I’m coming up on my 7th blog anniversary at the end of this month. Although, I have not been a very good blogger these last couple of years. I feel like my blog had a heyday and it was a few years ago, that’s for sure. The last few posts were either about the weather, the sims or WoW, and that made me kind of sad.
Maybe I’m tired of blogging. Maybe I’m tired of blogging the same old way I used to. I don’t know. My blog has always been about my life and what I am doing. The fact is, I’m not doing anything. Somehow the the hours pass, the days go by and most days are exactly like the ones before it.
That might be the crux of it. Maybe I don’t want documented my failing to make something more significant out of my forced early temporary retirement. I suppose I’m a bit embarrassed that I have not written a book, become fluent in French and learned all the nooks and crannies and secrets Vancouver has to offer. Nobody really wants to broadcast the fact that they are not living up to their potential.
I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. Maybe the way I blog has to change. I’ve thought about stopping entirely. But that is not what I want. I want to love it again. I want it to be fresh. My blog and I are just not as intimate as we used to be. I want to fall in love all over again. And other clichés.
I believe I am going to blame all this on Evildeb, for not moving to Canada with me.
The Sims 3 is a different paradigm from the Sims 2. (-5 points from me for using a word so highly regarded in corporate buzzspeak.) Sims 2 was all about the neighborhood. Create as many families as you want, they will wait for you while you play in another household. I spent 4 years creating a custom neighborhood with multiple families and generations.
With the Sims 3, the world is open and dynamic. If you so choose, everyone in the neighborhood changes, evolves and ages right along with you, as you play your default household. You can add as many custom characters as you want, but idea seems to be that you focus on one household. And maybe because of that, you now can create separate “games.” Each game is a different world, unrelated to the other world.
I’ve had several issues with the game. Guitar boy, aforementioned crashes and an inability to update my game despite the fact I had installed no mods. (the forum kept telling me to uninstall my mods and then update.) What I did was deleted everything and reinstall. This meant I lost my family, which included guitar boy, but I was ok with that because something crazy happened to the triplets. Three girls, triplets, and when they aged from teenager to young adult, their faces stretched and they looked like a characture drawing of Dick Van Dyke.
It was unsettling to look at. I guess I like my sims pretty. So I created Poppy, a green thumbed natural cook and workaholic. This was the sim I was working with, collecting screen shots to tell you stories, she was going to be a Executive Chef, and was actually only two levels away from it, when the sims went BOOM. Again.
The Stepdot is visiting, and I set her up to play the sims yesterday. Once again, it is unusually hot here and the game crashed several times. She lost her household during one of those crashes, and when she went to save the new one, it gave her save over prompt/warning. I told her to go ahead, because I thought it was going to save over her last crashed game. But no. Apparently it was going to save over ALL GAMES.
No more Poppy.
I think the computer (a closed MacBook Pro hooked up to cinema display) was overheating again. Once she was playing without the cinema display, she quit crashing. Today I bought a desk fan to blow on my computer.
I hate summer. Maybe hate is too strong a word. I will tell you this, I like summer more when I have air conditioning. However, for the last 21 years I have lived in a part of the world that just does not commonly put air conditioning in homes. Because it just doesn’t get “that hot” that often.
Bullshit I say!
I don’t do well with heat. And it’s sunny and hot today. It was sunny and hot yesterday. It’s going to be sunny and hot for days. Other places in the country(ies) might not consider 80 that hot*. But they have air conditioning in their homes. I’d fork over the few hundreds to get a portable a/c unit, but we are kind of poor right now. And I just spent nearly a thousand dollars on having more teeth removed from Pru’s gum diseased mouth. (get your pet’s teeth cleaned. trust me, it’s cheaper in the long run.)
Other people might consider today to be a beautiful day. While they marvel over the appearance of the sun here in the PacNoWest, they seem to be completely unaware that the sun IS TRYING TO GIVE THEM CANCER!!
I’m the only one who understands. The sun is trying to kill us.
*I bet they consider 80 degrees to be hot in Canada because they use Celsius and 80 degrees C must be a BILLION degrees F.
A couple of days ago, I came out of my Sims 3 stupor. I felt like I had been on a bender. (Only without the tasty beer – Wil) My new and fragile house keeping regime had fallen to pieces. I quit cooking dinner. Or willingly shopping for food. The house was getting sloppy again. Who cares if my dishes are done, it’s my sims dishes that are important! You should have seen my laundry hamper. It was overflowing everywhere.
But I expected this, really. I knew it would be like that for at least two weeks. I am getting a grasp on my own life again. Actually, for the past several days, I’ve been reading a great deal. So… that’s good.
When I found out that EA was releasing the Sims 3 as a Mac/Win hybrid DVD, I was thrilled. Aspyr seemed to have pretty much abandon the Sims 2, we don’t even have the last few expansion packs. Bastards. I was tried of seeing things I could not have because our game was translated and released by a seperate company.
That’s to say the Mac releases did not have it’s issues, this time around. I hate to say this, because I was/am so grateful to EA for finally getting on board with the Mac players, but the first few days were full of frustrations for me. I have had a handful of crashes. One major crash that resulted in the complete loss of all my families. I still had downloaded material. And I had the beginning versions of those particular sims, but the households I had been building were gone. Which pissed me off because Posey and Simon were due to have their first baby.
Extremely sluggish performance forced me to play using my laptop display, rather than the monitor I normally have connected to it. (I only use one display at a time so it’s not a dual monitor situation.) The sound would disappear after a few moments of game play when i was using my soundstick USB speakers. It was fine when using my headophones.
Miraculously, the sound issues has disappeared. And the performance issues when using my monitor improved, they aren’t great, the sims still stop and take long pauses between actions, but not like before. The only things that has changed since it wasn’t working is it is no longer 88 some odd degrees in our easy bake apartment. As near as I can figure, maybe my laptop was overheating? It is a very system intensive game. I turn every single application off before playing.
All in all, it’s a great deal of fun to play. And I will discuss some of my characters in depth later, for Fee. Who loves the Sim stories. However, I would like to leave you with one other bug. I gave my Sim, Clive, a guitar to play. It is now permanently attached to his body. No matter what I do, change clothes, take a shower, go to bed, workout, that guitar is stuck to his body. And it leads to some very interesting stylistic choices when he actually plays the guitar.
In case you are reading this in an RSS feed… I put up a new blog design. It still needs lots of tweaking. But I’m pleased not to have a generic, non-jodiferous, template up. I basically stole the banner from my old booklist page and changed it up a bit. Added Momo. It’s not the only banner I designed over the last few months, but oddly, it was the first. I was completely sold on another idea, but then I took a good look at both of them together, and I just decided this on was more me.
Couple of things, I created tabs along the top. And pages for the blogroll and Monthly Archives and Category Archives. After nearly 7 years of blogging, a list of monthly archives can get quite cumbersome. Trying to clean up the sidebar a bit. I’ve also added my Goodreads book list info, but I’ve been pretty negligent about adding my books to it. I resolve to do better.
I got it. I’m playing it. I love it. But I’m having some unfortunate performance issues which are a bit of a joy suck.
Well…. I DID buy a brand new computer for the release of sims 2. Just sayin.
And in completely adorable news, Wil has started playing the Sims 2.
Oh god, you guys. My hunter is level 79 and 3.5 bubbles. That means I am 16.5 bubbles away from 80, the level cap. Also, she is no longer Tangwen, but Tangwen the Explorer. Since I have explored every inch of the world of World of Warcraft, I have a title. I would not quit until I got my ability to fly in Northrend (lvl 77) and finished exploring the world to get my title. And a special tabard.
And, oh yeah, I can MAKE FLYING CARPETS, bitches! This is not a super fast one, I have to save up 5,000 gold to get the ability to fly super fast.
So, maybe you are asking yourselves, what are you going to do, Jodi, when you reach 80, and have saved up 5,000 gold and can fly super fast? Doesn’t matter, because the Sims 3 comes out in a week and I’ll have a whole new obsession. I cannot wait I cannot wait I cannot wait!
I write blog posts in my head CONSTANTLY. You wouldn’t know that by reading my blog lately. There is a big difference between lying in bed and composing entries and actually typing them out, however.
So many things I “write” nowadays need to be prefaced by a certain fact. I’ve tried several times to sit down and actually compose a for reals post about it, but never actually completed anything I liked. As time went on, the need to share all the little details became less important. And now, at this point, I just want to post something about it, so I can move on and talk about all the other things in my life that are affected by it.
So, here it is. Last year my depression came back. That’s why I disappeared over the winter. And spring. I tried to deal with it without medication. I failed. I finally decided to go back on meds, a new one, in February. I fell better now.
Last week, we kept getting phone calls from “Private Caller”, with no number displayed. They were very persistent. Both Wil and I are … hesitant to answer the phone when we don’t know who it is. I have had too many years of scary bad credit. And both of us too much time spent doing phone technical support to ever trust that any phone call is not going to come with a time consuming request. Plus, we were busy. Playing World of Warcraft.
After the 10th call that day, I answered the phone. Recently, I had been victim to Roger’s willingness to give out my home number to one of the “authorized” retail partners. They called and called and called. We ignored them. (I would pick up the phone and say “Hello-two-three” and hang up. A trick I learned dealing with afore mentioned horrible credit. If you don’t answer in 3 seconds, chances are I don’t want to talk to you. ) Finally requested to be removed from these lists. So when a woman I didn’t know asked for me, some kind of paranoid instinct kicked in and I said I wasn’t home. I don’t know why. I tried to take a message, and that’s when she said she was calling from the CIC. Canadian Immigration.
I freaked out. What was I supposed to do now? Backtrack and admit I lied and that I was home. Explain to her about the near harassment level of sales pitches we’ve been getting because of our wireless contracts? Hope she thought it was funny. I couldn’t admit to Immigration that I had lied to them, even in such a benign manner, and it was totally innocent and benign, albeit extremely paranoid! So I carried on. She said she would call Jodi’s representative, I said I would tell Jodi they called and hung up. Then I ran in to the room and woke Wil up from his nap to tell him that I LIED TO IMMIGRATION and that was going to hell and no way were they gonna let a liar in to the country. Because lies are the first step to terrorism, right?
Turns out my lawyer had made a few mistakes on the form and they just needed some corrections. But it means they are, at last, processing my application.
