Hey, it's me again--Juju! Today I want to talk about a HUGE problem in the town where I lived, and show some pictures that I took. It took a few weeks to really notice what was happening, but when we did notice, it was awful! I have pretty good memories of the first day I came to Rosetown. The date was November 16, 2008, and the town looked pretty gross because all the grass had that icky color all our town grass has in November (I like to call that color urple because it looks like someone tried for purple but got sick on the way--seriously,

it's a terrible color and I've heard that other realities don't look anything like that in autumn) but I knew that in a few months spring would come and everything would be green and beautiful again so I only needed to make it through a few weeks of 'urple, then go through the winter and I'd be home free! I ended up buying a little house set back a ways from the beach because it had really nice grass and I wanted to have a really pretty yard with green grass and flowers planted by spring time, so the spot was perfect! I wasn't the only little person who lived in Rosetown--oh no, Twoflour and Blue moved in too. We were having a great time hunting fossils, fishing, looking for bugs (Twoflour even caught a bee for the museum!), checking out what Nook and the Able Sisters had in stock, playing hide and seek with our neighbors, shooting balloons out of the sky--you know, all that fun stuff we should be doing every day (after all, my life is all about fun, right?)! We were planting fruit trees and flowers around our town and trying to make it look really pretty! I planted a lot of fruit trees right next to Nook's store so I could pick them and have just a short walk before selling them and I was making really good money from them, too. Then the snow started falling and we could build snowmen! There was always something to do in our town! We got to chase Franklin and Jingle all over town getting goodies from them over the holidays and my room even got featured with the HRA after I put in the stuff I got from Franklin! Oh, it was great fun--just the three of us and our little animal neighbors living happily in Rosetown! During the first few days in Rosetown, we all noticed that some of our grass looked like it was dying. The path we took to Nook's was getting awfully bare. We didn't mind so much, though, because that was a path we took a lot so we didn't see anything wrong with grass dying where we walked on it all the time. But then one day I noticed that ALL the snow all the way around my house was just completely gone! My hopes of having a beautiful yard by spring were totally crushed! As I walked around town that day looking for fossils and gyroids (it had snowed the day before), I took a closer look at things and saw that it wasn't just by my house. The snow around Blue's house was completely gone and so was the grass near Twoflour's house! All the snow near Nook's store had disappeared too and all the ground around my orchard trees was a muddy mess and I had only walked there on the days I picked the fruit, which was only every three days. These weren't the only spots without snow, either. Twoflour had been building snowmen so he could get the snowman furniture, and everywhere he had been building them, the snow was vanishing. The area near our beach had once been snowy and beautiful. It now looked like a desert with palm trees. Everywhere in Rosetown we were walking even only every three days looked like a huge mud pit. Not only did it look awful, but the snow was going away so fast we had to roll the snowballs even farther to make snowmen, which ended up causing our snow to go away just that much faster. All three of us got so depressed that neither Twoflour, Blue nor I even wanted to come out of our houses because we would have to look at the ugly mess that our beautiful little town had become. Twoflour, Blue and I had a town council meeting to see if we could think of something to do to help our town. We decided to put pathways in Rosetown and have everyone walk only on those paths. We would only dig fossils and gyroids and pull weeds we could see from the paths and see if that would help. I made contact with another world and someone told me that if I planted flowers and trees it would help our snow to come back, so we started planting little flower gardens with the seeds we could buy from Nook. After a few days we could see a tiny dot of snow coming back but the flowers had to be watered, and when I stepped over to water the flowers, all the snow that had come back instantly melted! Where the trees were growing, snow was coming back directly around their trunks, but none was gathering between the trees! I am thinking I could have chopped down those trees and plant more trees in the spots where there was no snow, but there was one little problem with that. I needed money to buy axes, and needed the trees to plant, and Nook only sells three per day, and at least one of those is usually a spruce tree which will only grow in the top two rows of acres, or I could plant 100 bells to make a tree, or I could gather fruit and plant it to make more trees. In order to harvest fruit to plant, I needed to walk somewhere and damage more snow. In order to earn the bells to buy axes or plant for trees, I needed to walk somewhere and damage more snow. It was hopeless! Every morning for several days I got up and came outside and took a slow walk, only along the pathways around the town doing whatever chores I could along the way. I stopped harvesting fruit. We all stopped fishing. We stopped chasing down balloons. We started telling our neighbors we couldn't play hide and seek with them because our games were causing the snow to go away. Take it from me, upsetting a grouchy wolf by telling him you won't play hide and seek with him is a bad idea! Many days I just walked outside my house and stood there fearful of moving at all, because I knew that any step I took was only going to make our town worse than it already was. Finally, all three of us were so depressed we couldn't even bear coming out of our houses for almost two weeks. When finally I did work up the courage to go on another walk along the pathways around town I noticed that there were tiny bits of snow coming back in spots so I thought maybe things were going to start looking better. I even decided to shake a tree for the 100 bells it would hold (it's the only regular tree in that acre, so I know every day it will have 100 bells) so without leaving the path I shook the tree and the money dropped. I was so excited because this meant I could plant another tree! Then I stepped over to pick up the money and what do you suppose happened? All of the snow that had come back in that spot vanished right before my eyes! I wanted to just sit down right there and have a good cry! I could see that no matter what I did, it wasn't going to work! I decided then and there, the only hope of ever having snow or grass in our town again would be to try to prevent the damage from the very beginning, so we had another town council meeting and decided to move to another town. This would take me a lot of work, but what choices did we have? We could either stay in a town that looked like it had suffered from nuclear fall-out, or start fresh and try to preserve as much as we possibly could, so the decision was made to move. As I write this, Twoflour, Blue and I are now living in Calico, a town where we still have a lot of snow. Even so, every day I am watching its very noticeable disappearance. We are trying to be really careful to save as much of it as possible so we can have a beautiful town when spring arrives in a few weeks, but in truth, we still aren't having as much fun as we should be. Instead of each one of us being able to come out and play every day and run all over town having a great time like we should be having, only one of us little people gets to do anything at all that is in any area off the pathways like looking for fossils or harvesting fruit. To save as much of the snow as we can, Blue even ended up making a snowman smack dab in the middle of where we're supposed to walk instead of putting it someplace sensible! Not a one of us ever dares to run outside in Calico. The only running we can do is inside the museum, which seems very impolite to me. We should be running outside. Blathers does a fine job and doesn't deserve that kind of disrespect! If our town gets a special visitor, like Wendell or Saharah, it's practically impossible to fill their requests because to do that we have to walk over many parts of our town that aren't on the pathways. If one of us has a guest visit our town, we all tip-toe along as slowly as possible so we don't cause damage. When friends come over to play, we should be able to do just that, but instead we are forced to either tiptoe or stand in front of the town gate and chat. It was during the time of getting ready to move to the new town that I ran some controlled tests in a couple of spots in Rosetown. The pictures (click on those links below) will explain exactly what I did, and why this Animal Tracks feature is a good idea, but an idea that went terribly wrong. Animal Tracks--DO NOT WANT!