Part 2: Turns out I wasn't ready just yet.

Remember how last time I said I was ready to leave?  Turns out I wasn't ready just yet.  I had done most of my preparatory farming and sugarlump crafting in the midst of a series of Minecraft crashes and Mo'Creatures version updates.  The result was that after my first optimistic declaration that I was ready to start my horseback journey, I embarked instead on a series of bizarre Groundhog Day-esque replays of the same day.  I must have built the same farm four or five times, and the same floating forest at least three times.  In one of the replays, Minecraft remembered that it was nighttime, but forgot that I had just spent the day reflooring Squares's pen in wool, reverted it to grass, and (since they spawn only on grass) immediately spawned a bear.  By the time I noticed the wool back in my inventory and ran out to save Squares (in the dark, mind you!), he had already been devoured. The other repeats of the same day were less nightmarish (Squares is OK now), but I have become quite sick of farming.

Squares in his pen, with evidence that I was indeed working on flooring it in wool, and honestly didn't leave him to the bears that one time.

One of the incarnations of the farm, this one containing a rabbit.  I chased the rabbit around with a sword for a while, managing only to damage my crops.  Finally I cornered it and shoved it bodily out the window.  It fell to the ground several meters below and hopped away.  Defenestration: a successful pest control method.

The latest updates of Mo'Creatures added a few things, one of which is sharks.  Dr. Zhang must have been really excited about the sharks, because they're set to spawn in large numbers everywhere, including in the waterfalls near my house.  The sharks that spawn in my waterfalls are unfortunately short-lived, since they flow immediately onto dry land and then spend the next few minutes blinking red and writhing before finally expiring in a puff of smoke.  The first time it was exciting and impressive (sharks are big!) but after the tenth one or so it changed more to "What the heck is wrong with these things?"  Every time I leave my house I see at least one of them in its death throes, and the ground is littered in shark teeth.  There's no use for shark teeth in the mod yet, but as I'm amassing an impressive collection of them, I hope the eventual use for them will be something completely awesome, like building your own hovercraft or adding them to a horse to make it an attack horse that doesn't take guff from bears.

Shark that has just run out of river.  These things take a LONG time to die, which means they're tough, and which means I don't ever want to meet one in the water.

The other thing the mod updates added is a GUI that controls all sorts of settings about the new creatures.  I suddenly have very tempting options, including the option to turn all the hunter animals off, or the option to make them not attack horses, and the option to make 1/10 horses be a pegasus, rather than the current 1/100.  The most seriously tempting option is to make the hunters leave the horses alone, after the traumatic experience with an alternate universe in which Squares was eaten by a bear.  It's not even fair - the horses don't even try to run away from the lions and bears, but just hop excitedly, saying, "Hello, Mr. Lion!  Are you coming to be my friend?  Hooray!"  After some consideration, I've decided to keep the predators vicious, and keep the pegasus rare, so the journey will be longer and more exciting.  This may be a mistake.