Tuesday, April 14, 2009

At The Farm

We went to pick berries this morning. At a farm.

"Do I need a passport?" I asked Gloria, being unfamiliar with farming in the actual world. Having spent the last month playing Rune Factory Frontier almost daily with Eli 7.8, though, I have a very good handle on farming in the pretend world.

"Dude, we should ask the lady at the farm if she can tell us where to find the Green Ruins," I said, which is a dungeon in the game. Eli thought that was an excellent idea, but I finally managed to persuade him that it might alarm the woman and cause her to shoot us. Or something.

There's also a very entertaining theme song at the beginning of Rune Factory, and it's entirely in Japanese. Eli's learned to mimic the accents perfectly, and when the hero starts running through an orchard (with exaggerated arm motions), Eli gets up and starts doing it, too, which is incredibly goofy and totally funny. He did it in the real fields today. Mr. Bean and Benny Hill would have been proud.

One of Eli's friends went with us. She's in Eli's class and she's one of his best friends. You might expect that two kids together (who get along well) would have 2X the energy, but that is incorrect. Child math is different. In this case, the energy is given an exponential increase and is actually unmeasurable.

We picked about 12 pounds of strawberries, and everyone was perfectly behaved--even Gloria, which was somewhat of a suprise (she's going to kill me for that). We also petted a few baby goats and even a baby donkey. In my limited experience with any real animals besides a cat, donkeys are incredibly sweet and gently tempered.

Okay, I've only seen three, but they were all aces.

My favorite lines of the day:
--Eli's friend loves horses, and whenever we saw a horse as we drove out to the farm, we'd point it out.

"There's a horse!" I said.

"Awesome!" she said.

"Sweeeeeet!" Eli said.

"Did you actually see him?" she asked.

"Um, no," Eli said.

--Here's an example of the kind of scenery 7.8 year old boys find particularly noteworthy: "Hey! There's a porta-potty!"

--And here's an example of the kinds of questions that came up: "Do lobsters have butts?"

We also saw a sign in the country that said "PICKNICK TABLES $80." Spelling, obviously, not included.

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