Ten-Finger Exercises

it's about time

What have I been doing? I even wonder myself. I've been spending a lot of time farming, virtual farming that is. Can you imagine why it might be fun to plow patches of virtual ground, buy virtual seeds and harvest virtual crops?

I am not sure of the allure, but part of it is artistic. It's fun to design your farm, accumulating fences and barns and silos and houses and laying out the acreage. It's fun to watch the crops come up. Potatoes are cheap and take one day to mature. Tomatoes take two days, and so do wheat and rice. Grapes take only four hours, and they go to waste if they're not harvested in eight. Pumpkins take the longest time-- four days. The longer you play the game, the more you wish there were more three and four day choices.

The trees are the most fun, and the animals. People give them to you. The animals run around the farm if they aren't fenced in, and they scratch and roll over and eat. They also moo and chirp and oink. The trees are productive and give you good crops of apples, oranges, mangoes, bananas, plums and coconuts to sell.

The way the game works, if you hire someone else to harvest your farm, they make money and your crops sell for more. Everybody wins. Kind of a nice touch we don't see often enough in the real world.

Anyway, Bill and I both have farms. His is called "Don't Buy the Farm." Mine used to be Aunt Elsie's farm, because it was the only farm I ever went to when I was a child and I have good memories of it. I once chased a bunny through the strawberry patch and caught it. My grandmother let me take it back to the lake cottage with us, and we put it in the window well, as close to a cage as anything we had, I guess. Of course it jumped out and disappeared during the night, but it was still an adventure.

My new farm, now that I've doubled its size and added a maze and two ponds, was supposed to be Aunt Elsie's Serenity Dude Ranch and Day Spa, but that was too long. So it's just Serenity Ranch and Day Spa. Y'all come.

Bill and I both have as much property there as we can. We sit and harvest each other's farms at night-- if that isn't the silliest thing! I doubt if we'll play much longer though. The weather is getting too nice to stay inside, and we've gotten about all we can out of the game. His kids have their farms next to ours, and we send them lemon trees or cows or something every day. Theirs are growing too. That may keep us playing a little longer, waiting for whatever new developments come up, new crops to grow, new decorations to buy with the money we earn from our harvests.

I think you have to join Facebook to play, but if you're ever in that direction I hope you'll stop by.

In the meantime, it's June, and it's time for me to come back before my membership here runs out. See ya!