After watching an Anais video out of sequence, she mentioned that minikube is a bit fussy and that she was using microk8s, so I tried that and ... success! :) Having something show up when you type a k8s command, rather than an error is nice. I'd still like to figure out what the issue with minikube is, but microk8s has lesser requirements (am able to run with one vCPU and 2G of RAM), so I may be able to run a few nodes or at least a couple pods. Yay and thanks to Anais!