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      Christopher and Loretta got married and had a girl I named Brooke. She's a witch, like her dad. When they first married I had to change both their surnames by forcing Edit A Sim In Create-A-Sim, because I only married them because I liked the name Steel. And Christopher Candler just doesn't have a ring to it.
      Instead of buying the Philosopher's Stone, I bought the Collection Helper. I wasn't quite ready to turn anyone into a ghost, but I do want to find and cut some gems. When I left off, Chris-topher and another roommate had picked up every rock in the neighborhood. When Mindi had started, Loretta was single. By the time they finished together, she was a married mom.
      I love that we can actually see the baby grow. I love the collecting, planting and gardening bit. I adore the Philosopher's Stone and the transmute thing (which go hand-in-hand - one kills, one resurrects; it's great for ghost-Sim lovers like me). But I hate that the Lifetime Rewards collect so slowly and that you need 80,000 of them in total. I hate the way they walk and I hate the way they stagger up and down the stairs. I hate that burglars and zombies alike can appear in enclosed areas and I hate that the grieving process takes two days.
      Okay. Mini-rant aside. Everything else, I love. I remember how shocked I was when my first Sim stepped into the shower fully clothed and began singing. It was nice to have some variety. I called her Sheena, and she stole a lot of stuff. Kicked over a lot of cans. She even almost got caught. I had to make her get home before her enemy returned. I only had a few seconds (minutes, in game-time) to spare and then I saw the cops outside the enemy's house. It is better than Sims 2. And I love that, too. I do wish there were other things you could find - crystal, sapphire, amethyst, pearl. And like I said, the Sims need to be able to become lapidaries, and make jewelry using the gems they find. Maybe they do, in Sims 3 World Adventures, or Sims 3 Ambitions. I don't know. I only have three expansion packs: Seasons, Pets, and Supernatural. So, my knowledge of it all is pretty limited. Mission and Abbotsford don't really sell anything by EA anymore, unless it involves guns.
      Anyway, in too few hours I have to wake up and go clothes-shopping. Damnit. As if regular  shopping wasn't horrible enough.

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      I reinstalled The Sims 3 today. It's awesome, considering it was made in 2009. Man, two more years and it'll be a decade old! I feel so ancient. My girl, Loretta Candler, is already a pretty good gar-dener, has more than 100 apples in her fridge (I have a thing for apple trees). She's a writer, a guitarist, and a fisher, too. She was actually fishing when Christopher Steel joined her, casting his bait in the same area. I admired his name and decided to marry them off - they were so cute, stealing glances at one another.
      I think I'm going to install Supernatural, too. I don't much care for the supernatural forms, which don't have enough abilities to interest me, but I love, love, love resurrecting the dead. I always delete the door at night, so burglars can't come in, and it's nice to have Sims who can walk through walls. They're always the ones paying the bills if I forget during the day.
      I wonder if a ghost Sim can become a zombie. I know they can talk to and spook other Sims, but it should be impossible to grab onto an insubstantial body unless they're both dead. Although technically a zombie is dead, but it's not ghost-dead.
      Anyway, I want to get the Alchemy thing, the gem-cutter thing, and the transmute thing. Loretta's already found a luminous gem and a diamond rock, and I want to increase their value. And maybe I'll even move her to a big, nice house by the lake. Or even the waterfall. My house-building skills are less than decent, but some-times I surprise myself.

A Piece Of Paradise

      I downloaded the Need For Speed: Most Wanted demo. Though the graphics are terrible and the car is very stubborn, it's so great cruising the map of good old NFSW again...even if I have to do pursuits to unlock the whole thing. Still, even if I fail, each pursuit takes place in a separate location, so I can still access the whole map even if I get busted. I've only done three so far, and I won the first two. The third is more challenging, but I got to go to that college place, and the stadium...I even knocked down the giant doughnut! I never thought I'd see this map again. I really hope I can get to Fortuna sometime. Being the silly girl I was when I first started playing, I actually had this stuck in my head whenever I went there: Oh Fortuna, oh don't you cry for me - I come from Rockport Turnpike in my new Lamborghini!
      What?? I told you I was silly. Anyway, that was a loooong time ago, when I first started.

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      I have the chance to reconnect with an old friend. But she's not really my friend anymore. In fact, when I went to see her last July, she didn't stick around long after greeting me, and she didn't even notice when I left. And she was right there.
      We were actually there for a party for someone else. I just wanted to take the opportunity to see how she was. Nobody had to convince me to go. But I know what kind of person she is. I know her mother would have to talk her into coming over. And if I didn't invite her mother, my 'friend' wouldn't come at all - I know it. She'd either be dragged along against her will, or their visiting me would be postponed, time and time again, never to actually happen.
      I've lost many friends over the years. She was one of them. Question is, would I lose her again, or is it still lost?
      I've known her for fourteen years plus. We were so close as kids. The day before I had to move, her mom gave me a picture of all of them. I still have it, in top condition. I know I'll hang onto it even if we become mortal enemies. I'm kind of sentimental.

--

      It looks spooky outside. The sky is dark, and the moon is shining past a wispy cloud and onto the bare branches. It's like something out of a storybook.
      I'm supposed to be asleep, but I don't sleep at night. I get an energy rush around 9 PM every night and can't go to sleep until around 8 AM. I can fall into routine, but it never lasts. Anyway, I doubt I could sleep. I've tried already, but I'm kind of excited. We're finally going to Hayward today. I've been hoping to get back there for at least a year now...I'm hoping to make a day of it. It's a relaxing place...I really need to relax.
      Too bad I have to come back. That's always the worst part. I just want to stay there. The sun, the waves. All my worries come back in a fetid rush the minute I hear the words, "Ready? Get your stuff."
      No outing is long enough. We went to a beach one time. We walked to one end, turned around and walked back. Got in the car and drove home. We didn't get our feet wet, we didn't even touch the sand. Not even with our fingers. We were literally there for a few minutes. A nice place, but to this day I don't know what the point was of going there.
      Well, I suppose three more hours of a sleepless rest is better than none.

X-Treme Mistakes

      I've been watching the X-Men movies, and I noticed some horrific mistakes. The timeline is where those mistakes come from. A guy tried to explain it all away with alternate dimensions, but only one X-Men movie has anything to do with alternate dimensions and time-travel. The rest is, ipso facto, unexplained.
      Okay. I should start at the beginning. First, they made X-Men 1. It starts with a young Magneto being ripped from his family at the hands of the Nazis. That takes place in Poland, 1944. Fast forward into the not-too-distant future, where we see Rogue, a teen-ager. Wouldn't that make her older than, or as old as, the pro-fessor? Anyway, after nearly accidentally killing her friend with her powers, she discovers Xavier's School For The Gifted. Xavier, around Magneto's age, is now sixty, seventy-something, and his students are anywhere from children to thirty plus. Jean Grey is, in this movie, thirty-plus; yet in X-Men: The Last Stand, we see a flashback, in which she's about thirteen years old, talking to the professor and Magneto, still sixty, seventy-something. Still with me? In X-Men: Apocalypse, Xavier is a young man, maybe seventeen years old, and Jean Grey is there, maybe seventeen.
      That's a problem for me. Unless, Jean Grey ages slowly, like Logan.
      In X-Men 1, Logan also discovers the school, and he meets Jean Grey. But, wait! They've met before! In X-Men Apocalypse, she uses her telekinesis to open his cage, while also making people unable to see her, since she's supposed to be locked up and all. They lose him, and they have to follow the trail of dead, bloody bodies to find him again. He initially doesn't trust Jean, but when he realizes he likes her a lot, he lets her read his mind. Then he vanishes. Why doesn't Jean recognize him in X-Men 1? Why don't Professor Xavier and Magneto recognize him? They caught their first glimpse of him in X-Men: First Class, when they were young men. They both read his mind - yet they never seem to catch on that they've en-countered him before.
      In X-Men 2, Jean and Storm meet Kurt Wagner, also known by the name Nightcrawler. But...they met him before, too. In X-Men: Apocalypse, where Professor Xavier was a young man! Aaaand, they knew both his real name, and his mutant name.
      I'm getting off-topic. My point is, Logan meets the gang in X-Men 1, X-Men: First Class, and Apocalypse. They never recognize him. Yes, these movies were made in a certain order, but there's no way to watch them in order, because they all become acquainted more than once. To make it worse, the storyline of how old they were when they met is inconsistent! And there's more than that. In First Class, young man Magneto has numbers on his arm. It looks like they were burned into his flesh. In X-Men 1? Blue ink. Blue ink - seriously!
      In Apocalypse, we also see Angel getting his feather wings replaced by adamantium wings. Magneto and Xavier are young in that movie. In X3, when the two of them are old, Angel shows up at Xavier's school with feather wings. Not to mention that unlike Xavier and Magneto, he isn't much older.
      So there we have it. Rogue should be around the professor's age, and Jean Grey doesn't age. Not normally. And, since Scott was a teenager when Xavier was a young man, he doesn't age, either. In fact, they're all immortals - Beast, and yes, Mystique as well. How else would Magneto age, while Beast and Mystique look like they've only aged four years? They went to college together! Magneto and Mystique were lovers. She should be old and saggy, but she's not. Beast should be gray, but he's not. And for telepaths, Xavier and Jean sure have the wool pulled over their eyes when it comes to Logan.
      Oh, and by the way, Professor X was crippled in First Class, as a young man. But, in the flashback in The Last Stand, he's walking as an old man. And do you remember when we see Cyclops running from Victor, and William Stryker gives him a shot to knock him out? They're roughly, oh, I don't know, twenty years apart. Yet in X2, when Stryker is an old, gray-haired man, Cyclops has only aged a little.
      So they're not perfect. The timeline is confusing - hell, it's downright laughable. I guess X does not mark the treasure.

-

      The quality of my life seems to be at a standstill. If Life quality were a Sim thing, mine would be in the red zone. Because I take the liberty to sleep when my body demands rest, like an unthink-ably horrible person, I'm being forced to stay awake through the whole night until 10 PM and then when the others are up, I'm expected to go shopping and do housework with a perky, life-loving, I'm-such-a-freaking-Rapunzel kind of zest. (And it don't feel to me like Mother knows best! It's not like she knows my body better than I do. But she does know what it's like to be overtired. She completely lacks the compassion she wanted for herself all those years ago.)
      Anyway, I'm sitting here, playing games, watching movies. I need something to do in order to not think about how tiiiired I am. So I'm watching anything I see, no matter how stupid it is. (Like Toy Story 2. Mostly good, but how the f**k can one toy father another? They're plastic. Even if they have genitals, they're not functional. Let's just skip the Star Wars reference, please. Goddamn it all, why did I have to know where it came from before I looked it up?)
      So now it's time for Toy Story 3, and then maybe, Memoirs Of A Geisha. And then I have to pretend like I don't have a headache I was forbidden to sleep off.
      Forbidden? Be serious.
      Yeah. Seriously. We just don't get along anymore. Hell, a few nights back, she threatened to place me in a home because I didn't stack the dishes right. I am so tired of her threats. She's always saying she's going to send me away. Just do me a favor, do it already. Maybe then I can sleep at night!
      My brother's no damn help. He takes her side, and when she toodles off to bed, that's when he stands up for me. A little late, bro.
      Oh well, whatever. Let them f**k my life up. They're pros. I'm just going to sit back and spiral into my beloved nocturnal bliss and stay out of their way. I'm going to cling to oblivion, and dwell in a fake world of talking toys.
      Oh, speaking of which! I'm glad this came up; I wanted to talk about a dream I had. I was calling for Jessie, looking for her. Apparently she was mine. I could hear her voice answering me; she was inside a kitchen cabinet. In the movie, the toys - before they meet Jessie - move to a new house. In my dream, I was packing up the last house to come here, to where I live now. Here's the kicker; in my next dream we lived here, and I could see Jessie on a shelf.
      Anyway, I think Toy Story 3 is at least mostly loaded, by now. See ya next time.

...,

      Well...things here are going slowly and badly. I'm trying to look on the bright side - it could be worse - but sometimes I can't see the bright side. Sometimes the sun just ain't shining. Basically, if I'm not in bed, I'm wishing I were; feeling more tired than usual. I eat, and become even hungrier than I was before I ate. I'm always hungry and tired; but at least before, if I slept or ate something, it got a little better.
      Day before last, I stayed in bed until five. Today, three-something. I just didn't see the purpose of dragging myself through the same old, same old, when I was too tired and depressed to open my eyes. The only time I feel like it's been a good day is when I can buy something new - or sweet. Every time I'm able to wake up before nine, I look out of my window to see if the car's still here. If it is, I ask for a ride downtown. And if it's not, I crawl back under the covers.
      I don't even see the problem everyone is making it out to be. If I'm too tired to think straight, bed is where I belong. I'm not missing out on anything special anyway. For example, the other day my brother opened Battlefield at least four times. And guess what he's playing, right now?
      This level of monotony is ludicrous. I can't wait until bedtime. Or a nap, whichever comes first.

Nice Day

      The weather is great - the sun is shining and the skies are blue. But thankfully, it's not warm. I'm sitting here with my window open maybe two inches, and I can feel the heat just being sucked away. Feels great.
      Today I went chair shopping. I found the perfect one...but it was about $260 too expensive. So instead, I went to GameBit, and found nothing but a couple, talking about my favorite show. I was tempted to join the conversation. But, I did not. I had the same opportunity many years back, when I overheard two girls speaking Simlish at the Abbotsford mall. Sadly, I could understand them.
      Next, Superstore; where my brand-new purse decided to fall apart. I think I know what the problem is, though; the handle is a black leather strap woven into a gold chain, and last month the leather tore in half. Two unattached ends poked through the chain. I think if I took the leather strap out and just left the gold part, it would work. And if not...I still have the purse I replaced.
      Finally, things began to look up. I was able to buy not one, not even two, but three movies. For my brother, X-Men Apocalypse, which we've never seen - I didn't even know it was a thing - and the sixth season of The Walking Dead - which I didn't even know was out. And for me, the first Toy Story! Twenty-two years after it was made. I'd seen it there before, for the same price; but the few times I could afford it, I was buying other things. Now all I have to do is find the second and third. And I hear they're making more.
      I saw a man in a costume, dancing away beside an adver-tisement. I saw a man whose dogs were pulling a wagon. And I saw Professor Proton's lookalike jaywalk across the street. I saw a plane that looked like it was carrying a kayak, and a cloud that looked like the medical sign.
      All in all, this is one of the rare instances I'm happy I got up. It's been a decent day so far. And that's something, because lately it's been really miserable.
      Well, looks like it's time to watch some Walking Dead. I hope we have the season now where Negan is introduced. I really want him to kill Eugene!