Monthly Archives: December 2011

I am concerned that sharing the following may be irresponsible.  If this causes you to lose the same number of life hours that I have, then I will be definitely be ashamed-slash-delighted.  But I’ve spent 83% of my eleven day staycation playing Tiny Tower.  How could I not write about it?  It’s become meaningful and important in my life.

Tiny Tower is a sim game, a sort of game I am not generally wont to explore.  In fact, I’m not much for video or computer games at all.  Not counting that stint with Dark Age of Camelot.  But I’m not counting that.  Seriously.  Let us never speak of it again.

Right.  Tiny Tower?  You build a tower of stores and apartments.  Little people buy stuff, you earn money, you buy more floors.  People with varying aptitudes for doing stuff move into the apartments and you employ them in your stores so they can keep the store stocked with roasted duck or a 2 player game of mini golf.

It takes about 5 minutes to earn enough money to build a new floor in the beginning.  It’s all very exciting.  Yay!  I got a new candle store!
But as the tower gets higher and higher, it takes progressively longer to earn the money to build a new floor and the new floors take longer to construct.

The little people have dream jobs.  If you have the kind of business that is his or her dream job, then you get all sorts of little bonuses.  And this is the part that I think really drives a lot of the addiction.  If you can just build one more floor of apartments, maybe *those* new people who move in will be dreaming of the jobs that you already have in your tower.  Or your next new retail floor will be the bank that two of your little guys have been waiting for.  But no.  It’s a recycling center instead.

While you’re saving up your funds to buy the next floor, and waiting current construction to complete, you spend most of your time ferrying little people up the tower in an elevator.  Someone arrives, demands to be taken to floor 27 and you hold the up button until they get there.  It’s thrilling.  Sometimes they even tip you.  And then you’re all “I’m 1/5oth of the way closer to having 1/3 of the money I will need to buy another floor that will be completed some time tomorrow!”

And so I continue.  Peddling my wares, building new floors, acquiring new tentants.  Holding out hope that my next floor will be the tutoring center that will fulfill all of Kent Neal’s career goals.

Some very wonderful friends have just moved away.

I wanted to do something to say just how sad I am that we won’t be neighbors anymore, how much I will miss them, and how much I’ve appreciated having them around.  What with all this holiday business, my floodgates of spend are wi-i-ide open and in fine form; I figured that I’d find something great to buy them.  But instead, I had a wonderful idea that I think I like better than any of the Christmas gifts I’ve gathered.

Rather than telling them how about how sad I feel and how that sadness equates to love, I clevered up a plan to tell them about how much fun they’ll have exploring a new home.

I polled some friends on Facebook to get opinions, did some scouring of Yelp, and started buying gift certificates for places that they might like to check out in their new town.  I go two for yarn stores, two for rock climbing gyms, a book store, a movie theater, a coffee shop and a mobile food truck.  All local, independent places – so I largely had to make calls and talk to people on the phone (dislike!) to get them, but I really love the idea of taking part in helping them get out there and get to know about neat places in the area.

After a particularly creative flurry, I also drew my own card!  Drawing is a thing I do largely never.  Although my mother would probably disagree and reference this series of dad cartoons I created in 1987.
Anyway.  I drew a card!

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty sure that you could probably tell what this is… right?

It’s a dinosaur exploring his new cave!

So now I am full of that hooray feeling of happy that comes from good gifting.