Gardenia Completes the GAC Challenge! (Days 44-45)

Gardenia slept for only a few hours Monday morning--she was too excited about being so close to finishing the Gardener/Angler/Cook Challenge.

Restless, she got out of bed and checked her mail. She was puzzled to find a certificate from a cooking group congratulating her on "knowing all recipes".

A quick check of her skill journal confirmed Gardenia's suspicion that she did not in fact know all recipes--she knew only 93% of them.

"Perhaps by 'all recipes' the cooking people are referring to only those recipes that I've acquired just by increasing my Cooking skill, and not also to the recipes that I have to buy from the bookstore?"

Confused, she returned to bed.

She got up again after several hours, and spent quite a bit of time tending her garden.

"I sure do have a lot of dead Death Fruit plants lately!"

She harvested 3 more money bags, which she sold for $989.

She took a long nap in the late afternoon, so that she would have enough energy to read the last couple of recipes she needed to learn.

On her way to the library, she stopped by the 4 businesses in which she was a partner. She was thrilled to find out that the investment she had made in the theater just the day before had already netted her profits of $3,000!

This, added to her profits from the bookstore,

the grocery,

and the bistro,

together with the $2,199 she got from selling her remaining fish and produce (Gardenia was so certain that she was about to complete the GAC Challenge that she sold everything left in her inventory except for the one Flame Fruit that she carried around to improve her mood),

brought her Household Funds up to $14,928 by early Tuesday morning.

In a very good mood, she went back to the bookstore to purchase the last 2 recipes she needed.

Before 4:00 a.m., she had learned how to make Baked Angel Food Cake,

but she thought she should attend to some of her low needs before tackling the final, difficult recipe--Ambrosia.

Since she had sold all her produce, she had to eat fruit off the trees in Central Park for nourishment.

She showered and used the toilet at the gym before resuming her reading.

Mid-morning Tuesday, she had to take another break for nourishment.

At 10:57 a.m. on Tuesday--Day 45--Gardenia learned the recipe for Ambrosia, and so completed both the "Menu Maven" challenge and the Gardener/Angler/Cook Challenge!

Her score follows:

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Because the Deadline is flexible, Gardenia could have continued playing, but the game crashed and all her files on my hard drive were instantly deleted (both her active file and her backup file). Since I was visiting my Dad at the time, and he doesn't have internet access, and my most recent Carbonite back up was from 2 days prior--which was more than a week in Gardenia time--her progress was just too painful to redo. (I still have that 2-day-old version, so I may catch her up at some point.)

Too bad, because Gardenia--the enthusiastic hard-worker that she is--would probably have scouted around with her Collection Helper, making money hand over fist, till she owned every business in town. She's competitive, and certainly would have liked to break 100,000 with her score.

Things Gardenia sorely regrets not having done: She didn't finish the Omni Plant Challenge. She never found a Life Fruit seed, so didn't have that plant. She wanted to make enough money to buy the beautiful beach house overlooking Sunnyside Strand. She wanted to adopt a baby girl and raise her into a fine gardener, and leave her a comfortable lifestyle.

You, dear readers, may have noticed the "Deadline-While-Elder" entry from the spreadsheet above. That's because, since Gardenia completed the goals on Day 45, she's technically an elder (which happens on Day 42 with the Normal lifespan that's required by the GAC Challenge). Because of a (-nother) glitch in my game, Gardenia didn't age from Young Adult to Adult till Day 24 (instead of Day 21). So--Gardenia being the honest person she is--she didn't try to claim that she had achieved the Goals while still an Adult.

I would love to hear everyone's ideas on scoring and strategy, either by comments here or in the S3 Yahoo group.

Thanks for reading,

Veil