Grow Pumpkins on Minecraft

My big discovery today was that if you find a pumpkin and put it in the crafting table, it turns into pumpkin seeds. Yay. Then you can plant them the same way you plant wheat. So now you don't have to settle for randomly finding a pumpkin patch. You can grow as many as you want to. Most of what I've learned on Minecraft was through tutorials, so it's a nice surprise when I figure out something all by myself. Now if I could just figure out how to pick up lava in my bucket without dying. Anyone know?

Taming a Dog

I've known about cats a lot longer than I've known about dogs.  But I could never manage to catch a cat. I'd get hearts for feeding them and everything but they would never follow me.  So imagine my surprise yesterday when I captured a wolf and made it into a dog by smacking it with a bone. (Use left click because right click will kill it).  I had it for a while then lost it when it was attacked by a mob of spiders. But straight away I got another one, and so far I still have it.  I even died once, and assumed it would also vanish, but it was still there when I respawned.  In my current scenario, which I called Botanica, I haven't even seen a cat yet.

Kablooey

I think today takes the record for the number of times I've been blown up.  One house was blown up twice. And last night the explosion took out 3 enclosures and I had animals running everywhere. Sheesh.  I think that fuse sound is giving me a nervous tic.

Black Sheep in the Family

This morning I scored a chicken and a black sheep.  I just love the black sheep. I crossed it with a white sheep and the baby was black too.  I wonder if they'll all be black. (Update: The second time I did it I got a white sheep).

After the great chicken explosion, I finally got another chicken too, so now I can have baby chicks.
I still blow up fairly regularly.  Now if I see them in the distance I stay well away from those creepers.  Maybe if I get the hang of archery I can shoot them.  Now that I finally have chickens, I can get some feathers for arrows.

I crossed a black and a white sheep and got a black sheep.

So then I did it again and got a white sheep.

Rainy Day

Fishing always makes me nervous, because creepers and other nasties can creep up behind me.  So now I fish at the Alley Cat Lodge, right from the front door.  It's a pleasant way to sit out a rainstorm. It's a bit off the ground, so nothing can easily get to the front door and even if they did, I'm sitting in the doorway and I can whack them with my fish.

It's Curtains For the Chicken

A creeper just blew up my carefully and newly finished chicken corral.  Kablooey. I turned around to see what happened to the 2 chickens.  One was deep fried. I didn't see the other one but I could hear it.  So I went in my house and shut the door to try to live through the night, and when I turned around, there was the other chicken, in the house, sitting on the stove.

Tutorial Pet Peeve

Sometimes I get stuck on Minecraft and go to watch some tutorials, hopefully explaining how to do what I'm trying to do.  Today I went to find one on planting an apple tree.  Just one apple.  Just one tree.

I find a bazillion tutorials on apple tree farming.  They all compose of a giant apple farm with pistons and artificial lighting and canals and sliding auto harvesting modifications. For the love of god, can't you just show someone how to plant one apple in the ground?  I'm not Johnny frickin' appleseed. I'm not understanding why everything must be 'automatic' with 'pistons'. I'm not sure why you have to harvest 10 million apples or cocoa beans. I don't know why you need fruit that picks itself or why you need to chop down 300 trees at once.

In a strange parallel with real life, I just want a simple farmstead, with an orchard. I want it to be beautiful, not like the industrial age in Chicago. I'm sure I'm not the only one that wants that. Nor do I need to construct a flame thrower or set the whole forest on fire.

The other tutorial pet peeve is someone that starts out and never gets to the point, or gets distracted mid-course. The title will say apple tree farm, and 15 minutes into it they've talked about building a self-watering greenhouse.  Then he says, "And now it's the end of the tutorial"...but he never planted any apple trees.  Face palm.