I am currently in the middle of a two-week staycation, during which my primary goal is to laze around the house and avoid peeking at work email. However, I also wanted to take advantage of this time to meet a few slightly loftier goals, both involving mental challenges. After being bitterly disappointed by a rash of new, overly-hyped up farming sims, (I’m looking at you, Ooblets and Faefarm), I finally went back to the old classic—Minecraft. Being both dyslexic and generally apathetic, after years of playing on and off, I’ve never managed to build much more than a plain, square, crackerbox house. But this time around, I was determined to make a cool-looking house with an A-frame roof and nice facing, and, if not all of the bells and whistles, at least a few of them. So I pulled up a video tutorial of an adorable, charming little cabin and began going through it frame by frame, filled with an irrational confidence that this was all going to be a snap.
About ninety minutes in, I was exhausted, confused, and had a headache. I am the worst when it comes to any sort of spacial reasoning or being able to visualize three-dimensional objects and rotate them in my head. I’m pretty sure that I was either born without a spacial sense, or it just broke somewhere along the line. The other part of the problem was my complete lack of experience with building and not knowing all of the little tricks, like where to put the cursor on a block to get an object to place in the right orientation. The only thing that kept me from rage-quitting was Mr. Typist’s calm and patient encouragement and his constant checking of my work. However, after far more hours than I care to admit, the fruits of my labor were realized, and I had an honest-to-goodness cute house that actually looks like something other than an upside-down cardboard box:
I’m especially delighted by the chimney, which I didn’t know the trick to until I watched the video. If you’re interest in this specific tutorial, you can view it here.
My other goal was to make significant progress on my custom diamond painting from a drawing that my artist friend did. It’s been a lot of trial and error, as previously documented, but I am pretty happy with how it’s turning out:
More than anything, I wanted to make sure the essence of the turtle came through from the original artwork. I think it probably would have been better with square drills, but I all I had in spare drills was rounds. As usual, the photo doesn’t do it total justice, as these gorgeous, shiny gold drills I found are not really coming through, nor is the overall shine and sheen.
So, mission accomplished in both cases. Now I have even more time to putter about and not look at email. Hooray!
--Kristen McHenry
Nicely done on both projects!
Love you art, Kristen! 😚