Eee Eye Eee Eye Ohh

When I first started at Outback one of the girls that trained me was telling another girl something that went like this: "I was so tired when I got home last night all I could do was harvest my crops and go to bed."

I was floored! This girl sooooo is not the farming type! So I said, "holy crap! Where do you live???" I knew she lived with her sister and sister's family somewhere near me. Don't get me wrong, there are farms around me. But this girl? Uh...no.

She then informed me that she was talking about Farmville on Facebook. And the second she said "Farmville" EVERYONE started talking about it. Talking about their strawberries and eggplants and cows and someone sent someone else an elephant (something no farm should be without) but they didn't really have room for it so they just built a pen and put the elephant in it. These people were literally speaking a foreign language. But it was only foreign to me. Everyone else knew what they were talking about.

So my friend D'Laina asked me if I farmed and the look on my face must have indicated that I didn't so she said she'd "neighbor" me. You see, you want neighbors. You need neighbors in order to expand your farm. Plus, everyday you can go to your neighbor's farms and help them do things like pull weeds, rake leaves, scare away raccoons or foxes, get rid of gophers and then you can fertilize some of their crops. All of these good deeds gets you coins and you want coins to buy more crops or tractors or make your farm bigger. You can buy houses and barns and butter churns and ponds and yes, elephants. The list goes on and on and on.

So of course at first I was all aboard the "mocking train". This was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard of! You buy crops, wait a certain amount of time depending on the crop (four hours for strawberries, three days for cotton) and when they're fully grown you harvest. When you harvest it makes you more money. Typically, the longer you have to wait to harvest, the better the return. And as you plant and harvest you earn "experience points". These points advance you to the next level opening up a whole new set of things for you to plant or buy or give as gifts. You can even buy a hot air balloon.

One day Harley was wanting to see the "bird" on Tavis's computer. So Tav told him to wait a minute and he'd pull it up for him. I asked what bird he was talking about and he said he has a duck on his farm that Harley likes to look at.

Again, floored!!! My husband is Farmvilling!!! Of course I spent a few days mocking him. Then I reluctantly joined him. I've found my new addiction. Forget blogging. Forget solitaire. This is what I live for now. I get so excited when I log on to FB and see I have new gifts waiting for me or even better? A new neighbor request. That's better than Christmas! (Especially since we'll be so poor this Christmas, that FV gifts will be the only gifts we'll be getting. Hope the kids don't mind getting a virtual bird bath.)

So as if blogging wasn't enough, I've entered another popularity contest. First you have to have a fair number of FB friends. Only because those friends then need to be your neighbors. Tavis knows first hand how this contest works. He's not huge into FB so he doesn't have a ton of "friends". And of those non-tons of friends only a handful of them farm. So he's got tons of money but not enough neighbors to make his farm bigger. I have enough neighbors but not enough money. (Story of my freakin' life, I tell ya.) Although, make no mistake, "if this was the real world of farming, he'd have all us us whipped!!!"

So, MB, when you ask me, "harvest your crops, wth???" Now you know. If you don't Farmville you really should. It's tons of fun. And if you do, you really need to neighbor me. And if you're not my FB friend then you need to remedy that, too. Although as I type this I'm thinking of the 10-12 people who comment here and I'm pretty sure I'm FB friends with all of you.

Oh! Gotta go! I've got bell peppers that are THIS CLOSE to being ready to harvest and I don't want them to wither!