April 17
Or possibly two days. Oh well.

April 17 Redux
I didn't mean to lie, I really didn't! I figure I can squeeze in maybe a half hour of gaming before sleep and it might as well be Harvest Moon as anything else. Well, an hour-and-a-half later and I'm looking at a total of five hours sleep for the night. Hasn't prior experience taught me anything?

Nope, guess not. Anyway . . .

I've discovered something I hadn't really realized before: my guy is a lot tougher than he used to be. In year one all the work I'm doing would have killed him dead, but now that it's fall I've got six - count them, six! - rows of crops going. That's sixty individual plants I'm tending with a minimal drain on endurance, as compared to year one's four rows nearly killing me. What this means is that, in addition to having a farm that doesn't look like large patches of dirt with plants cowering in the corner, my money flow is going to loosen up quite nicely very soon. To quote another game entirely - "Woo! Indeed, woo hoo!"

So the plant pattern is now plant a row of ten crops, save enough out to keep a full larder just in case you need to cook something, dump half in the seed machine so that it splits one plant into two seeds, sell the rest. At the moment I'm still in the stage of building up my personal supplies of food, but once that's done (and I don't expect it to take too long to do) it's all money in the bank. I'm still in a financial tunnel, but the light is looking pretty good at the end.

In the meantime, I've been stalking the doctor to try to track down the screaming he heard. He visits the old guy, Galen, in the mornings and that's when I can get the conversation bit from him about hearing "a girl screaming the other night." Poking around a bit more I found out that he's in that area of town at 8PM regularly. I'm going to do a bit more stalking and hopefully turn up what's going on. I'd have done a bit more but summer turned to fall and I was spending more time setting up my new crops than tracking down plot threads. The change of seasons is a very busy time around here.

April 18
Fall is in full swing now, and I'm beginning to question the wisdom of six rows of crops. Sure, I can actually take care of them without falling over dead now, but it takes a serious chunk of the day to do it. My normal schedule of 5:30AM or so until 11AM, tending all aspects of the farm, and then the rest of the day wandering around, is now stretched out to 1PM. A couple of journals ago I mentioned that time seemed an easier commodity to manage, but now I'm really feeling the temporal pinch. Nothing I can't handle, I'll just miss a few events I might otherwise have seen, I guess.

But I did manage to find a new event: gravestone polishing. Yep, when you run across the widower watching over the grave, he offers to let you polish the headstone. I think I did well enough my first time, but there's definitely room for improvement. You basically push the A button rhythmically, not as fast as you possibly can but just at a decent pace. Work too hard and you lose several seconds of your one-minute time limit resting up, work too slow and you do a lousy job. As I was nearing the end of my time, I noticed a fuzzy figure getting more distinct off to the side, and when I was done it faded away. I think I'll be back same time tomorrow to see if maybe I can't get a better result.

Other than that, a gaming day of holding the course. I grew crops, played with the kid, and just generally took care of business. I still haven't figured out how to get a higher level crop than the basic B level, though. Next up, continued experiments with fertilizer. It's the only thing I can think of at the moment to try to raise the seed level from B to A.

To be continued!

Continue to: Days 5 and 6 | Return to: Week One