Farm Hard, Farm Strong

In hopes of winning the F A R M   W A R S contest against Cathy Perry, I was farming pretty hard the other day.  I hadn't felt much like playing fv2 over the holidays, but Zynga's recent announcement of new levels, coupled with Cathy's challenging challenge got my farmer blood flowing again!  So back to the farm was I, raking and hoeing, planting and watering, fertilizing and harvesting away like a madman on a mission.

My half-hearted hiatus over the holidays had left me with a huge backlog of neighbor visits.  Friendly and helpful neighbors were lined up for miles and miles just hankering to do all my dirty work; everything from slopping the hogs, to pointlessly wasting visit energy by clicking on random items of decoration, to watering the trees and raiding my wells.  There were so many of these well-intentioned and benevolent souls in fact that it took me until 3am to get through them all.

Fully exhausted after such a long day on the farm manipulating others to do my bidding, I finally lay my head down to rest and thought to myself, "Choo-dog, (I call myself that sometimes) you farmed HARD today!  Hard and STRONG!"  "This is what farming is all about," I thought.  "A hard day's work of making other people toil in my fields."

Then I started thinking about, "What if Hollywood made a movie about my life?  What would it look like?"  Not so much the movie itself, but the movie poster, that is.  And this is what my fertile mind conjured:

 

It's a pretty good likeness, I think.  I wanted to change the gun to a fertilizer rake, but I got lazy and just put a strawberry on top. "Everything's better with strawberries on top," I figured.  Plus I had more farming to do, so no time for fancy graphics.  

The original poster can be seen here, in the event you are too young to remember when this movie originally came out, in which case I hate you, you young whipper-snapper.  Get off my lawn!

So back I went to my farm the next day to farm harder, and I thought to myself, "Wow I sure could use some more fertilizer, how can I get monies for this?" 

Then I remembered Lance Armstrong's nonprofit organization, Livestrong, and those silicone wristbands that were everywhere for awhile.  I thought, "What if I make a Farm Strong wristband of my own that I could sell to generate fertilizer revenues?"

So I went online and found a site where I could design and purchase my own custom silicone wristbands!  Here is what I came up with:

The site was pretty neat, as it let me choose a motto for front (Farm Strong), and back (Team Choo), along with clip art to add to my wristband.  I chose a cow, a horse, a strawberry and a pear, because to me, these are symbols of farming.  The cow represents milk and yogurt, the horse gives me fertilizer, the strawberries give me prized crops and the pears give me prized tree fruits.  My Farm Strong silicone wristbands would perfectly symbolize the full circle of farm life!

I was so excited as I placed the order and input my credit card numbers.  It cost me around $310 for an order of 1,000 of these babies.  "A solid investment," I thought, while calculating my ROI in the four-to-five-figure range, depending on how much I ended up deciding to charge for them.  

Here I am thinking, "I'm f'in ta get paid in mad stacks of fertilizers, yo!"

What I didn't anticipate is that no one would be interested in buying any.

As it turns out, no one cares about Team Choo or farming strong, or wristbands, cows, horses, strawberries or pears, for that matter.  In fact, one person who shall remain nameless even accused me of cheating by attempting to use the proceeds of my wristband sales to gain an unfair advantage over my competitor!

So now, since I cannot in good conscience sell these things in the wake of accusations of malfeasance, and since even if I could, nobody wants to buy them, I am stuck with 1,000 worthless Farm Strong/Team Choo silicone wristbands.

But I'm still farming strong, and farming hard.