Obsessive

I walked for 45 minutes on the treadmill today at the gym (2.5 miles). For me, it's all about boredom. I was watching the Olympic women's marathon, and that was pretty motivating, too. And very emotional -- I just happened to turn it on when they were nearing the end, when the British woman dropped out.

I'm not really normally much for track and field. I care absolutely nothing for tennis; yachting is pretty boring. I really like the swimming events -- I watched that one night last week at the gym. I like diving, although I haven't seen any of that at all this year. I've watched some of the gymnastics, there's been a lot of that on this weekend. There hasn't been a lot that's been terribly riveting, but I always do try to watch quite a bit of it. I think it's important, although I'm not really sure why it's important to me.

I had the television turned on this morning while I was making breakfast, and it was men's tennis. I was listening to the commentators, and they were talking about Venus Williams, I believe it was, and when Bob came downstairs I said I thought there was something wrong about turning on the Olympics and have them talking about Venus Williams. And I said that I was just using her as an example, I have nothing against her personally.

But I always thought that the Olympics was about amateur athletes, and giving them a chance to compete, and shine. To me, it just seems ridiculous to have someone who is obviously a professional athlete compete in the games. I'm hopelessly old fashioned and out of touch, I'm sure. And I know that a lot of the athletes are professional, even if they're not household names. Still, it just seems to take something away from it for me. But I watch it anyway. I think I like the spectacle and the pageantry . . . and the scandal.

Being the obsessive sort that I am, I have, of course, already completely uninstalled The Sims again and re-installed them. My old computer had trouble running the game by the time I had installed all of the expansion packs and the hundreds (if not thousands) of user-created objects and skins that I've downloaded.

And the new computer was having a bit of a problem, too, which is why I uninstalled and reinstalled the first time, and why I didn't install all of the expansion packs. But then I discovered a way to take a large number of objects and compress them into one enormous file which, even though it's huge, is still treated as just one file by the game and is thus loaded faster.

I took all of my objects and organized them into folders, then compressed them, and the game ran so much better and smoother that I thought there wasn't any reason not to have all of the expansion packs installed, and I might as well do it sooner rather than later, so I did.

I don't have any idea how much space it's taking up, but I've got plenty right now, and I'm not worried about it.

I have the Bob and Willa house back, and the Buddhist monastery, the Jedi ranch house and the abandoned nursery and several new houses just waiting for their occupants.

I haven't really played the game itself very much -- I've been searching out all the new sites that have come into being since I stopped playing the game the last time. So, no pictures. Except one, of Sim Willa at her computer.