So, Friday I posted about how I didn’t have enough time for everything. Two people posited that I should cut out the FarmVille portion of my life, since it was a) a timesuck and 2) not constructive. One of them, Tom, mentioned that I should pay more attention to my bass guitar. Of course, since he has a wonderful series of on-line lessons for the bass guitar, I kinda knew where he would stand…

The other one, Greybeard, is like an older brother to me, and I value his opinions greatly. (You can hear him on the 2/5/10 episode of The “O” Word from BlogTalkRadio (on the player in the margin)). He seemed to think that Farmville was, in fact, one of the worst ways to spend my time.

Oddly enough, none of the people who are my neighbors on FarmVille had an opinion – I think it’s because they were busy taking care of their farms.

Being an addictive type person (I pick up and obsess over some things – which is why I am a recovering alcoholic, a former three-pack-a-day smoker, and a freed-from-caffeine CocaCola fiend) means that I don’t always see the signs of addiction. An old friend of mine in Oregon mentioned that his wife was afflicted with Farmville – and I joked that he had misspelled addicted. He pointed out that I should know him better than that; he meant what he said.

I have spent some time since I posted that list yesterday thinking about and praying about my fascination with FarmVille. In fact, with all things Facebook-related. While I will stay on Facebook, I won’t be on the Farm much longer. I will be bringing in my current crop, selling off my livestock, and leaving the field plowed so neighbors who visit can get credit for fertilizing the fields. If you don’t know diddly about FarmVille, then that last part won’t make any sense to you – just know that by helping your neighbors, you gain experience points and earn FarmVille coins.

Since I am currently at level 50, and not knowing how far this game goes, I’m going to be leaving it at my peak but probably not the peak of the game itself. I just had to complete a horse barn this morning – that was the final straw. I know I have to stop. I can’t even believe that I’m pouring this out here on my blog. How else would all my “neighbors” know what I was doing?

With the setting aside of this addiction/affliction, comes the need to ask forgiveness. First, and foremost, to my friends that I have lured in to this timesuck – I am very sorry. Please forgive me for dragging you into this. Second, to the ones who are deeply tied into this cyber-reality, and who might be using me as a metric for how well they are doing compared to me, please stop. Don’t compare your farm to mine. I was so obsessed with earning the achievements that I was devastated when they took away the ribbons for the pictures. My entire farm was planted with the eye toward maximizing the profit from every square. I have a spreadsheet – an actual Excel spreadsheet – dedicated to the most profitable animals, trees, and crops. It breaks each item down to how much it will earn me per day – and my farm shows it. Once I earned certain ribbons, I stopped working with whatever I needed to earn those ribbons. Knock On Wood Blue Ribbon? Poof! Sell off all but the most profitable trees (olive trees, in case you are wondering. the pomegranate trees are pretty good too, so I kept them as well). When the Starfruit trees first came out, they were taking four days and generating 100 coins. For some reason, they dropped to 65 coins. I sold them off. When the calves and the bulls started becoming available, I was in hog heaven (so to speak) – they were each worth 80 coins every day – and not even a lot of crops do that well! I was very upset with the latest redesign of Facebook itself – not because of the way it looks now, but because I had grouped everyone into neat little lists, in order to avoid the Live Feed/News Feed issue from the last redesign, and I had a list for FarmVille that I could click on and make sure I wasn’t missing out on any free animals, or eggs, or lost bulls, or found referee cows (again, you have to be there to understand that one…).

So, I’m out. I quit. I’m really going to have a hard time explaining to my wife why HER farm is no longer being taken care of – because I couldn’t get enough of a fix by running my own farm, I had to run hers, also – just so I could spend more time with FarmVille.

Pray for me, will ya? The next few weeks are going to be tough while I wean myself from this cyber-crack.

Chat ya later…

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