Sara and I were spending a lot of time in Antarctica. We had a lonely shack in the middle of nowhere, and there was this one trail along a ridge that went to a small patch of woods or a creek or something that that we had explored together. Sometimes she'd go back home and I'd be there by myself for weeks or months at a time, and I'd remember our little adventures fondly while doing other stuff.

There was a video game I was working on, some 2D side-scroller with a character that looked like Sonic. I had put a lot of effort into making a set of rock pile tiles look realistic. You could walk your character over the piles and climb down the front as if it were 3D terrain, even though it really wasn't, and that was very satisfying. Now I was messing with some floor blocks to the right of that, which looked like Zelda II bridge blocks, even though there was nothing to bridge over. Maybe I was overusing bridge blocks.

It occurred to me later in the dream, when I was maybe back in Madison with Sara, that I didn't have a lot of memories of our Antarctica house, as if a lot of time had passed without much happening, and attributed that to my rarely going anywhere. There wasn't really anywhere to walk to—our shack was in the middle of a large valley with mountains in the distance, so you'd have to walk several miles before finding anything interesting (our little path-along-ridge-with-a-tree-at-the-end notwithstanding)—so I hadn't 'gone out' hardly at all. During warm periods I would spend a lot of time out on the deck, which was sort of a courtyard-like area which the shack partly wrapped around, doing woodworking stuff. And other than that, I spent a lot of time in a corner of the shack, at my computer, doing programming stuff.

I had probably made a lot of gridbeam during those warm days. Maybe, I thought, if I think back on all the stuff I built, it'll feel less like time just disappeared.