There have been a few changes in HKO farming, and I’m not entirely sure I agree with some of them. The flies don’t bother me, you learn to tune them out quickly enough, and I don’t know if their presence has an adverse affect on your production.

There is pesticide you can purchase, but I haven’t figure that out yet. I got a stack of 30, and clicked on an infested tree, but it had no apparent effect, and did not consume the pesticide. I’ll toy around and see.

As for the disagreeable changes, that has to do with the now-present gathering timer. In “old” FB, gathering on your farm was “free”. It was instant, and cost no stamina. Now, gathering has a timer, which ultimately increases farming time by about 5-fold. There is no stamina hit, so I’m not sure I understand the purpose of the timer.

Right now, it turns what was a pleasant and enjoyable activity into a boring and artificial timesink. Farming was always a timesink, but it was nice and relaxing. Now with the addition of time gathering bar (0 to 99, approx. 5 seconds), there is an artificial imposition to the activity.

There are some other related changes, planting seeds now has a progress bar, and you need to be within distance of the square you are planting. Those make sense. Before, I could plant any square on my farm from any location. And the planting timer isn’t an imposition.

Take the gathering timer with the Christmas quest, and it’s a terrible timesink. One quest involves 100 snowballs, which requires 1,250 snows. That is almost 2 hours for gathering alone. (1,250 snow, 5 seconds per is 6,520 seconds to gather; or 104 minutes). That’s assuming a contigious gathering period, which is not feasible, since you need to give time for the “plants” to ripen to harvest. The harvest wait is fine, the gathering wait is tedium at best.

Sorry for the long post, but I needed to vent a little. One bonus is that I was able to finish my house during my snowman farming period.

Ok, one last post about snow. I know it’s winter, and we’ll undoubtedly get more. But at least now I have the winter mind-set. It snowed most of the day Friday, and then turned to ice overnight. I cleaned up most of it before it turned to ice, so Saturday morning was just touchup. I’d say we got about six inches of snow.

Most of the schools in the area closed in anticipation. I had the day off from work on Friday, but the newspapers say that our offices closed early. Now they’re calling for some more snow on Sunday!

When I went to bed last night, it was snowing. Sometime during the night, it turned to ice. Then I went outside and was greeted by . . .

Sorry for the poor image, it’s from my cell phone. I was hoping for something a little more “pretty”, but this is fine. I was expecting more shoveling and delays getting to work, but it’s mostly ice, and they were out salting and sanding most of the night.

I’m pretty ambivalent about snow. On the one hand, it is very pretty, but in a few days, it gets all grimey and ugly. Of course, I hate to drive in snow. Does anyone like to drive in the snow?

This isn’t our first snow. Other places in the US have already had significant amounts of snow, but this was the second which amounted to anything. The first was actually a freak snow-storm on October 28:

Driving home from work. Looks like someone lost control of their car. Also from my cell phone, but I was safe (nobody in front or behind, doing about 20mph at this time).

So there’s a lot of new stuff in the Christmas thingy for HKO. Here are a few things I’m looking forward to:

The Item Mall. I’m guessing decorations for our houses. I hope my house is still standing. It was incomplete, and the building inspectors probably think it’s been abandoned, since no work crews have shown up for over a month.  They’ll give us 300 points, so I’m not sure if the Kitty Points from SanrioTown are used in HKO.

Talking pets? One phrase pops into my mind, “Feed me, Seymour!”. If the reference escapes you, google it :-/ (or look here)

New York! Well, I live 30 minutes outside of the real New York, so it’ll be kind of interesting to see how it’s been Kittyfied. Is that a word?

Player profile on SanrioTown. This I’m probably most excited about. It’s like the HKO version of the Armory. Why do I feel like I’m repeating myself when I say that!

In-game mail notification. This is nice. You could send mail, but you wouldn’t know if you got mail. I wonder if they’ll tie in the blogs in the same manner? Right now (well, “now” being when the game ended), you could only view blogs. It would be handy to be able to post directly from the game (and maybe upload images, but that might be pushing it too far)

Anyways. Right now it is 19:45 on Tuesday, and the game starts on Wednesday at 22:00, but I won’t be able to login until Thursday around 14:00. I’m getting anxious!

This was waiting in my inbox this morning:

Yay! When it arrives, I’ll take a photograph of it. Shipping costs exceeded the prize limit, so I chose the cheapest delivery, which was $6. I think they said a 6-12 week delivery time. Doesn’t matter. Since I don’t have a sweetie in my life (sigh, hints to any eligible (and legally aged!) females who might read this pfft), the long delivery is Ok. And actually, they always grossly over-estimate delivery time anyways, so I’m sure it’ll come a little faster. But yes, the Christmas season is upon us, with deliveries flying all across the globe, so that’s that. Anyways, I’m babbling, I guess cause I’m excited. And it’s just a little less than one week for the Christmas reunion! I’m actually going to take that Friday off, because I have one more free day left at work. I can’t play on Wednesday when it starts, since I’ll be in bed by that time for work on Thursday.

Well, it is December, and now Christmas is rapidly approaching. I really don’t have anything on my wish-list; what I’d like are things which nobody can give.

So this is more of a wish-list for my cat!  Here are a couple of shots of her:

I’m sorry for the grainy quality. Trying to get a cat to pose for a picture is often impossible, so I snapped the shot as soon as I could. That’s an odd shadow behind her one ear. Here’s another one:

This is her sitting with me at the kitchen table. I’m eating lunch, and she’s asking me why I’m not feeding her.

In any event, while I was browsing around the web, I ran into this thing,  Marmalade Pet Sweet Lounge Cat Bed. This looks like a fantastic cat toy. She is not declawed (I do not beleive in declawing cats), so I think she would just go crazy sharping her claws on that corrogated cardboard.