I had a weird couple of evenings that I assume were high luck (Year 2 onward, I only bother checking on recipe days or if there's a fish I want to catch that requires certain weather).
Thursday evening (still Winter Year 2), I crafted a bunch of flooring, some fence posts, a couple tea saplings, a wicked statue, and a couple skull braziers to make the cemetery outside the slime hutch nicer and to make the pier I'd wanted in the camping/recreational island (the one in the upper left corner of the Meadow-lands Farm). I have monsters turned on, so while setting all that up, I end up killing four purple slimes, two shadow brutes, two wilderness golem, an irridium golem, an irridium bat, one or two lava bat, two or three frost bats, and a serpent. Farmer Tim has read the Monster Compendium and I hadn't swapped out his rings after a trip to the secret woods earlier, so he was wearing a lucky ring and the burglar ring. I ended up with 6-8 of all the standard dropped items from those monsters (slime, void essence, bat wings, fiber, etc) plus six irridium ore, four bombs, a dwarf scroll IV, two dwarf scroll III, two white algae, a spicy eel, a strange bun, a diamond, and a prismatic shard.
Friday evening, around 10:00, I realize I haven't checked the big request board for the week, and accept the ectoplasm quest. I was using a lot of my coal stores smoking fish, so I figured I'd kill two birds with stone stone by hitting up the frozen floors in the mines. Every floor had a ghost and I got the ectoplasm by midnight, plus a bunch of coal (mainly form killing dust sprites) and stone, half a dozen cave carrots for some reason, some frozen geodes, five frozen tears, and a blue slime egg. I had previously accepted that quest and never got the ectoplasm, despite killing a couple dozen ghosts during it, so I'm happy to have that done. I just made another dozen mushroom logs (plus I used hardwood fence posts for my pier), so I think I'll need a little more hardwood to build two mini obelisks, but then I can move my fishing cabin up the recreational island (it's currently at the bottom of the map). It's all coming together. Yay.
I also discovered that my farm computer doesn't work in the basement. It's still staying down there in the Batcave, though.