After I built the house on the floating island, I went ahead and built a road back to the Aerie, which is what I call my first house on this world. Well. It wasn’t a road so much as a series of bridges and cobblestone blocks, which turn out to be surprisingly easy to follow and one hell of a lot faster to build than roads. I wish I had figured this out before I built roads from the Aerie to the Midlands and then to Marin and then to the Castle and to Funland and that’s not even to mention my roads on the other worlds. It’s a pain in the ass to build roads but if you don’t then you will mourn your lost and sometimes incomplete houses like I mourn the one I was building before the five creepers got me. Finding lost things on these planets is tough but building new things is, fortunately, easy. 
Back on Earth it’s raining again: it is January and all it seems to do is either snow or rain. Both of them leave behind seas of weather; the snow is easier to clean up than the mud but neither is desirable and I’m depressed and unemployed. So I travel to these other worlds where, I have finally figured out, a block of anything is about 3 feet on a side. That is pretty big but I am a whole lot stronger in my other worlds than I am here on Earth and it is the work of seconds to chop up blocks and move them around until I have the kind of giant sculptures I wish I could build in my North Carolina backyard. No such luck, though, the mud doesn’t come away neatly in blocks and if I fell from a 60 foot tower here I’d face worse than missing my lost house. Although that would probably happen too.
As I start this narrative I’ve just finished hollowing out an island. I had the bright idea of building a series of wayhouses on the road between Flying Pig House and the Aerie so that I wouldn’t end up making tiny, aesthetically displeasing hidey holes all over the landscape. Flying Pig House – it’s a striped house on top of a floating island and pigs tend to fall off it, even though I built them a handy water stair - is situated far, far away from the Aerie on Pumpkin Continent. I had a fit of pique while I was looking for my vast, gray, lost house and decided to just build a boat and sail away (this is something I should probably do on Earth, come to think of it.) What I do in these situations is keep traveling until I find some amazingly beautiful landscape and then I build a house there. On Earth the beautiful landscapes are already full of houses inhabited by wealthy and annoying people, leading me to the conclusion that this is yet another way in which my other worlds are far preferable.
Anyway, when I got to the Pumpkin Continent I discovered a very excellent floating island and thus ended up building Flying Pig House and a water elevator of which I am rather proud. Flying Pig House is remarkably ugly. It turns out that the muted Swedish design aesthetic of stone and blond wood I had previously had in my houses was dictated more by materials than by taste, because as soon as I could make dye I promptly started making everything out of virulently hued chunks of wool. I get wool by hitting sheep with an axe. They squawk but they don’t really care and then they trot off naked, looking reproachfully back at me. If you hit them with a Vorpal sword, though, they’ll die and that makes me feel guilty, so I am careful to use the axe.
My wayhouse plan has already been sidetracked a bit, because I found a cave I thought I would explore half way between the first wayhouse, which is, if I do say so myself, rather a charming little country cottage, conveniently situated on a point by the sea that does not seem to be too overrun by monsters and the planned next wayhouse. Caves always take longer than you think they will: you just go in to grab a little silver and maybe some gold, because gold boots and a gold hat make your dreary silver outfit so much more sort of Andy Warhol 70s disco looking, and then you end up stuck in there for days. I was looking for diamonds, too, because diamonds are incredibly useful and for lapis, because lapis is new and will enable me to expand my vocabulary of hideously bright dyed wool blocks. The cave was vast, as they usually are, and featured lots of underground waterfalls and lava pits – all the usual cave stuff – and a fucking spider who pushed me into a lava pit. I survived but barely and had to sit still and quiver for some time afterwards, drinking mushroom soup and cursing spiders.
I dug my way up out of that cave as I usually do when I realize that I can’t stand being underground a minute longer and finally abandon the pretext that I have even the slightest chance of finding my way out the way I came in. I do try, for a while, when I go into caves: I put torches on the left hand side mostly and jack o’lanterns at important intersections and cobbled blocks here and there but inevitably I give up this stuff and just start heading, willy nilly, into every dark corridor. There’s a metaphor for my life here but I’d rather not look at it too closely. Anyway, I almost always manage to dig my way out even if, like today, I come out under the ocean and have to swim up, desperately hoping I don’t run out of air. Once I did that under a frozen ocean – it was a long time ago, when I was still pretty young and naïve – and nearly died but somehow managed to chip my way out of the ice. That was exciting. I think it was September, then, on Earth.
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