Camouflaged

It's been a very quiet, relaxing weekend. I ran some errands on Saturday and was out most of the day, but I didn't leave the house yesterday except to ride along with Bob when he went to pick up Chinese carryout, and I can't think of any reason I need to today, either.

Partly it's because I haven't been feeling completely well--I'm a little dizzy and subsequently nauseated, which I assume is some kind of inner ear thing or the beginnings of a cold--but if I'd had anything that I actually needed to do, I'd go out. I may go out later today, it's only 11:15, but there's certainly nothing pressing. Bob's on his way home bearing lunch, and I have a TON of computer work to do, so I imagine I'll just stay home.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time reading, I did some knitting, and I played with The Sims again.

It's been several months. A few months ago I had to wipe everything out and start over. I'd installed one of the expansion packs--"House Party"--and it seemed to overload the system. Honestly, it probably wasn't so much that as the fact that I had thousands of downloaded items, but whatever the reason, everything slowed down to a crawl, I was getting a lot of errors and crashes, and there didn't seem to be any way of fixing it short of starting over.

I lost all of my families, of course, and all of my lovingly decorated houses, but I wasn't too sad about it--the fun part is decorating the houses, and creating the families, and I figured I'd just do it all over again.

But once I actually started doing that, it seemed like such a huge undertaking that I never got back into it. But then I saw that the Mac version of "The Sims Vacation" was out, and I'd been waiting for that. There's a Vacation Island, and your Sims can go on vacation to a ski resort, or a campground, or a beach, and that sounded like a lot of fun. So I went out and bought it on Saturday, and then I spent Saturday night downloading new furniture and new skins and new houses . . .

Since I've been away, most of the extensive download sites have become pay sites. Not that I blame them, they might as well try to get some money for their creations, and they're not charging a lot, mostly around $5.00 for a 30 day subscription, but it surprised me. It made me feel like I'd been away a long time. Of course, yeah, a few months in real time must be years in Sims time . . .

So anyway, I created a new Jedi family, and moved them into a house last night and furnished it, and I downloaded some Egyptian people (and a mummy!), and made a new Buddhist Monk family -- Oh! This was interesting--I just imported the old Buddhist temple, and I guess even though the old family is gone, the things that have happened in the house remain, because one of the monks, who hadn't even been in existence when the old family lived there, immediately went out into the yard and started crying and moaning over the ashes of the old monks who had died there. Kind of spooky.

Kind of cool, of course, too, but I didn't really want to have to deal with all that sorrow, so I bulldozed the old temple and downloaded a new, fresh one without all the emotional baggage.

I really don't have time for this, I suppose. It sucks so much time. And to no real purpose, but it is fun. Pictures anon.

Hunting season started this weekend. Dove season. I really do hate the fact that Bob hunts, but I live with it because I love him. It makes me unhappy to think about it, and when people ask me about it, I usually say that he likes it more because of the camaraderie with his friends, the tramping around in the woods, the outdoors, etc., rather than the killing, but I guess he probably really does like the killing, too. I try not to think about it too much, and we don't really talk about it.

When he came home yesterday he picked Pye up, and I was struck by how she kind of disappeared into the pattern of his camo clothing, and I picked up the camera and asked to take a picture. Later I found her curled up on his discarded shirt lying on the stairs. Camouflaged.