Farm Town

So, I'm slow posting today because I spent most of the weekend spending time with my Family.

I'm really not a big video game player.  Back when DH and I first met, he was working with a company that developed computer games and I was introduced to several different ones that he worked on.  Computer games were new and novel, and DH was pretty cute, so that was fun.   I played Pong a few times when we visited his parents, and then after we married and later bought our first Atari, we bought a few games too.  Since then we've always had a few computer games around.   When the kids were small we bought a Nintendo 64, so I've played Mario Brothers a time or two, and I've played a few games on our Playstation.  But, the only electronic game to ever really hook me was Farm Town on Facebook.  

So what was it about Farm Town that kept me glued to the computer for hours on end?  (My kids all thought I'd gone crazy!). It was probably the fact that I could create beautiful, gorgeous crops and flowers with just the touch of a button.  I admired other Facebook friends' farms with intricate layouts of different crops and buildings.   It was amazing to see the quilt-like patterns all over their farms, and I tried my hand at a few.  But the real joy of playing Farm Town came when I decided to re-create my childhood home on my Farm Town farm.    I grew up on a dairy farm where our house was separated from my paternal grandparents by our large garden plot and dairy barn.  It was there that I planted my first flower garden and had the chore of helping to plant and harvest the vegetables and pull the weeds.   For me, it was the perfect place to grow up, and I loved re-creating all of the houses, gardens, barns and sheds, streams and fruit trees, and even embellishing them a bit now and then.  Eventually I realized that I was wasting hours and hours of my valuable life on something that was not really tangible, and I plowed up all of my crops and left my virtual flowers to wither.  I left Farm Town behind so I could spend more time with my real family and my real home and my real garden.  

This week I went back to facebook to find my farm, but it wasn't there.  Apparently Farm Town no longer exists on facebook.  I thought I had saved a screen shot of my Farm Town home, but can't find it anywhere to show you, so here is a photo that DD4 recently took of my childhood home.  You'll have to use your imagination to see the Farm Town farm that I created, but I know it's out there somewhere in the Cyber-world.  

My childhood home as it appears today.  The house on the left is my brother's home and did not exist when I was growing up, so it was not included in my Farm Town farm.  The house in the center was my Grandparent's home, and is now rented out.  The barns and sheds in the center are getting old and run down now as the cows have been sold and most of the property is rented to other nearby farmers.  The house on the right is where I grew up and where my dear parents still live.