Old Pictures

I thought I would post old pictures that I hadn’t previously showed before on either this site or my old one.  Pretty much Sims 2 pics, and I don’t really have the CC or anything anymore, nor do I know where I got it.  So I won’t be crediting – if it’s yours and this matters to you, then lemme know and I will add credit in this post : D

 

still no internet

I still don’t have internet.  The earliest I may have it is somewhere around the 27th, but it may even be later than that.  I have to see what finances are going to be like and if I can afford it.  Things were really tight this month and we even had extra money.  I hate being an adult D:  Oh well.  I have been playing Sims 3, though.  I am starting to miss Sims 2.  Even though there is a lot of CC out there, it isn’t near the level of Sims 2 CC.  I know it’ll take a while, but still.  I was looking at old pictures from Sims 2 after I discovered CC and it’s just so much better.  And of course it would be nice if EA would hurry up and put out more expansions – I’m not a new simmer, though, so I know it’ll be a few years before they cover all the Sims 2 territory as far as expansions and stuff packs go.

A couple of updates, though …  Awesims has updated with two new sets.  I especially love the bathroom set.  It is of terrific quality and comes with a gorgeous print as well.  All that is lacking is a bath tub and a toilet, but how many bath tubs and toilets do you really need?  So really, I think it comes with what you really need, especially a very simple, lovely shower.  The Nook set is nice too, though I must say it seems a bit over-sized to me.  The framed pictures are great, but I wish they were a tad smaller.  Other than that, this set is really nice to have.

Well, best of luck to those of you who do have internet!  Enjoy all that downloading : )

liberty of london

I went to Target today and just about cried thanks to the beautiful things I found.  Liberty of London is a new brand to have hit the shelves, and they couldn’t have come at a worse time for me.  Yes, I am broke.

Anyway, for any Simmer who loves colourful, girly prints and shabby-chic influences, this is the sim brand for real life.  They have everything is a small selection of prints from clothing (across the board – kids, men and women) as well as home furnishings, dishes, even bikes – YES, as in bicycles!  I went nuts, obviously and I really hope they keep this stuff stocked for months because it will be at least two until I can afford to just go buy half of it.

I am really excited about a few things to start, but of course I want everything.  The pillows for instance, are absolutely gorgeous and they have piggy banks with the multiple prints on them, but cut out from the whole print.  They have boxes, picture frames, and lamp shades.  The colours provide for a ton of opportunity to mix patterns and bring out the colours you favour as well as more use of white which seems to be popular lately as Simmers create houses that are meant to spread light into the home.

They have chairs that are really awesome in this print – very simple, much like one custom content chair I’ve seen for Sims 3 but I cannot remember where from.  You absolutely have to check out the dining stuff – they have platters, plates, bowls, cups and glasses, even tea pots!

The clothes are great as well.  For men, they only have a few shirts available but they also have wonderful ties and as a last resort to make your man wear what you like but not be embarrassed, they also have boxers!  For women they have dresses and jumpsuits, really pretty ruffled tops, bathing suits (my boyfriend’s sister got the gorgeous black and white one piece) and pull-overs, pajamas and underwear.

They also have flip flops and galoshes, purses and scarves.  I wish they had jewelry as well, I would think that it would be very fun to see what they would match with their clothes.  This is developing a whole new sense of inspiration in designing.  I finally got my computer back yesterday and all ready got on last night for a few hours.  All ready I have a house set up and am trying to furnish it, but I might end up scrapping it from something smaller.  We shall see.  Or I will – you will have to wait, as I will not have internet for a month still, or more, unless something happens to change that.  : )

mobile update and LS#15

My computer is still at HP, yet I have not had the meltdown I thought I would without it. Or maybe just the specific meltdown, anyway. I do think that I handle stress better when I have a place where I can zone out and forget about the real world and all the crap that goes along with it.

To explain – I am moving, which should be a joyous occasion on my part but thanks to all the obstacles that continue to pop up with shrill notes of “surprise!”, moving is definitely not what I would have it be. First there was the news that my bf and I hadn’t quite caught by reading the lease before that even if we gave 2 months notice and forfitted our deposit of $500, we would still have to pay in full the remaining months in our lease! Our lease ends in August and rent is $875 a month – you do the freaking math.

So, with tears in our eyes, Zeb and I agreed to put our apartment up for lease, so that when someone came looking for our layout, they would offer ours before anyone else’s. Last Friday I got s call that someone wanted ours, but it went to vmail. Thanks to my phone being an absolute jackass, I didn’t get that message till Monday. I called the office only to find that they’d offered this to one other person as well – and they’d called beck first. WTF. I was so upset, I broke down in tears.

Now, it isn’t that I don’t like this apartment. When we moved in, Zeb and I were in love with them. A company has been purchasing historic mills in our area and they turn them into beautiful lofts with high ceilings and gigantic windows with a brick outer wall. The amenities are pretty good as well – beautiful pool area, full fledged gym open 24 hours, gathering areas complete with cast iron furniture and 4 star grills, as well as two elevators at each end of the mill. This last one is a complete must, as each floor is two storeys tall which makes the building actually nine storeys, if you count the basement entrance.

Even so, the elevators break down very so often from idiots holding them open too long, the resident’s gate doesn’t work that well as the south west entrance. The parking is atrocious and the layout isn’t any better. If you don’t get the minimal prime parking, it can take you anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to walk up to the building, which = am sure is not bad to someone like a New Yorker who has to walk a block from the parking garage anyway, but here in the south good parking is one of those amenities that is just short of required by law.

I really did not mean to go on an apartment bashing spree, but it did make me feel better. Anyway our reasons for moving are this – money (the place we’re moving to is small and cozy but light and airy too and looks like a pottery barn apartment waiting to happen, plus it is only $550/month), energy waste minimization (our loft has 14 ft. ceilings and 10ft. windows and the two bedrooms which lack windows are like caves which equals a pretty high requirement of electricity for light and air conditioning or heat), and last but not least, space. Not that we don’t have that all ready, but the space we have is very awkward and we have just too much emptiness. As I said, the new apartment is small and cozy and filled with light, plus there is a balcony : )

Where was I. Oh, yes. Other mishaps. Well, I had two things on my credit that I had to pay – a very old library fine I didn’t even know about and some fine BMG music, which I’d seriously never heard of. I pretty much got fucked over there bc it was either pay or wait three months while the claim is investigated, which is time I didn’t have. See, I wanted the new apartment to stay within our immediate grasp, just in case our apartment was to be called for, which it was – yesterday.

However, we’ve paid for this month’s rent and won’t get that back for 5-30 days so we have been a little tight with all this needing to pay for stuff (didn’t mention the application and holding fees for the new place). Then when we think all is settled and all we need to do is figure out money stuff, we get a call from the new apartment. The woman who manages the apartment we lived in before our current apartment is saying we owe $245. This is something she tried to do before when we’d all ready moved out and Zeb cleared it up with and it was all fine and dandy. But now the bitch is trying to do it again.

So anyway, we paid that.  All over.  And then that night we got a letter from our current apartment that we owe them $198.  They told us before that we didn’t owe anything and that we would be getting a refund for the rent we’d all ready paid, but no they took the discount we got for prorating and applied our rent refund and the $198 is the difference.  I am seriously so very sick of all this shit.  Instead of saving us money, which is what moving should do, it is only costing us so much more than it should.  It makes me want to cry.

Anyway, I have been trying to write this post over four days and can no longer go on.  My phone is terrible for updates.  So this is it.  It should only be a few days until I get my computer back now, so then I should be able to work on more housing updates.  I will probably be able to get up a new header, one with a Sims 3 theme now.

Check out the new Living Sims issue at Pink Rabbit!  Page 94 is a great article on Custom Management (helpful with the blue lot phenomenon) and there are also interviews with some of my favourites, including Malle (LimeLove) and Gosik.  Also do not forget to check out the basement tutorials – there is one for the basement with a swimming pool view!  Enjoy : )

Food Inc. and no CP

So something is wrong with my computer.  I don’t know why, and neither do the techs at HP, but the monitor keeps falling asleep, even when safe mode is enabled, and it won’t wake up.  Therefore, I have to restart it every time this happens, which makes me lose things, included a house that I was building and absolutely loved.  However, every time it does that now, it goes to sleep immediately after I restart.

So I’ve sent it into HP for them to hopefully fix, and will get it in (as they say, anyway) 7-9 business days.  Hopefully sooner, because I am really starting to miss TS3 and WoW.  I keep getting these ideas for sims and I’m afraid I’m going to forget them all.  I guess we’ll see.  The thing is, I think HP is going to wipe the computer, so I’ll have to reload everything all over again, which I am not particularily looking forward to.

At least this gives me time to catch up on all of the xbox stuff I haven’t done.  So far I have finished the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, and I am nearly through with the Gears of War campaign, both of which I have only started on this week.  What am I going to do when I’ve finished the campaigns on all my games?

A movie that you guys should look up if you haven’t all ready – Food Inc. It’s a documentary sort of film about the food industry in America, and makes me feel like these major corporations think we’re all shit-brains.  Definitely check it out, it will make you completely rethink how you look at food.

It’s not just about animal cruelty, though that does touch the heart, it’s about how the corporations sell healthy practices and real food for quick turn out and money.  I always thought it was just expensive to eat healthy organic foods, but now that I think about it and understand why the non-organics are so cheap, I realize that it isn’t that the organics are expensive, it’s just that the regular food is so easy to make thanks to short cuts that it is able to be rediculously cheap.

Hope that makes sense …  Food Inc. is now available through Netflix and Blockbuster.

TS3 has not been working for me, and I don’t know why.  Probably some CC I downloaded.  This is -almost- a good thing, because then I could redo it all and reorder everything and post a WCIF here.  However, I really do not want to go through the ordeal of finding everything all over again.  It is so frustrating D:

Converting Your Toilet Into A Low Flush Toilet

You might think that the water you consume daily is made up mostly of your dish washing water or your bath water.  It is certainly where you can see a large amount of water being used with your own eyes.  But the largest water-vampyr in your home is in fact your toilet.  How many times do you use it a day?  And how many times do other people use it a day?  Toilets built today and beyond are required to use only 1.6 gallons of water, but a toilet older than a few years before now could use as much as 8 gallons of water for a single flush.

So now you may ask, ‘How in the world do I change this without buying a whole new toilet?!?’  Toilets today can be pretty pricey – especially since installation fees for everything under the sun are so ridiculously high.  (I know I wouldn’t want to install my own toilet, either!)  A severely cost-effective option is using a gallon jug, like the ones used for milk or water.  The amount of mass that displaces the water in your toilet’s tank cancels out that much water being used.  So here’s how.

1. Fill a gallon jug (or half gallon, if a full one will not fit) with water.  Partially fill it with sand or gravel, whichever is handy.  This will keep it from moving around the tank and damaging the flushing mechanisms or budging the stopper in the bottom.
2. Before putting it in the tank, seal it shut.
3. Lower it carefully into the water.  Depending on how much water is in your tank, you may have to flush it to keep it from overflowing, or scoop out enough water.  Close the lid over the tank.

You may want to check your last water bill (or ask your place of residence’s owners if you are renting and that information is not regularly provided for you) to see the differences between before and after flushing.  If you are between bills, you can still look at the before, current and after bill to see the influence.

I hope that those of you reading this will use this idea and post your comments.  It is probably one of the cheapest ways to influence how much water you use, and the more that I think about it the less of a reason anyone has to not use this practice.

Birds and Whip It

Just found this at Peace & Unrest, really beautiful recolours for The Sims 2!  I really wish that Omar would do stuff for TS3 D:  He just has an awesome eye for how things should look D:  I really love these two sets following …

These are also gorgeous!  I love the square paintings, though I really wish they were placed a little higher.  Even so, they are soooo adorable and I just love them : D  Grab them over at Sims Art Gallery!  They have also started to upload their pictures as packages, so if you would rather download items through TS3 launcher, you’re in luck!  I just wish they’d put everything else up through the launcher too : (

Also … I want to make this house sooooo badly!!!  How awesome is it?!?!?!?

Tuscan Villa

My boyfriend has been asking me for a Villa for a while now, and today I actually started on it!  He loves the Roman villas in Italy, the city ones with the piazza and then the rooms coming off of it.  So I am trying my best to create said villa, though it isn’t exactly like the ones he favours (see Assassin’s Creed 2 xD).  Anyway, I thought I would post pictures for you of what I have done so far.  Some influences in the interior design part have come from this month’s issue of Country Living, which hosted three beautiful homes whose interiors I absolutely love.

I still have a lot to work on, including the outside which has basically nothing when it comes to landscaping.  It should include a few patios, a couple of flower gardens, a vegetable garden, and walking paths by the time I’m done … I think.  I guess we will see : )

First Floor

• Dining Room
• Kitchen
• Great Room
• Library
• Sitting Room
• Office

Second Floor

• Master Bedroom and Bath
• Senior Bedroom and Sitting Room (Great for a live in grandparent!)
• Four Bedrooms

That sounds like a lot of rooms, and would seem to make for a gigantic house, but it really isn’t that big.  I’ve become better over the years at making smaller rooms, and even the master bedroom isn’t that big.  Probably 3-4/5’s of the property will be landscaping, if that makes sense.  The villa will be available for download once I have finished it, but be aware, it may take some time for me to do this as I plan to put a lot of detail into it.  Let me know what you think!

A-101 and A-102

Small and well lit, our A-101 model is perfect for the Sim who prefers clean lines and green living.  Plenty of sunlight helps to cut down on energy costs, and grey water systems recycle used water.  Soften your footprint on our wourld’s resources by choosing A-100, a model home for a model citizen!  *A-101a is furnished!

DOWNLOAD HERE

A-101 A102 A101a

*** So you know, A-101 is the two story, while A-102 is the three story.  A-101a is furnished with bright, sometimes neon colours.  If there are any problems, please let me know!