orikes | My Cat Ate My Homework

My Cat Ate My Homework

So, last night before going to sleep I sat down and wrote out a list of all the scenes I need to shoot for the BC finale. This was good to do because it helped me work out the order of the things and how to make the story work. This afternoon when I got up, I dropped the notepad and my ipod on my computer chair along with a blanket since it's freaking cold out there today.

When I came back in after showering and getting breakfast, I discovered one of my cats sitting on top of the notebook happily shredding it to pieces. He's NEVER done anything like that before, but apparently since it was on top of the blanket he wanted to cuddle into, it was fair game.

Not only did he mutilate my notes, he also mutilated a couple of RPG characters I had in the notebook. Everything can be salvaged, but it was very irritating. I suppose it's not quite as bad as a dog having half eaten it, in which case it would be completely unrecoverable, but still. The furball is lucky he's cute. (For those that know my kitties, it was Malakhi.)

I did get a couple of the filler scenes shot today. They were relatively uncomplicated ones meant to fill in some gaps I had from the pictures I already had. I actually made a copy of my whole neighborhood folder and set it up with a new neighborhood number. Now I can do all the plotty stuff without worrying about accidentally messing anything up. There are also a couple of other reasons I did this, but I won't reveal them until I'm done and doing a final behind the scenes.

Now for some random picspam!

Hmmm. Living in an apartment complex does mean that privacy is a commodity, doesn't it?

The placeholders for the last update were the Goodie couple which comes with AL. They're actually rather sweet and I had fun playing them for a couple of days while getting the update setup. I like them enough that I finagled to get them into the adult career track so they have a chance of fulfilling their LTWs. Playing them has given me a better understanding of how apartments work, so I might give them a serious try with the next generation when they graduate. God knows when that'll be.

Anyway, how are you? Babble at me, please. Work's going to take forever tonight.

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Yeah, the Goodie family really is sweet. Before the virus I had them adopt a child and they doted on him.

Cat eating your work? How about dog breaking your darn sims CD-DVD roms? I had to rebuy two of my sims games for the reinstall :P

Gotta love cats! "This is in my way! DESTROY." I have a spiral-bound notebook to keep track of Legacy things, and my die is stuffed into the spiral with a pen so I know where those are, and Loki is obsessed with trying to get at that little cube. Keeps him occupied, at least.

Scene lists are definitely helpful. As are storyboards with stick figures. And there must be some serious plottiness if you need a whole neighborhood for shooting it so you don't mess anything else up!

How am I? My allergies are still fairly annoying, but at least I'm in a good mood. I need to go shopping for jeans that are immune from the perils of gravity, and I should probably buy shirts without little kitty claw-holes in them, which is fine except that I HATE shopping for clothes almost as much as I hate shopping for shoes. Both generally involve beer at some point. And last night, I got a perfect shot from one of my Sims, and it always makes me happy when they comply with my wishes. Also Gilbert and Grimmy won't stop pillow-fighting.

You hate clothes and shoe shopping too? My long lost twin!

I have dialogue bits scattered in my notebooks all over the place. Luckily, Destructo-Puppy is toning down on her eat-everything tendencies.

Make that three of us that hate clothes and shoe shopping. I have to be "in the right mood" for clothes shopping, which translates as "there is something specific that I need" but there is no such thing as "in the right mood" for shoe shopping.

I don't mind shopping for clothes when it involves me sitting in my pajamas and a catalog or a website in front of me. Going into a store brings back too many memories of my mother 'trapping' me in the changing room and bringing me all the stuff she thought would be cute. She had it timed perfectly so that I couldn't try something on and get out before she'd bring me something else to try.

Shoes aren't so bad, but I only get comfy shoes. :}

I hate, hate, HATE clothes shopping. I have to be to the point where I only have four pairs of pants to get through five days of work before I'll go (and even then, I sometimes try to wait until I'm down to three).

I don't mind shoe shopping, though. But I can do that online easier without problems getting them to fit. :)

I'm not so anti-clothes shopping, but I used to be. Still hate shopping for shoes, though. I have to be forced to shoe shop, sometimes, and even when I've decided I need new shoes on my own, it's only when I can, say, see my socks through the toes of the shoe or something equally shoe-is-too-old-implying. And even in those cases, my reaction to shoe shopping is something like "find something wearable that doesn't look horrible, preferably black, and then get out of here before someone mistakes me for someone who *likes* this sort of thing".

Clothes-shopping is fun for me, but only because I like finding shirts with sayings on them that I find funny. I have a closetful of funny shirts, some of which I've worn.... twice? At most? Something like that.

I maintain that there is no such thing as comfy shoes. Shoe shopping and shoes themselves are true evils. I'm coming to appreciate them on a purely decorative level but I'm still not wholly convinced of their practicality.

For as much as I like clothes, I too hate clothes shopping. It's disheartening.

Wow, I'm just a little ray of sunshine this morning. Sorry!

I've been writing rough outlines for ages. I generally have a lot of stuff in my head, but when I get close to writing, I'll go thorugh the pictures I have and pull what I think migth work, then sit down and do an outline to make sure the story flows how I want it to. That's with general play/story at least.

When it comes to the big plotty, that's a little different. I've had the outline for Pseudo 3.8 sitting in my notebook since May. And there were versions prior to that as I was working out 3.7.

My cats mostly leave my dice alone, unless it's gaming night at my house and there are other people there in addition to other dice. Pashenko prefers to go after the minis, though. We have to watch him because if we're not careful, he'll hop up on the map with the minis and flop. Considering he's a 25lb cat at this point, the minis always lose.

Still largely clueless about your Sims stories, but I know it must take work to get the pictures staged and I like seeing them. :D

I'm good! But I'm invariably good. Lucky that way. Hi!

How's the budding parasite? :)

I always wonder what my non-simming friends think of all the simming stuff. Since that's really all I ever talk about nowadays.

I know you tried to explain it before, but I remain mostly clueless. :) But hey, it's still fun to see and obviously means a lot to you! There are stranger and less accessible art forms out there.

The parasite is doing well. Little scare the other day but that was just to keep me on my toes, apparently. Everything's good. :) New ultrasound on Tuesday. I gotta post the previous ultrasound pics so I can post that one too when I get it!

I do the same thing with my chapters. I write an outline full of ideas, make sure it goes along with the storyline. Then I write it into word.

Apartment Life has me interested in taking time to explore the neighborhoods more than I have in the past, whereas I've usually been more interested in CAS characters. Maybe it's the nature of seeing your neighbors with regularity, but I really like this expansion.

I'm probably going to spend part of my weekend exploring the non-Strangetown hoods to see the stuff that I may have missed before. The Goodies seem really sweet. It would be cute to see them paired up with the Oldies on a double date or some such.

I hope you have a good night working.

My only complaint with apartment life are the pre-built apartments. To be happy using them, I'm going to have to completely remodel most of them. They don't have nearly enough windows for natural light and there's other silliness too. Probably after the BC is done, I'll take a little time and fix some of the apartments and try my hand at my own. Of the three families that came with AL, I've only placed the GOodies. The orphans and the other family are waiting until I'm happy with a family friendly (playground included) apartment complex.

With the Maxis megahood, I recommend taking the time to get all the binned families set up in their appropriate neighborhoods. It seems like the majority of the Veronaville folks are all in the bin and only the three main families are already in their houses. I grew quite fond of Veronaville, so they're definitely worth poking with a stick. I also enjoyed Pleasantview more than I thought I would. Surprisingly, Strangetown is the one that I got bored with the quickest, but there are fewer childrinions in that neighborhood. And on top of that, some of the teens are so close to growing up, you don't get any lpaytime with them before you have to ship them off to uni or grow them up (I'm looking at you, Johnny, Ophelia and Tank!)

So, did you Scold him, and if you did, did a skill-bar appear above his head? Good luck recovering the characters and notes.

I wanna install it so baaad! But I am going to be good and wait for a patch. Heck, I haven't played the Nebulas since I installed FreeTime, so I've got a whole list of things to discover anyway.

The FT premade who most bothered me was Luis Aspir. His LTW? Become a City Planner. His job? Retired City Planner! Stupid, Maxis, really stupid. I think the same thing happened to my Olive Nigmos.

I WISH training cats was that easy. It would solve so many of my problems. Heck, it would mean I could put a throw rug back down in the living room.

I forgot that you haven't gotten too much fo a chance to play FT either. Wow, I hope you get some good playtime soon. :)

With Luis, at least he has the lamp, so he can wish for happiness or wahtever it is that makes him permaplat. With the Goodies, I used insim to age them down to adult and put them at lvl 5 in their respective careers. Then I aged them back up. The only bug I ran into with it was that they switched from Knowledge to family aspiration. That was easy enough to fix.

LOL! The cat! Too funny!

Sigh. So envious of you guys. So, so envious.

Marko is very bad. Mostly he chews things, but he also likes to hook things out of my purse with his paw. Usually it's my keys, but mostly recently it's been cash. "No, you cannot have an allowance, and no, you may not borrow the car." Yeah, that's exactly how they handle things like that. They do something vile, and then they *CUTE* at you. Hopefully you can put it together again.

I'm really looking forward to seeing both the last chapter AND the final Behind The Scenes.

How am I? Cleaning. Uncomfortably tight pants, which always makes me unhappy. I'm going to have to do something about that, seriously, or my clothes won't fit. Trying to get some more simming done. Yelling at the TV except when Rachel Maddow is on.

Johnson tends to go outside of the litterbox when he's angry so I had to remove the throw rug in the livingroom, but beyond that, most of the problems I have with my cats are minor. Pashenko tries to claim my bed EVERY night, but that's about it. Malakhi shocked me when I caught him happily shredding the notebook.

Tight pants stink, but cleaning's good. :)

Sam destroyed my screen door last week I think there was a bug between the screen and the glass. It looks like he tried to climb it and then slid. I rent and I already know I'm not getting my deposit back, Blue took care of that so meh.

I have an outline for my next couple of updates, along with some dialog and notes on what needs to be done before I can shoot them. I'm almost set up for shooting the next one I need to do, I may get to that tonight.

I'm on my way to class momentarily, it's my 'fun' class of the semester so I'm doing pretty well tonight.

Right now, I only know where 4.8 is going. I've got some loose ideas for after that and some plot arcs I know where they're going, but beyond that... I've got nothing for 4.9 and beyond. (I keep writing 3.8... grrr). I just can't wait to start playing again and see who the 5th gen kids are.

Bad kitty! Aren't they just lucky that they are cute some days? Bailey has yet to really destroy anything. No wait...she destroys her own toys but that's ok. She does like to chew, but really that's just my arm when I move it and she is trying to use it as a pillow.

Apartment Life looks fun. I don't think I'm going to wait for the patch this time because, Ferd and Mag REALLY need to be warlocks! But I am trying to get out another Penguino chapter first, that way I can play it without feeling guilty.

How am I? Tired. My assistantship involves copy editing for 20 hours out of the week which is horrifically draining even if the papers are interesting. This means I'm too tired to do anything when I get home (classwork, cook, play the sims, leave comments on sims stories...). But it is Thursday so that means the week is almost over and that is good. :-)

I think if you get the ALfixes from MATY, you'll be all set. That fixes any of the dangerous bugs. For the most part, it's a fairly well put together expansion. I do hope you install it since I think you'll like it. :)

I had a job that drained me like that for a while. I was gone pretty much twelve hours a day and when I'd get home, I was too exhausted to really do any of the fun stuff I wanted to do. I didn't even have cable, so I couldn't veg in front of the tv. It stank. At least yours probably has a good end in sight, though. Y'know, that whole degree thing. :)

I'm doing well. I'm not getting any time in the game tonight, but I did some knitting (I'm teaching myself with the help of the Internet), and we went grocery shopping after Jim got home from work, and now we're just back home. My cat Zelda is sitting next to me, purring, and my dog is sitting on the futon growling (she hates Jim's dog, who is moving around - it's a fun household here, with my five cats and two dogs, and his two dogs).

My cats (or dogs) haven't torn anything up on me in a while, but believe me, I know how it feels. :)

My kitty only ever demolished hair scrunchies. I don't think she ever nommed on my journal or any of my writing notebooks. Chris and I don't have a kitten at the moment (and we WANT one, but no Pets in this Apartment Life we live, ALAS). I think we'd forgive nearly any indiscretion on a kitteh's part if the cat did a CUTE at us.

I like AL pretty well myself. I love the new interactions and objects, that's certain. I hope you do build some apartments and share them :). I'm not a builder, myself.

As for what I'm up to? Well, I wrote a long ramble on my non-writing journal (the first writing I've done there in aaaaaaages) and Chris and I are having a Heroes marathon. We finished Season 1 on the weekend and we have to re-watch Season 2 by Sunday night. Chris spent the day emailing resumes and shooting Sim Spade scenes and I spent the day working. I'm putting together my recap chapter tonight and writing it, and either Chris or I will be making me a new icon especially for Talk Like A Pirate Day tomorrow. We both have laptops, so will be spending the evening curled up on our couches.

Today is payday, so I've already spent all that money in my head a few dozen times. Too bad most of it goes to bills :(.

Hehe. I don't have pets, with 6 siblings, as it may get a bit challenging enough ;)

I'm pretty good on the simming news, organizing some pictures and writing for the next update. The Goodie family is darling, and I'm finally getting around to a BC.

I could be better in life though-- just had a breakup and some jealousy that came as a smack in the face, all in two days. Ah well... I feel sad, but C'est la vie. I think I'm gonna watch some TLC shows and chug down some ice cream to blow off some steam.

I'm glad you're doing well though! =D

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My Cat Ate My Homework

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