Focus on Me - pt 4 - Minecrafting into 2021

Wow...it has been a long time since I've written in here, hasn't it?  All the way through 2019 and through part of 2020 I was pretty much glued to my blogs, trying to get something updated once a week or so, and trying to help my mental health by getting things out of my head an on to "paper".

Now, it's been about six months later and things are, well, more or less the same.  About the same time that I left off of the blogs I started into the game of Minecraft.  It was a free solution to me wanting to create and decorate and explore the world around me (well, free in the sense that I only had to purchase the game but not the materials, that just took time).

I feel like I really need to dig deep into my new obsession with Minecraft.  Here I am, about to go into my 42nd year, and I'm obsessed with this digging, building, and battling game.  At first I played it only on the weekends, spending time with my friends on a shared server and eventually only my husband and I were on there for the most part until then there was me.  My friends still helped me defeat the dragon, still worked on their builds, but eventually they moved on to other games and doing other things.  We'd exhausted pretty much all there was to do - especially since they weren't into building and designing as much as I am.

And obsessed...yes, my evenings were spent exploring and building maps, finding beautiful scenery in this cartoon landscape and it helped me forget about how 2020 sucked.  About the fact I could no longer play D&D with my friends in person, how I barely left the house but to occasionally go to the grocery store or the park to walk.  

In this world... I was free.  I could hang out with my friends (when they were there) or hang out with the NPC villagers which is what I spent a lot of time doing, coming up with small stories and going on adventures to build the most amazing things I could think of.  Of course...this was before I started watching YouTube videos putting anything my mind had come up with to shame thus far...but that's for another time.

My house recreated in Minecraft

When I did discover all of the other builders out there I realized quite quickly that I wanted more challenges.  My husband tried to start up a modded game, and he played with me for a few days, then dropped off each time we'd start up something new.  I'd press on, enjoying every moment until I had my own single player "X-Life" game where I managed to max out everything and had a wonderful village all on my own.

Since then I've played around with other resource packs (the picture above is MizunoCraft16 with some Ghoulcraft thrown in) but I'm pretty happy with how close I could build a replica of a house I live in.  It's not perfect, but since I had the constraints of what blocks are available and not having a whole lot of extra mods...it's not too bad either.

I've thought of doing some other things with this new found obsession, but, overall, I guess my anxiety makes me push a way from going streaming or trying to do other things like that.  Is it bad?  No, absolutely not.  Not every Minecrafter needs to be a Twitch streamer...or YouTuber, but I do like to show off what I've created and I'm proud of the things that I've done with my time even if they aren't physical creations.

Unfortunately, I feel a lot of the time that the push I had two years ago at this time, when I'd lost my job at the craft store and moved into attempting crafts full-time for the summer of 2019... it feels very far away now.  I'm definitely a different person than I was then.  I don't feel like the same excited, bright-eyed, "let's do this!" kind of person I was then.  

But you know, dammit, even if people don't appreciate the time and effort I put into this game... even if they don't seem to care that I want to show them what I've made because it's not tangible...well, screw it.  I AM PROUD of it.  I find relief in these things, no matter how strange it might seem.

And I'll probably keep up with it for a while longer, because that's what brings me comfort.

Anime Figure Collecting

 So, I have a bit of a confession to make, and it's probably a wee bit late to confess this, because the addiction has been going on for well over 10 years now.  But... I have an addiction to collecting Anime Figures.  And it's only gotten worse over the last few years, because when I first started this collecting thing, it was back around, let me think, 2002.  Back then I was a poor college student, still living at home, just getting my classes paid off and trying to work a full time job.  Later that same year I'd lose that full time job and have to switch to a part time job where I would then work my up the ladder to another full time job a few years later.  However, I digress in my story-telling here because that year as I was just finishing up college and getting my act together, I started going to anime conventions for the first time.  It was, in fact, right around this time of year (or actually a little earlier in January) that I attended Ohayocon for the first time.

Ohayocon was an eye-opener for me because this was the first time I'd ever been where there were so many other people of the same likes as me.  I dressed up as Milly Thompson from Trigun and after registering for my badge with Wolfwood of all people - I started my hunt to take pictures of all of the Trigun characters as possible.  Of course, that meant a lot of Vash, Wolfwood, Milly and Meryl that year as it was still playing on Cartoon Network at the time.  I knew there were figures/toys of anime characters out there, but until I stepped foot into the vendor room for the first time, I had no idea what I would be getting myself into!

In fact, I had just stepped up to the first booth when the first vendor spotted me and held up some of the figures from Trigun and I think I'd spent $45 the first 15 minutes I'd been at the convention.  And it would be awfully hard the rest of the convention not to find myself perusing the vendors, spending money I really didn't have, because most of them didn't take credit, nor did I have much of a credit account, and I still had to have money to eat and pay for parking come two days later!  But that hooked me, and I would forever owe my fevered collecting to my love of Trigun.

Mind you, as you're looking at all of these photos of figures in this blog, you're probably going, "but none of these are Trigun" and you're right, I haven't felt like taking more pictures of Vash and his cohorts these last few months, because, well, quite frankly the early figures were pretty terrible.  Molds didn't look proportionate, paint colors were all over the place, figures were just plain..well, bad.  It's really hard for me to look at some of these little figures that I used to stare at for hours on end, just in awe of being able to hold my favorite figure in my hand.  Of course, we're mostly talking gachapon and the other small figures that I started out with.

 Smaller figures now, many of them are as pretty as the newer, larger, figures, because I think it comes down to companies realizing that fans will spend a bunch of money to get QUALITY, rather than quantity.  That doesn't mean there aren't a TON of Chinese knock-offs, because there ARE... a LOT.  So many, in fact, that I am loathe to pick up figures unless I can see them and their boxes, see what the quality looks like and make sure the prices seem to fit and that the molds are correct, and the packaging doesn't have suspicious markings.  That can be hard, of course, if you don't know Japanese, but usually the rule of thumb is, if it's tiny, $10-$18 is about right for prices, if it's about 9" high (Barbie doll or smaller) then $30-$60 is about right, and if it costs even more...usually you're safe.

That said, of course, it's not impossible to still run across a good deal from time to time or even for a more trained eye to run across a good knock-off.  I still have friends that get tricked because they don't know better.  And heaven knows there are a LOT of cheap figures sitting around this house because I certainly didn't know that something like that could exist.

Anyway, the anime of the figures you're looking at on this page range from "Hentai Prince & Stony Cat", "Bakemonogatari", "Penguin Drum", "AnoHana", "Vocaloid", "The World God Only Knows", "Gantz", and a few others.  The main figures are ones I personally collected rather than ones that my husband bought, because there are a few more of those too.  My favorite at the moment are from Bakemonogatari and the little mini-nendroids from Vocaloid (Miku in particular) because of the fact that I got her from a blind box set and lucked out that I got her rather than any of the other Vocaloids.  I've only just started collecting the smaller nendroids and have a few of the larger ones, but those are for another day!

The Guest Room

I like having guests over.  For short periods of time it's nice to have someone over from out of state, particularly my Mom or my In-Laws since we both moved away from our parents when we were married.  I had a friend who recommended it because it gave us an opportunity to learn what it would be like to depend on each other rather than our families, and for the last five years that we've lived away from our parents, I'd like to think we've become pretty independent.

However, I think as with all parents, they'd like us to be just a bit more dependent upon them.  I know my Mom would like me to call her every day, and my husband's parents would like to stay for longer periods of time at our house than we've allowed them in the past.  There's only one problem with that, of course, which was space.

It was pretty cramped when we had them over at our apartment when we only had two bedrooms and one of them was our bedroom, and the other a computer room.  When we moved into our current home, we picked up a spare room which was to be the spare room as well as a place where we could watch movies and read books.  Instead of becoming a spare guest room, however, it became a craft/hobby/library room where there wasn't a free wall to stick a bed up against.

Fast forward a year and my In-Laws finally broke down willing to pay for a bed for the room, so we suddenly had a quandary: where do we put the spare guest bed?

My husband started thinking it over, because even though my own mother would like a bed, she wasn't pushing for it (she understands how money can be and has a worse time of it than me) but his parents were the ones wanting to be here for a week at a time since they are retired now (unlike my mom, who happens to be older).

One Sunday evening after he visited me at work, my husband packed up his computer desk and moved out of the computer room.  I came home to a big ol' empty spot in the computer room and his desk and chair and computer down in the basement.  Mind you, we don't have a finished basement or we probably would have had it down there in the first place, but we did buy a carpet for down there so we could set up a projection screen and play DDR (that's a story for another time).

By the next week we'd ordered the bed and by that weekend I was scrambling to get my computer desk moved into the library (where I sit now as I type this) and the room cleaned up and trim painted, ready for the bed to be moved in.  We went out and bought new bedding since I had originally intended to use my old bedding that would fit it better...but decided that I didn't like the colors too well.  Found this set on clearance at B,B&Beyond and fell in love with it.  Almost would use it for my own bedroom if it hadn't been white (I will NOT put white on my bed...)  Then we took an afternoon off of work to go to IKEA and picked up curtains (which I still need to hem up, but I've been lazy) and  a small desk that I could put a TV on and possibly hook up a few gaming systems - mainly for my Wii Fit so I could still exercise.

There's my cats enjoying the new set up.  Olivia (the gray) tends to hide under the bed, she likes to sleep there and freak my husband out.  He calls for her time and time again and when she doesn't answer for a long period of time he starts to think she got out and has gotten herself hurt.  She's pretty stubborn about coming to her name.  Mina on the other hand, doesn't spend much time at all in that room by herself, rather she likes to be wherever her humans are.

The photo above is where my husband's computer used to be, and the one to the right up above is where mine used to be.  No, that's not my computer desk, that was a cheap $20 IKEA desk I bought just for the TV, but ended up nearly destroying because - NEVER BUY CHEAP IKEA - it'll just break on you.  The more expensive stuff is the good stuff.  I broke two beams on the thing and if it weren't for extra stabilizing beams on the chair I probably would have thrown that $20 down the drain with the desk itself.

Meanwhile outside...the gardens are doing okay but because of the drought my grass is dead.  My husband and I have gotten to the point where we're allowing our weeds to grow because that's the only thing growing out in the yard.  We have really pretty queen anne's lace and chickory and various asters.  I wonder what our neighbors think when they see all of our wildflowers?  Ah well, it's too ugly to take a picture of, so I'm not going to bother showing you...instead I'm concentrating on inside.  It's cooler in here anyway.

New Year's Repairs

Instead of writing a list of New Year's Resolutions, I thought I'd make a list of repairs that I'm going to be working on this year.  I believe I started this blog after buying our house, well after we got settled in, in fact, so that most of the initial problems were solved long before I started writing about life.  And for quite awhile, we didn't have many problems crop up, just the usual cleaning and daily care.  But the house was in pretty bad shape when we first bought it since it was a bank owned property where the owners were obviously not happy to have left their home.

I think I might first tell you about the state of the house, at least briefly, because from what I've heard it was originally owned by a couple, and you can kind of tell that things were going well.  They'd painted the downstairs, installed various shelving units in the garage and basement, put up wallpaper borders in the kitchen (bleck - first thing to go!) and at least for awhile, I think they had a pretty good home.  Somewhere in there, according to a neighbor, they moved to another town, allowing one of their children's families move in with their two young children.  You can tell that one room had been 'loved' to death by the sheer amount of dirt and crayon drawings on the walls.  Then another room must have had a special painting day with the kids helping because it was painted fuchsia pink and there were tracks and fingerprints of it everywhere throughout the house.  I'm still finding spots on the stairways, outside on the back doors, you get the picture.  They must have thought that the bright paint was a good idea because part of it was also in the second bath, but they ran out of paint and used a bright orange to finish it up.  I figured this room was for a pre-teen because every square inch of the pink space was pin-holed with, what I assumed were posters of some sort.

There was also candle wax everywhere.  This was a rather new addition to the house before we got it because over time the spots I was unable to get out of the carpet have turned black with dirt buildup and then I have to spend time repairing these spots on the floors.  There were also nailpolish spots and smoke damage in the master bedroom where I suspected mom or dad smoked under the bathroom fan, staining the counter with nicotine as they put out their butts, burning the floor's linoleum multiple times.

Almost every light switch cover was damaged or removed, all of the light fixtures and fans were gone, nearly all of the appliances were gone and so too all the blinds and even one of the doors was removed from its hinges.

Mind you, this wasn't the worst house that we'd looked at during our house-hunt a year ago (goodness, it's almost been a year since we started looking!) but it took me a good week to get all of those repairs completed, and the bank had to fix a gas leak too.  We had other problems over time, like bad lightbulbs and beeping smoke detectors, a garage door that we had to get openers for, and a back porch that I had to pound into submission so it wouldn't fall apart on us the first year.

During the summer months we'd pretty much solved most of our problems, except perhaps for the leaking sub-pump, which was thankfully a very easy fix.  Leaky sinks that my father-in-law repaired.  But overall, this house has treated us pretty well.

And then...

There's a leak in the basement.  We've been working on fixing it for half a week now, but it's leaking from a t-joint under the washing machine, and no matter what we've tried, nothing has stopped the leak.  Tape, epoxy, rubber sealant...  So that's number one.

The calk that I thought I'd repaired in the bathrooms is now cracking, so obviously I did that wrong in the first place.

The soap dispenser in the kitchen stopped working so we need to get a stopper for the hole and just stop using that all together.

The pretty wood floors in the kitchen I thought had been there awhile?  I think they were actually put in to sell the house because they're starting to fade already.

Not to mention all of the nasty holes in the linoleum floor in the master bath which needs a new coating.

The subpump pipe next to the house needs a better repair than the duck tape we used at the beginning of the year...

Well, you get the picture I think.



And yet, you're probably wondering, why am I sitting here blogging instead of getting on some of these problems now?  Well, it's because I spent a few hours putting up all of the Christmas decorations, and that is enough work for me!