two (also estate sale) boxes of rings and lids were a lot of unused lids, because I was otherwise out of new lids. A fair number of old/rusty/corroded rings and lids got tossed, and the crate went back to the garage holding only eight baby food jars, for which I haven't yet figured out a use.

I played a little Minecraft this morning (I found a surface cave in my world that seems to have lots of mineable resources including lava; I am now plotting how to make a lavafall on one of the mountains near my house), but the exchange of the day came later when my husband was at it. Him: "A pig just spawned in my cathedral!" Me: "Bacon is a sign that Notch loves us and wants us to be happy."