making progress!

i found today (tuesday's) class very helpful ... i enjoyed talking and playing with our classmates and learned a lot. i worked with isabelle and robert, and both helped me gain a much better understanding of where i can go from my current skill and experience level. as robert and i 'walked' around his new house in the server (amazing!), i asked him questions about various objects and materials .. how he got them, made them, what they are used for, etc. Both he and isabelle were wonderful about answering and helping me string together some of my more fragmentary knowledge. i learned about a lot of new materials that i didnt even know existed becaues i have never seen them, either in person or on the wiki - like obsidian, red stone, and diamond. i learned how to eat, too, with isabelle and robert's help! (thanks to wendy's food shelter for keeping me alive there - so amazing). i also found it cool that when isabelle explained to me how to start a farm (i had asked), she only had to say a few things, like 'make a stone hoe, which is 2 sticks and 2 cobblestone blocks (and demonstrated the shape with her hands' and then 'gather seeds .. use the hoe to prepare the earth.' I love that i totally understood what she meant with those directives, even the 'recipe' for the stone hoe, it made total sense, and i immediately was able to visualize it. it made me feel very accomplished to now have enough base knowledge to be able to get on the same page with her - i didn't have to first ask, 'how to i make sticks/get stone/get seeds' etc, because i already have those fundamentals in place. so that felt like real progress to me, even in how we communicate about the game and are teaching each other. so much of this is really about doing, you can't progress just in the abstract! 

as for tonight, making continued use of the wiki to fill in the gaps i still have ... used isabelle's explanation to plant seeds and an oak sapling close to my house! i mined more sand and made glass and then knocked down 1/2 my roof to make skylights because i was getting claustrophobic and seasonal affective disorder inside without natural light ... i kept checking on my seeds and became frustrated when they weren't growing as quickly as i had hope .. ah, patience, even digitally so! 

a continued struggle/question .. i cant connect to the server on my wifi in my room (i know, i could go to the library and do so ..), and i vacilate between getting 'lonely' in teh singleplayer and then enjoying it and not really wanting to get on the class server. there's a certain aspect of singleplayer that i enjoy in terms of being 'alone,' and even though i'm not figuring everything out on my own because i'm using so much of our class' support and collective knowledge (in person and this blog) and the wiki, too, i like kind of 'going it alone.' but then i wonder what the 'point' of my mine craft existence is and get existential, lonely, and bored - meta! so i go back and forth. that's about it for today. continued excitement/interest in/respect for this project.