Just like real life

I haven't played The Sims for a long time. I keep thinking I will, but I've been too busy with too many other things. One night last week I thought I'd play for a little while, but the game crashed while it was loading, and I restarted and tried it a couple of times, and it never would start. The only thing I could think of that was different since the last time I played it was that I had upgraded the OS, and although all the literature said that the game should work in OS 9.2.2, I thought it was certainly possible that upgrading the OS while the game was already installed could have caused a problem, although I didn't have any other software that stopped working.

I wrote to Aspyr, who make the Mac version, but they never replied. So I thought I'd uninstall it and reinstall it; I'd been looking for an excuse to do that, anyway, and just hadn't gotten around to it. I have the original Sims game, of course, and the Livin' Large expansion pack, which is my favorite--it allowed them to have a lot more interesting career paths, for one thing, including a Psychic career path, which is pretty cool.

Then there was House Party, which I have, but which never really excited me. I'm not much for parties in real life, and I could never get up a lot of enthusiasm for them in the Sims world, either. Hot Date was the next one, and I never bought it; it would probably be cool, but somehow I just couldn't justify buying it. The next expansion pack was Vacation, which I did buy, and it was cool, but the game started running really slowly when I played it, particularly when the Sims left their homes and went on vacation.

So they ended up never going on vacation because the gameplay was so erratic, and they just stayed home. And then Unleashed came out, and while I was deciding whether or not to buy it, Tish bought it for me off my wish list. It was wonderful, because now they could have pets. There was also a downtown area with this pack--you had to go downtown to buy the pets--but when they went downtown it caused the same kinds of problems that occurred when they went on vacation, so they ended up taking the bus over to the town, buying pets, and hurrying home to sleep for a couple of days because the trip tired them out so.

So I saved my skins, objects, and house files, and deleted all the game files, then reinstalled the original game, Livin' Large, and Unleashed.

I started up the game before I imported all the extraneous files, and it started fine, but when I put in all the files I'd downloaded, it crashed again, so the OS was obviously not the problem, it was a third-party file. Well. It didn't matter, really, I'd accomplished what I wanted to do, which was scale down the game so that it ran better, so I started deleting files, starting with the ones that I'd downloaded most recently.

I didn't have the patience to boot up the game after deleting one file at a time, so I took out about a dozen of the latest files, and now it works fine. I'm getting an error message on some of the houses to the effect that "some objects couldn't be loaded," and my guess is that there were some Vacation-specific files that aren't there now, but I h haven't tried to figure it out yet.

I told Bob last night that it had been so long since I'd played that I'd almost forgotten how. I love playing it, but it eats up so much time. And they never seem to have time to do anything much besides eat, go to work, and sleep. Much like real life.

Bob erroneously informed me that today was the first day of Fall. He informed me of this by doing an interpretive dance this morning in the bedroom while was getting ready for work. He called me later to tell me that tomorrow is actually the Autumn Equinox, so I guess I can look forward to another performance tomorrow morning.

He loves fall because it means hunting season, dressing in camoflage clothing, male bonding while sitting in a duck blind, etc.

I don't mind it getting colder so much as I mind the short days. I particularly hate getting up in the dark, it seems so much worse than getting up when the sun is shining, even though the time of getting up is the same. And soon I'll be driving home in the dark, too. I've taken to carrying a flashlight with me when I go out for my walk in the evening, and I'm sticking closer to home.

At least the flashlight comes in handy when I have to grab Dinah as she dashes out the front door when I come home.