I hoped ahrubyblue might have a chance to see these before her big adventure! A big day, I think! It would have been even easier if I hadn't been so fussy about CC. Don't you hate it when you have the perfect outfit and it turns out to only work for Adult, but not Young Adult, or vice versa?

( Elaine pictures! )
Now that they're all settled in, I'll be tossing a wedding for Ulysses and Doc Nerd, and I think Cecilia and Cecil will be heading off to Takemizu.

I have a lot of grading to do these days, along with preparing for the holidays, but I'm enjoying it and hope to have at least a short Uni post up soon, and a few reviews, including Doc Nerd's up tomorrow.

I absolutely stink at the picture end of things, but I hope you have a wonderful birthday, and thank you so much for saving my sims when my neighborhood went belly-up. The Goodytwoshoes would have died in Gen Eight if it weren't for you, and that's a fact. And I am so grateful.

Have a great birthday and a fabulous year!

I am quite nervous about going to the dentist tomorrow. It's a measure of how nervous I am that I didn't say anything about it before and don't really want to talk about it. The good thing is that I went to the Victorian ball yesterday and now my whole right leg really hurts, so tomorrow maybe my mouth will hurt and get my mind off my leg or vice versa.

I was an extremely good girl and commented on some graduate papers today and ran errands. So now I have a quick picture for the ladies whose simselves went into this mix--

Duodecimus!



He got penguingirl03 's eyes. I think his mummy writeraissa may have contributed to his general prettyfulness. Also in there somewhere is Grandma orikes13 , great grandma Denise avidreader7 , and great great grandma fireflowersims .

He rolled Fortune, and I think he's the first Marian to roll that since forever. They're mostly been Pop and Pleasure. Right now Grandma Pen is the lone Knowledge Sim in that house and everybody else wants to Play On Sofa or Buy Electronic Entertainment, over and over and over.
PurpleBunny is still working on her Celebrity Chef LTW. Sextus may not make his 20 Best Friends LTW, though I suppose I should let him use the family Wishing Well, duh.

I have a few more Romans to age up, and I will probably cheat, sorry, and then everybody is ready for Uni. REALLY. That close, knock on wood, and I sure hope so because I would like to be done or nearly done by the time the three-year mark rolls around.

--that it is St. Cecilia's Day. I can take no credit for this: I had totally forgotten it myself, but was reminded when I attended church today (Feast of Christ the King.)



(St. Cecilia, Guido Reni)


Anyway, I thought you might enjoy all that. I carry around a lot of extra material in my skull as a hazard of being a nearly constant tourist to seventeenth-century England.

I haven't been able to play too much: I had a lot of grading to do. I was a good girl and got it done, so I'll be catching up on Legacy Comments tonight and perhaps playing a bit.

For everyone who is working on NaNoWriMo--

and for those, like me, who know that November is the second cruelest month, and wouldn't dream of it--

Snootch's NaNovel.

Mostly for the amusement of peasant007 , I thought I would post these pictures.

Those of you who are unfortunate enough to have Cecil in your neighborhoods know that he turns up everywhere, like the proverbial bad penny. Two Outgoing Points my eye; he does run bys, steals newspapers, and shows up on community lots. And his specialty is strolling into important shots, especially when he is supposed to be on a Mysterious Journey.

( Slightly spoilery if you have not read the latest chapter of SC )

 --from today's lecture on Julius Caesar.

"Brutus:  My answer is, not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more."

--

Caesar < Rome

Enjoy!

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Part Two will follow in a few days, if I'm lucky. Work is slowing me down. Enjoy!

 I haven't been all that well, BUT I have an update nearly sorted out:  a two-parter.  I have a filler slide or two to shoot, and then I need to write it up.

I can't exactly predict when it will be done.  I just got my first load of grading/commenting to do, and this will slow me down a bit. The grading will keep up through December, too.  Nevertheless, it's some nice progress, especially since I've played Elaine up to teen and her elder brothers are all in college.  

Generation Nine almost in college!  Yay!

Actual game shot!



As a special birthday bonus, I won't tell anyone what that puddle is yet!

Many happy returns of the day--

Prof

My most recent heiress teened up! Here's Elaine.



I'll leave her Aspiration and LTW as a surprise for now.

I like her in the more normal clothing, but if her brothers are in medieval clothes, I'm kind of stuck.  On the other hand, I may wind up putting them in something--more Maxis, let's put it that way--and if I do, I have a bit more leeway.  Anyway, she's in pinky hearty stuff, no matter what, and luckily she looks good in it.

Parsifal and Gawaine have to go to college right away.  They are really, really close to aging to Adult--within three days, and that's really unusual for me.  The only reason I waited was for Elaine to be a teenager.  She has nearly all her scholarships, too, so probably she'll only spend the weekend at home and then go to college--long enough to have some fun, buy a cellphone, and get the Connections Perks from Daddy.  

Would someone be willing to extract Gen Nine for me?  I'm always a bit paranoid and I have a weird werewolf memory and that always makes me worried.  The only thing is that whoever does it will either have to have a game from before AL OR be able to  put the Sims up on the Exchange.  Saving Sims to file, at least as a SimsPack, means Macs can't install them.  

I've packaged the lots as files, and I removed all the CC except for the skins on Telemachus and Nausicaa.  I did that because I'm not sure what happens if you remove the custom skin off an alien.  Probably something dire and they'd probably have that skin with question marks or numbers all over.  

They're an interesting generation.  

Otherwise, it's been a really busy and stressful time.  I'm getting ready to leave for Virginia early Tuesday morning.  Getting ready for travel always makes me nervous and I'm even more so because last time I left, the catsitter didn't know to come.  She does know this time and we called to confirm AND she came over on Friday, but I'm still feeling paranoid about leaving my babies.  And guilty.  Cats always make you feel guilty.


I'm caught up on most legacies and getting there with the BRRL!  Can't wait!

I was in a foul mood today, partly because while I was driving around in my little village, I paused at the stop sign to check if the big SUV would roll through its stop sign, or the pedestrians on the side would float right past as through I wasn't there, and while I was looking around, the lady on the sidewalk wanting to cross started to SHRIEK at me. "GO! GO!!!!!!" She virtually shrieked me around the corner and into another crosswalk where some other pedestrians were trying to cross and they were clearly very worried and upset. I was so angry that I got an adrenaline rush and had a quick visualization of how long it would take to park the car, race back, and pound some sense and manners into her.  That is extremely rare for me to get that angry, and of course, I did not do it, but it took all afternoon and a heavy bout of exercise at the gym to calm me down.

Not sure why this upset me so much, maybe because I try so hard to drive carefully in the town I live in, and it's full of college students, and it's a pedestrian town. So on Friday at lunchtime, there will be lots of people floating across the street, at the crosswalks, or maybe in the middle, they don't care or notice, and there will be parents driving assault vehicles and high school kids racing around, and maybe even kids. And seniors--lots of them. And lots of bicyclists. I *like* the fact that I live in a walking town in Southern California, which is pretty darned rare, but the price is that you have to drive very defensively. I've seen a little old guy driving a golf cart get hit--and killed--by a lady in a truck who had the right of way, but so what? He was just as dead. People with short fuses have no business walking OR driving around there. It takes patience, or there will be accidents.

I'm glad I didn't try to play Traffic Cop With Fists, though. Maybe I will write a note to City Hall. They put up some better signage when that poor man was killed and I hope my letter had something to do with it.

ANYWAY, I have been extremely busy and tired, and I slumped down and started watching Rachel Maddow, and she played this clip and I could not stop laughing. As a special bonus, it's got Stephen Fry in it. It's his nature show, "Last Chance To See," and here he's documenting a rare flightless parrot.

OK, I don't watch a lot of TV, and the stuff I do watch, I watch again and again. There are only a handful of channels I watch--basically, if it isn't MSNBC, Comedy Central, or PBS, I have to look up the channel number. (I used to watch TCM a lot, too. I don't know what happened to that.)

And since I'm mostly a public television and public radio type person, seeing the same ad over and over and over burns a little track in my brain. So what the heck, I thought I would share the misery.

( Ads under the cut-- )

I'm getting there with catching up on the comments.  School started yesterday, and I'm not quite ready.  I have to get it all done by Sunday because Monday is one of my "furlough" days and I can't post anything to Blackboard or even answer email.  This is a big deal when you have one class that is entirely online and you had to move a bazillion files because the school changed its servers.  Plus yesterday and Wednesday were entirely eaten up by an unnecessary bureaucratic nightmare that I might write about when I stop spooking at sudden noises.  But I am down to a few legacies AND I am catching up on the BRRL!

 To Stacie, and also to Jamie and Dicreasy, whose birthdays I shamefully missed because I dithered about worrying that I had no time to shoot a proper card.  Happy birthday to all of you!  

The next update is about half written.  It's going to be very long but it's full of nice kiddie pictures so I hope no one minds.  I'd hoped to be finished before school started, and I'm close.  

The first day is tomorrow.  It's going to be weird and tomorrow I may tell you why.  Classes start on Thursday.  But I'm happy that I finished my syllabi, and that was a pain because I had to adjust them all to reflect the furloughs.

I have been a busy bee.

Did anyone see Dr. Horrible on the Emmys?  It was fun!

I have over two hundred pictures, so once I'm done sorting them out, I will be dividing them in half. It's not exactly going to be a Part 1 and Part 2, just 250 pictures is a lot.


I apologize for being so slow.  I had a fellowship proposal to write up this week, and those are pretty complicated.

School starts Monday, and frankly, I am really depressed about it. For one thing, evidently there is talk about merging my department with another one. I don't mind "English and Foreign Languages," but "English and Foreign Languages and History and Psychology and Sociology" sounds as though it's nothing to be taken seriously. And would you want a graduate degree from a department like that? Seriously?

For another, trying to figure out my syllabi is a serious bummer. Do I cut assignments? If so, which ones? If I do, how will I live with the guilt? If I don't, am I allowing the University to pick my pocket by giving them 150% work for 90% pay?

The LA Times today suggested that it would be a good idea to extend furloughs for the UC into next year. Oh, yeah, sure sure we understand that UC faculty are only paid modest amounts, but surely there won't be a "mass exodus." Translation: it is so hard to find work once you are tenured that they pretty much have us over a barrel, so they can carry this on indefinitely. Meanwhile, students are ANGRY. Some of them are going to protests and getting arrested. UC students don't like 32% fee hikes. CSU students, sadly, are used to it by now.

And Monday I get my ten year service pin. WHOOPIE. I already agreed to wear an "I don't want to strike" T shirt. And I am first in line.

What can you do, huh? I'm baking a pie. I figure that might help me, anyhow. And I've been playing. And . . .

well, here is Elaine.







 

 Oh, dear, I feel so embarrassed to admit that the previously-mentioned super sekrit project has nothing to do with the Sims.  It's actually a crochet project and it is super-sekrit because if it comes out nicely, it will be a Christmas present for my mother.  She doesn't read LJ but you can't be too careful.  It's nearly done.  The first one is for me because these things are always a trial run and the second one is always better than the first.  

AUGH, already enmired in school!  I have to write a fellowship application and I guess I could have done it earlier, and should have, and it's not going to be as good as it could.  It's warming over a research project I did a while ago before I go sidelined by other stuff.  Still, if I complete this, I will have done pretty much all the academic work I promised myself would get done this summer, and you can't say fairer than that.  Not so much the projects around the house, but you can't have everything.

I also have to move alllll my web stuff onto a new server, tart up my syllabi, making allowances for the furlough stuff, write up a presentation on Much Ado About Nothing that I am giving on Friday, and begin work on my paper for the Blackfriars.  Plus, of course, laundry.  If comments are late, this is why.

I also bought a new hand mixer and tried it out with my chocolate angel food cake recipe and it works like a dream.  I was wondering what kept going wrong and basically, you can't expect a twenty year old mixer to work very well, so the meringue wasn't lofting the way it should.  The difference with the new one is like night and day.

I've been playing a lot lately, actually, I'm just really, really sloooow. And of course I do not want to spoil anything, but I do have a few pictures of the Gen Nine kiddos that I thought you would enjoy.
( Picspam! )

I don't know how soon an update will happen.  I've been crazy busy but I did want to get a bit done before school starts next week.  I've also decided to play some of the reverse-Pleasantview families.  What's the point of having them if you're not going to play them?--plus maybe some of the kids will hit it off with the Legacy kids or the Romans, and at this point, I might as well send some of them to college.  The neighborhood is practically brand new, so the character bloat has hardly started yet.

I'm also almost done with a super-sekrit project.

Seriously. I don't care what you think of the President and his policies, you do not scream "YOU LIE!" while he's talking at a flippin' Joint Session of Congress.




You gotta love the expression on Nancy Pelosi's face, though.  Look at that jaw drop, and Biden's head shake and "that is so, so not right."  As someone said on another site: you know you're in trouble when *Joe Biden* is embarrassed by something you said.

Without getting overtly partisan about this, I think it's connected to what I said earlier about screaming "Nazi!" and bringing guns to rallies. When you make a practice of outrageous behavior, you're going to carry it into inappropriate places.  You can't act like a yobbo everywhere else and then stuff the milk back in the jar.

There ARE appropriate ways to show disapproval during and after a Joint Session of Congress speech, which is really, really formal. (Clue:  look at how they're all dressed.) Typically, they are:

1) non-verbal grumbling
2) pointedly sitting down and not applauding
3) not shaking hands.  Political pundits LOVE watching who shook whose hand--it's a favorite after the day sport.  

Inappropriate ways of showing disapproval:

1) carrying protest signs
2) texting during the speech --obviously, blatantly
3) and oh, yes, screaming "You Lie!"  

They might as well have slouched in wearing backwards baseball caps.  

I've noticed in general that people have trouble with distinguishing appropriate clothing and behavior in different places.  When I teach writing, I often have students asking about "style."  Usually I tell them there's not one "style,"  and explain that you wear different clothing in different places.  You don't wear a tux to the beach and you don't wear swim clothes to. . . what?  Here is where I am running into trouble.  People now wear the same clothing everywhere, along with the same kind of manners, and it is always the lowest common denominator.  I enjoy dressing up on occasion, and I'm sometimes given the hairy eye by people who clearly think I'm overdressed.  I always think "whatever, dude, I'm not the one who chose to wear ripped-out jeans to the opera."  

I'm not a super-fancy person:  I wear sweats to the grocery store all the time and don't care what people think.  But I don't wear them everywhere.  I don't wear jeans when I teach.  I'll wear denim in a halfway formal dress, but not jeans.  I will wear them in office hours, along with a reasonably tidy shirt and sweater.

So whaddya think?  Is this a symptom of general rudeness in our culture?