Wednesday April 24

AM: 51 Bells
PM: 99 Bells

Yesterday I went on a fish and bug hunting spree. I needed a spider and a snail to complete my April bug collection. It was raining, so I hunted around for snails. They don’t seem to be as common as they were in City Folk. And they hang around on wet bushes.

Spiders are found in trees just like previous games. I shook a fair amount and ran screaming from bees. Finally I found one. Blathers was overjoyed (note sarcasm) when I turned in my bugs.

Next I decided to hunt for fish. I needed a couple of tiny river fish: a neon tetra and a pop-eyed goldfish. They’re only available from 9am to 4pm so I set out and snagged all the tiny shadows I could find. I eventually got them both.

I also needed a メダカ—which is a killifish it seems. Lillian asked me to get her one the day before, but I had no idea what fish she was talking about. They can be fished out of the ponds.

Gulliver!

Yay! I love finding this stranded seagull and yelling in his ear with the megaphone.

After he regained his hearing I set about helping him figure out where he was going with the following clues:

My choices were:

• Cambodia
• India
• Vietnam
• Thailand

He had me at Vietnam with the pho. There are pho joints all over where I live. They are usually cleverly titled “New Pho #1” and “Pho Queen”. I eagerly awaited my reward. I wondered if it would be pho?

Another one snuck away

As I was making my rounds I noticed a peculiar barren patch of land where there was a house the day before. I was shocked and saddened to realize it was Hakase’s house that had disappeared. I had grown to love zombie pig. Why couldn’t it have been Iris!??! I went home and checked my mail. It’s been dinging for days and I’ve just been ignoring it. I had two letters from Hakase. The last one had his picture in it.

More fish

I only needed two more critters to complete April. One of them I didn’t find, the オオイワナ (Ouiwana). I’m not sure what its English name is. I do know that it can be obtained at waterfalls after 4pm. But I’m not sure if you can get it from both waterfalls (the originating and the one that lets out at the sea) or just a specific one. The originating one is really hard to fish into, so I’m hoping it’s at the latter one. I’ll try again today for it.

The other fish I needed was the giant red crab. You have to dive to get him. I eventually fished him out and then went to see him in the aquarium. It looks just like the ones I saw in Osaka! I love going to aquariums and seeing all of the fish in Animal Crossing.

Thursday April 25

AM: 62 Bells
PM: 54 Bells

Gulliver’s reward for correctly getting him to Vietnam: an asian hat. I feel kinda racist wearing it.

I had no special visitors today, but I did have a camper: Lucky. OMG I love Lucky. I think I told him to move in. But when I get excited my ability to perceive Japanese goes down the toilet, so I may have told him to get lost. I hope not. Regardless, we played a couple games. I didn’t do so well at the games. I ended up shelling out money for a European wallpaper and a kayak.

I used my trusty silver axe and chopped down a tree by Iris’ house and got a heart stump. Now I just want to chop everything down to collect the different patterns. I’m trying not to…

The Nook brothers took pity on my visitor-less town and featured a #1 lamp today. I bought it.

I went up to Gracie Grace to blow a little bit of my hard-earned island fish money and to my shock and horror Ida (the poison frog, a previous resident) was shopping up there. We chatted a little. I pretended to be excited to see her. Then I bought a princess chair (it was all I could afford) and fled.

As you may imagine I went on a magazine buying spree in Japan. It was so novel to be able to buy current editions of the magazines instead of being a month or two behind. I was also able to find some that I’d only seen in ads in other magazines that I buy that my Kinokuniya doesn’t carry. Specifically: ぴこぷり (Pikopuri). It’s a girly magazine and seems mostly to feature fashion games, but it had a bonus book that was Animal Crossing related so I picked it up. It’s pretty awesome and contains a whole bunch of designs. Apparently users sent in drawings of outfits and they did their best to create the outfit as a custom design in Animal Crossing. They even listed the accessories and shoes they used for the whole outfit. Below is a shot of one of the dresses. I’m not wearing the outfit as pictured in the magazine because that smacks of effort, but it’s pretty cute regardless.

In addition to the pro dress designs, they had 4 cutout designs and several regular designs. I installed this cute cutout:

Kaizo’s Corner

I decided to give Kaizo a little work. I remade the puzzle game. You can remake it using your own designs, but I opted to take his recommendation and turn it into a star.