Okay, so I put a second story on my house in Minecraft. Here it is in the daytime, so you can see the materials. The footing is smoothed cobblestone, the walls and steps are chunks of birch wood (the steps are carpeted). The edge of the first-floor roof is red-stained clay. The edge of the upper-level roof is sandstone and red-stained clay, and the center of the upper-level roof is glass, so I can sit up there and watch the stars or the rain.

There’s another set of block stairs just like this on the other side. Oh — there’s a one-block wall of sandstone all around the edge of the upper level, set one block back from the edge. Pretty snazzy.

Here it is at night, so you can see it all lit up like Levy Brothers. (Levy Brothers was a clothing store in Louisville when I was a girl that had lights all over it. It’s still there, and still has lights, but now it’s The Old Spaghetti Factory. Like you care.)

It’s raining. The light up top is a jack-o-lantern. You take a pumpkin and you cross it with a torch, and you get a jack-o-lantern. It looks damn creepy, but it’s really really bright. The thing that looks like a birthday candle off to the right is a fence post with a torch on it. I do NOT want to get lost.

SO ANYWAY, there are all these equines around my house, right, so I tamed a donkey. I named him Sancho Panza, of course, and I put a storage chest on him. I fished and I fished until I finally caught a saddle. I saddled him so I could ride him. I wanted to ride him, because I wanted to use him to carry supplies back to this other place I had been.

I was using a map (harvest sugar cane, make paper, combine paper and a compass to make a map) to get back to the place. Well, the map only registers the landscape you’re traveling over IF YOU’RE HOLDING THE MAP, which means you can’t see where you’re going. But, once it’s done that, you can just bring the map out to check your location but you don’t have to hold it.

Oh, and guess what? Every time you go into the water, the damn donkey plunks you off and you swim away from him. You have to stand on the new shore and wave wheat at him to lure him across. After doing that about seven million times, I was pretty damn sick of that donkey.

Still I did not wish him ill. It’s just that I had the map out and couldn’t really see where I was riding him AND I was used to not worrying if I fell down into a pit because I’m wearing iron armor and I can fall down a pit like it ain’t no thang.

Not so, Sancho Panza.

I got out of the pit and looked around and — no donkey. I went back into the pit and — no donkey. Alas, he perished. And, alas, he took the saddle and the supplies with him.

Following the map, I eventually got to where I was going. There are no equines here, and I’ve caught two saddles since I arrived. Ain’t that just the way?

I’m blogging at Fatal Foodies today about Bumblebee Stew.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Have a character fall into a pit, with or without a donkey.

MA

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