ITEM. We have a new human in town. His name is NESJoe and his responsiblity is to create the best NES arcade in town. In truth, NESJoe is a soulless automaton manipulated by yours truly, which allows me the dual purpose of finding out what the animals think of me and building a bitchin' NES arcade. Since I am covering NESJoe's debt to Nook out of my own vast bank account, I estimate that there will be a second lifesize statue by the train station within a few weeks.

ITEM. Groundhog Day completely sucked. I had heard that festivities began at 7am for the big ceremony at 9am (thank you, Nintendo Power Strategy Guide)... but in fact the ceremony was held at 8am. I showed up at the Wishing Well at 8:45am, and all I saw was the post-Groundhog afterglow.

ITEM. The winter Igloo experience was like pissing your pants. At first it's allw arm and great, but it soon reaches a saturation point where it just isn't fun anymore. After about two weeks of daily rimming from the villagers insane Igloo guessing games, we spent more time banging on the Igloo exterior with our golden shovels than actually going inside. We were extremely happy to see the Igloos disappear along with the rest of the snow.

ITEM. One winter trick we did master was building a snowman. Initially, it is a daunting quest: combine two snowballs from opposite ends of the map, crossing a terrain full of rivers, cliffs and questionable pathfinding subroutines, and get both balls in just the right size ratio so the resultant snowman instantly develops a healthy self-image. But once you get a handle on the size thing, it turned out to be not so bad. The reward for perfectly cut snowmen is random pieces of the snowman furniture series, of which we managed to collect eight unique items.

I also celebrated my birthday in February, receiving Donkey Kong from Olivia (I already had it), a birthday cake from Mom, and several thoughtless, common gifts from other villagers. And that was winter in Adamsvil.