What's going on?

Not a whole lot... I started building a massive castle out by my floating cottage. No pictures of the castle yet, but I did find an enormous hole in the ground that I've been adventuring in quite a bit whenever I'm working on it.

A creeper was waiting outside my train station for me. I couldn't run away fast enough to save my house but I made a quick temporary repair.

I built a portal into 'The Nether'. It's spooky as hell in there, and also kind of dangerous. I built another portal hoping it would take me close to my floating cottage, but no such luck. I wandered around for a while trying to find my way back home but eventually just took the portal back. Then I built a compass.

And then I finally finished my glass tower. by this point I was pretty sick of it and I felt it needed something... anything. I added a column of lava down the middle.

I see what's happening here

I was down in my beach-front mine trying to correct the monster situation. Everywhere I went, there were tons of monsters and I couldn't figure out where they were coming from. I finally found some very dark areas up near the ceiling that I hadn't noticed before. I got them all lit up and found this:

Down at the bottom there, you can see some iron ore... but up above my head I saw a whole lot of sand. It may have taken a while, but I know the signs when I see them now. I'm supposed to go in there and pull out the iron ore which is going to cause all that sand to cave in on me. And you know what usually accompanies a sand cave-in? Water. I was almost certainly under the ocean. I figured I had two options:
1. Reinforce the ceiling so I could take out the iron
2. Stand somewhere safe and tap the sand forcing a cave-in.

Since I didn't have any good cave-in pictures, I decided on the latter. Here's the result:

Sand and water everywhere. Turns out I was under the ocean and it took a while to plug the massive hole and clear out the sand. But it got done eventually and I got my small amount of iron ore and a couple of pictures to show the process of a cave-in. Would've been better as a video though...

Oh yeah, I rode a pig

The other night when I was exploring one of my caves I came across another "Minecraft Dungeon" which consists of a fiery box that spawns monsters, with a couple of boxes which usually contain some rare items.
In one of these I found something I had never seen before. I looked around the internet and discovered that it was a pig saddle!
I was pretty excited. No longer would I have to walk everywhere, instead I could ride a pig! Gillian warned me that she didn't think a pig would necessarily go where I wanted to go, but I didn't listen. I threw the saddle on the first pig I found and hopped on... and that was pretty much it. The pig wouldn't go where I told it to go so I just sat there on its back.
Eventually I got bored and decided I wanted my saddle back so I slaughtered the pig... and that didn't work. Apparently saddles are one-use-only. =( Because I wasn't prepared, I didn't take a photo... but someone else on the internet did.

Oh noes!

"Scary new monsters"? Like they weren't already scary? More dangerous as I go deeper? Torches that go out? Apparently I have over a thousand torches. That is some bullshit.

Still, it should be awesome in the face. I can't wait for my underground sundial.

What to build?

 I sort of felt like my train track was a pretty epic project. It had demanded tons of my time, and I was left with something pretty amazing and functional. No longer would I have to spend an entire Minecraft day walking to my floating castle. But because it had been so great, it left me wondering what to do next. So I decided on a glass tower in the ocean. I figured it could also serve as a fast and not-confusing entrance to my most valuable mine. So I went downstairs to one of the largest chambers and started tunneling up. I figured it was under the water because of all the waterfalls. I was pretty confident I'm come up under the ocean but I wasn't worried about drowning. I was absolutely right to not worry about drowning. I didn't realize I'd come up under sand and be buried alive. Harumph.
At this point I figured it would be best to tunnel from the top down. I tried my best to figure out where my tunnel was going to come up, and this was what I decided. This tiny stone marker 10 feet off the beach.

When I was out there putting up the marker, I discovered I was a little off. There was a hole in the sand nearby... which is obviously where the sand collapsed on me. So I built a well.

And then I enlarge the well

And then I replaced the stone walls with Glass

That seemed time consuming... and the end result was the base of a tower not far from the beach. So I tried again a little farther into the ocean. This one was going to have a larger base with the water being deeper. I built the glass walls first and filled it with dirt. That was also time consuming but this is what I ended up with.

I think at this point I decided that this would be my main tower, with the other glass structure serving as an entryway of some sort. I'll get on that soon I guess.

The Trouble with Trains

I don't know how much time I spent trying to get an automated train system working at my respawn station, but it's a lot. Building the delivery part was easy, but I found that I sometimes missed the cart as it flew by the front door which was irritating. I tried to build a system to force the cart back around if I wasn't in it... but that didn't work very well. The system kept getting more and more complicated until it looked like this:

Eventually I'd had enough. I removed the automated delivery system and the "come back if empty loop". I figured I could just push the train down a chute from inside the station and hop inside. That made things much easier... although it doesn't look that much less complex on the surface:

With that taken care of, I was free to move along the length of track making it difficult for monsters and animals from getting on the tracks. I built boosters in every cave for both directions and finally finished off the massive hill bridge that had begun this whole project:

Now the only thing left to do was to add safety lighting to prevent monsters from appearing too close to the tracks. I got that finished and in the near future I'll take a test trip at night to see if I can make it without being killed. I think I'll be okay.

I wonder what I'll do next to entertain myself?

Skytrain

Well, it's done. I've elevated my entire track. It took a bunch of work, but I should be somewhat safer from monsters and general animal interruption now. It also looks a lot more impressive than it did before:

Once again, when the track was all finished and ready to go, I took a test ride. I made it all the way from my respawn train station to the base of my enormous uphill aqueduct and then the train stopped. I turned around and  saw that my train engine had run out of coal! This was highly unexpected. Everything I'd seen so far had made me believe that the train would continue to run endlessly. I guess I was being naive.
This is going to cause some problems for me.
1. My automatic system at the respawn train station requires that the trains be powered. If my engine runs out of steam while it's waiting for an occupant, it won't be auto-delivered. That's not a huge deal, but it's not great.
2. Powered mine carts will travel in the direction you're facing when you feed them more coal... but they can only push other carts. This means during my trips I'm going to be in front of the engine. If my engine stops part way through my trip I'm going to have to get out and re-power the engine. But with my new elevated track, that's going to be a problem. I mean, look how long this thing is!

So, I guess I'm going to have to break down and utilize some of the game's glitches to do what I need done. There's something called mine cart boosting which allows me to use other mine carts on parallel tracks to power my mine cart. This is what my first booster station looks like:

This is in the cave behind the waterfall. It provides one track with boost for each direction. It's impossible to explain in pictures and text, but this video explains things comprehensively.

I'm going to need a lot more iron for train tracks.