I just took better pictures of “Ooh La La” for my Etsy shop. When I took the pictures originally, my camera battery was dead so I had to use the Digital Rebel, which I loathe, and because of the resolution that the Rebel takes (or is set to take?) I couldn’t optimize my images for Etsy. It’s set to take pics at, I think, 180px so when I changed it to 72, it made my pictures too small and therefore I had blurry thumbnails on Etsy. Also the Rebel takes grainy pictures and I just fucking hate that camera. Sooooooo, yeah. New pics of “Ooh La La” on Etsy that show the colours better. WOOOO!

So I just finished watching Food Inc., which for some reason aired on CBC Newsworld last night so I recorded it (I just find this sort of weird since I think the documentary only came out on DVD like, last week? also, if you’re in Canada, you can watch it on the CBC website here but I don’t know for how long) and while most of the contents of the movie I already knew, it really helped to give the whole thing a bigger picture and at the end of the movie it’s not “welp, we’re fucked!”, they actually give you tips on what you can do to help change things.

Two of the tips were to eat locally grown foods and to buy produce when it’s in season. So the first thing I wondered was, how in the hell am I supposed to know what’s locally grown and what’s in season? I mean, I live in Ontario, Canada, what could possibly be “in season” in the dead of February when there’s 4 feet of snow on the ground? And another thing is that, just as an example, the only grocery store in our town, the entire time I’ve lived here, has never once had locally grown strawberries in July, when they’re in season, despite the fact that we live within 3 km of several strawberry farms. Every strawberry I’ve ever seen in that store has come from California, same with blueberries, blackberries and raspberries.

Anyway, we have these really annoying commercials on TV in the summer about Ontario farming with this really horrible jingle that goes, “Good things gro-o-ow, in Ontariooo!” and as soon as the thoughts above entered my head, I thought “durrrr” and Googled “Foodland Ontario”, which is like, the government “brand” for produce in this province and lo & behold, on their website is a chart as to which produce is in season during which months. So I bookmarked that, right next to my bookmark for the grocery store flyer and this family is going to make a concerted effort to only buy produce when it’s in season. If I want a BLT in February? Well that’s just too damn bad, I have to wait until March. Since it’s all grown in-province, that’s killing two birds with one stone.

Another tip from the movie is to grow your own vegetables, which as I’ve mentioned, we’ll be doing for the first time this summer. I bought enough beans, for example, that my intention is to have 4 rows total, 1 for us to eat during the summer and 3 for freezing. That won’t do us for the whole winter, but that’s just how much land I have to work with and considering that we’re doing the garden this year for financial reasons every little bit helps.

As for meat…well, we’re still going to have to rely on the grocery store for that because the organic food store in town is just too cost prohibitive. I already don’t eat chicken, though the rest of the family does and the only time I eat ground beef is in spaghetti sauce, which I’m going to stop doing, even though the rest of the family uses it to make hamburgers out of. Our dinners are still mostly meat-based, but gradually our meat portions have been decreasing and our veggie portions have been increasing, so that’s good, and we also have at least one meatless dinner per week.

We’re not gonna save the world and we’re not exactly models of nutrition, but I know we’re doing better than most of the people we know in that we’re actually doing something. Compared to say, 5 years ago, we’ve gotten a lot better as we’ve learned to do better and we’ll continue to do better.

And that’s really all I have to say about food today.

Sometime this week I’ll start taking pics of my grow-op and make my first official Keep Off The Lawn post. Right now on the living room windowsill I have cherry tomatoes, bobcat tomatoes, green peppers and purple peppers starting in beer cups. Some of them are getting too big for their Saran Wrap hats already while others haven’t even sprouted, so tonight when I replace their hats with clear plastic cups, I’m going to reseed the ones that haven’t sprouted yet because I have a feeling they’re not going to. Also, I noticed today that my daffodils are up and there are tons of little crocuses and tulips out front that I have to take pictures of before they get decimated in 2 weeks by the sod cutter. Somehow grass has overtaken about half of the front garden so next paycheque we’ll be renting the sod cutter to get rid of it so I can plant my wildflower seeds in May.

Next week is Gogol Bordello which means that also next week I’m going to be quitting smoking…again. It’s like my dad says, you just gotta keep quitting. When you start up again, if you start up again, you just have to quit again because every time you quit, that’s at least a few months worth of smokes that you won’t be smoking. I’m hoping that this time it’ll be permanent and Blake & I have decided on some things to make it permanent, namely, we’re not going to become friends with anyone who smokes until we’re both several years in the clear as far as being nonsmokers. Since we’re not friends with Wayne & Judy anymore and since they’re moving May 1st (*happydance*) and since none of our current friends smoke, there will be no temptation for me to smoke and no opportunity. As I know I mentioned when I quit last time, Wayne & Judy would practically put cigarettes in my mouth and light them for me (Blake too) and it was impossible to say no because they just won’t take “no” for an answer and they don’t respect the fact that you’ve either quit or are trying to quit. Instead, they would sit there and every 5 minutes say, “are you suuuuuure you don’t want a smoke? The pack’s right there, just help yourself,” or Wayne would toss you a smoke and say, “here just smoke it, I know you want to” and things like that. Then if you still found the willpower to say no, Wayne would sit there and basically tell you why you’re an idiot for quitting, how it won’t make a difference and how if you die of cancer, that’s just what God has in store for you, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it so you might as well enjoy your smokes while you wait.

So with Wayne & Judy out of the picture (our other neighbour doesn’t smoke), there will be no pressure and no opportunity to smoke unless I suddenly develop the courage to walk to the store myself and go get a pack, which would never happen. The fact is, unlike other attempts to quit, I actually want to quit, it’s my decision, not a decision being made for me. And I’d love to say that it’s for health reasons and while that’s partly it (I’ve developed asthma and it would be idiotic to ask the doctor for Ventolin rather than just quitting), it’s mostly financial. As a condition of me starting to smoke again last summer, I had to start paying for them myself and in the beginning that was fine because I was only smoking 2 packs a week. Since then it’s escalated to almost a pack a day and I just don’t make that much money and more to the point, the bit of money that I do make, I don’t want to waste all of it on basically nothing, not when I’m desperately in need of canvases and I’m quickly depleting my supply of the more expensive art supplies like gel medium, Weathered Wood and acrylic glazing liquid which are each about $12-15 a bottle and therefore (to me) expensive to replace. A pack of 3 canvases is about $25, also, again to me, expensive to replenish and I just started working on my last one yesterday.

So, it’s time to quit. Hopefully for good. I’ve decided to do it the day after Gogol Bordello because Gogol Bordello has me stressed out of my mind and I’m going to be around smokers that night, plus my mom that afternoon. Before I go to bed Tuesday night, I’ll be breaking and flushing all of the cigarettes I have left and that’ll be it. I’m not worried about it being hard, it’s not like I haven’t done this before, I know the first 3 days are going to be monstrous, but after that it just gets easier and I’m going to stock up on Skittles and Starbursts beforehand so I have something to occupy my mouth throughout the first week. (Insert lame and obvious oral sex joke here.)

So that’s that.

This weekend I was ridiculously productive. On Friday I finished “Ooh La La“, as I posted about, and Saturday & Sunday I worked on what I’m calling my “silly painting” for right now…because it’s a silly idea and I don’t even know why I’m doing it…and started a 3rd which is going to use the pink tinsel glitter I posted about the other day and which is going to have a fairy on it, although that’s as far as I’ve worked it through.

Something I have to say though, is that I am absolutely in love with these little storage cups I bought from Stockade when I bought paint last month. They’re the same kind of plastic cups you get coleslaw in when you get takeout, look:

I custom mix a lot of my paint colours and all of my glitter mixes and when I do so, I often have excess paint leftover that I’ve never really found anywhere to put. I tried plastic pill bottles because god knows I have a million of them, but they’re not air tight so the paint would just eventually dry out. Prior to that, I was just letting the paint go to waste, but with these little containers, I can store the it and use it for other things. In the picture, the top container is full of black glitter mixed with water and acrylic glazing liquid, the pink ones are metallic pink that I mixed this weekend, the blue is pearlized turquoise that I used for “Ooh La La”‘s eyeshadow and the purple is purple glitter mixed with acrylic glazing liquid to make sort of a paste that I used as eyeshadow on the “silly painting” I’m working on now. It doesn’t look like it in the picture, but the two pinks are actually two different colours, one’s a lot lighter than the other. One will be used for splatters while the other one will be used for hair. I should have put a coin in the picture so you could see how big the containers are. Each one holds about 3/4 of an ounce of liquid.

Anyway, they’re awesome, although a bit expensive for what they are, and you can get them here. If anyone knows where to get these cheaper and in bigger quantities, please let me know. I’m assuming you can find them on restaurant wholesale sites but they probably have minimum orders and really all I want is these cups.

Well, Blake’s going to be home soon, my paint is now dry, so I’m going to get back to working on these paintings before dinner. I hope everyone has had a good Monday and I’m sure I’ll blabber at you some more tomorrow.

The dealership where we got the new car is near Michael’s and my mom had given me a gift certificate for my birthday which I had decided, after much deliberation, should be spent on glitter as it’s my goal to have one of the large jars of every colour Martha Stewart makes because the stuff’s just beautiful.

So I go to where the Martha Stewart stuff is and I start looking at the glitter, which is $8.49 a bottle. On the shelf below the regular glitter, I saw a NEW kind of glitter and decided I had to have that too.

Since the stuff’s kind of expensive, I got my magenta and turquoise bottles of regular glitter and a bottle each of pink and turquoise of this NEW glitter. Check it out, it’s called tinsel glitter:

I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with this new kind of glitter, probably the same thing I do with the regular kind, but I thought it was awesome and I’ve now raised my glitter goal to having a bottle of every colour of this kind too.

They had a kit of 12 small vials of the tinsel glitter for $29.99, but I didn’t want to spend that much and it wouldn’t be contributing to my goal so I decided against it. Last year for Mother’s Day, Blake & the kids got me a similar kit that had 24 vials of the regular glitter, which I believe is every colour they make, and as I’ve been using it, I’ve fallen more and more in love with it. That Martha sure knows what she’s doing.

Annnnnnnnnd that’s all I really have to say about glitter at this juncture.

Goodbye old, rusty Cavalier that needed more work done than the car was worth, hello 2010 Hyundai Elantra!

“Ooh La La” is finished and is available in my Etsy shop!

One of my favourite sounds in the world. They’ll do this all summer.
Sometimes it gets noisy here at night between the frogs, the crickets and the coyotes!

As per usual, the pictures don’t do her justice. Her eyeshadow matched her dress almost perfectly and is a pearlized turquoise. Her dress is made of light blue glittery cardstock and her hair is metallic pink, as are her lips. Her eyes are a light metallic blue and her skin is so creamy and perfect I don’t know if I can bring myself to put the pink jewel bindi on her forehead as I had planned in the beginning (but I think I will).

The background is white crackle over turquoise paint, with metallic pink and turquoise splotches and magenta and turquoise glitter that will sparkle and shine once she’s finished and I put on the final two coats of gloss glaze varnish.

Later today I’m going to sew her corset with pink thread and give the poor girl some arms.

There aren’t going to be any words above her head and she’s not going to be doing anything but standing there being pretty. I sorta started off painting this one for myself, but after careful consideration, I’ve decided that she’ll be up in my Etsy shop once she’s finished because I like money and I’ll just keep whichever paintings I don’t end up selling.

Currently I don’t own a piece of my own artwork and this painting was supposed to rectify that situation but I’ve decided it doesn’t matter so from now on, she’ll be painted for profit.

Annnnnnnnnd that’s what I’m working on right now.

After 16 years of semi-dutiful service, my mom’s van has finally given up the ghost and was disassembled today. Since a lot of people who come to my site or who read my Live Journal really liked my mom’s van, I thought I’d post pics of what my mom & John did with it today. My mom says she’s not sure what she’ll do with the pieces, the edges will have to be made less sharp to do anything with them, but there was so much blood, sweat, tears and money put into that van that she thought they were worth saving.

Not that it’s important or anything.

Have you ever actually done The Sims’ Legacy Challenge? Do you even know what it is?

The Legacy Challenge started with The Sims 2 and is “a long, 10-generation challenge where you start out with a single founder and very humble beginnings and try to lead the family to fame, fortune and success over the course of 10 generations.” It was created by a fan of the game who longed to make it a little more challenging by actually having goals.

One of the two main rules of the Legacy Challenge is that you can’t use a money cheat and you can’t do things to prolong your Sims’ lives. In The Sims 2, you could drink an “elixir of life” which was a happiness points reward and that would extend your life by a few days. In The Sims 3, you can eat “life fruit” or “Ambrosia” to extend your life and of course, for the sake of the Legacy Challenge, these things are forbidden.

Here are the quasi-official rules for the Legacy Challenge for Sims 3 that are quasi-endorsed by Electronic Arts by the fact that they linked to them via their Facebook fan page last week. That’s when I realized that in the 10 years I’ve been playing The Sims games, I’ve always started out with the intention of doing the Legacy Challenge, but I’ve never really done it for real. And now that I’ve read the actual rules and have tried to actually do the challenge, I realize that a lot of the people I know online who have claimed to have done the challenge are fucking liars because the screencaps I’ve seen of like, their 3rd generation, are in houses with items that are absolutely impossible to get by that stage.

Here’s a little secret about me: I’ve never had a sim die naturally of old age. In fact, I’ve never had a sim age into an elder because I’ve always used the life-extending items in both The Sims 2 and 3. In The Sims 3, they allow you to toggle the aging option and I’ve always played the game with the longest of these options. I’ve also always given up on being poor in the beginning and have therefore always succumbed to the siren call of the money cheat.

The Sims 3 Facebook fan page is actually really annoying in that they ask you the most asinine questions several times a day, such as “Click “like” if your sim went on an adventure today!” or “Click “like” if your sim bought a car today!” but I remain a fan because the fan page is also where they post announcements on upcoming expansions and things like that. So, last week they asked if anyone had done the Legacy Challenge and linked to the challenge’s rules. And I thought, “y’know? I haven’t”, so I clicked on the rules link and educated myself, knowing full well that this month is going to be a shitty month full of bleeding and pain and not doing much else.

So I read the rules, which are actually kind of brutal when you’re used to playing without any real goals or challenges and you typically cheat your ass off, and created Endometria Moody, my legacy’s founder for the Legacy Challenge.

Now in the rules, they tell you specifically which property you have to move your founder into and they do this so you have a huge lot to expand your house and property as your legacy matures and also so everyone starts out with only $1500 disposable income. (Okay they’re called Simoleans, but there’s no sign for that on my keyboard, so I’m just gonna call it money.) And believe me, $1500 doesn’t get you very far. In the beginning, all I had was an undecorated wall, a bed, a toilet, a sink and a fridge and even though I’ve been playing for about 3 days now, I don’t really have much more than that at the moment.

Two optional rules of the challenge are that you can choose to have either a patriarchy or a matriarchy where only sims of a specific gender can become the next generation’s heir and the family trait option where you choose one of your founder’s personality traits that gets passed down to each generation. In the beginning I thought these rules were great, so I wrote down in my sims journal (yes I keep a sims journal) that I would be making a matriarchy and that my family trait would be “natural cook”, which means that you learn the cooking skill faster and you make better quality meals which in turn, give your mood a bigger boost.

Well…my first attempt at doing the Legacy Challenge FAILED COMPLETELY. Endometria Moody started out as a young adult whose lifetime wish was to be a “5-star celebrated chef” and you get 1 point for fulfilling each of your sims’ lifetime wishes. So naturally, I spent most of Endometria’s young adult life getting raises and promotions in the culinary career track. By the time she aged to an adult, she was already on level 8 of her career and the goal as per her lifetime wish was level 10. So here I thought I was doing pretty good, even though to keep her happy and hygienic I had to take her to the community gym every day before work so she could have a shower because I couldn’t afford to by one.

Since she worked so much, the only people she really had contact with were her co-workers, one of whom was Odin Crosby, one of the more handsome townies in the game. Since it’s another rule that you can only procreate with townies, I chose him as Endometria’s object of affection and started the love affair because at this point, I only had 18 days to produce an heir to my legacy – a female, according to my chosen optional rule – or it was game over.

So the love affair began, although there were some glitches I hadn’t accounted for and that’s what had me failing miserably. Odin Crosby had a wife or a girlfriend whom he lived with, named Heather. I convinced him to leave her and go steady with me and while we had crazy amounts of woo hoo, I couldn’t get him to try for a baby, which may have had something to do with the fact that one of his character traits was that be disliked children. After we started going steady and with about 10 days to go before Endometria became an elder where she wouldn’t be physically able to produce an heir of any sex, Odin Crosby stopped coming over. I’d call him up and invite him over and he’d say “Sure, I’ll be there soon!” but before the phone call ended, he gave me some lame excuse about how something suddenly came up and that he wouldn’t be coming over. And this kept happening every single day, no matter what time I called, until finally there were only 2 days left until Endometria would become an elder and since I think it takes 3 or 4 days to incubate a pregnancy, I had no choice but to evict her, wasting 2 days worth of game time, and deleting that saved game so I could start over with a cloned copy of Endometria.

I failed at The Sims. *headdesk*

It became time for round 2. Just as I had the first time around, I started Endometria off as a young adult, giving her extra time to get her career in order and to produce an heir. I threw out the idea of a matriarchy, because at this point I’d take what I could get, and I also threw out the idea of having a family trait at all, although I’m secretly attempting to give everyone in the Moody legacy a green thumb. These two optional rules don’t have any effect on the challenge’s scoring, so I kind of see them as bonuses more than goals.

Something I realized early on that I really took for granted with all my cheating, are maids, repairmen and nannies. Your hygiene level really goes down when you have to clean your own toilet, sink, tub, counters and stoves, not to mention the time it takes. Also, when all you can afford is the cheapest bathroom amenities, they tend to break a lot, which means that my current incarnation of Endometria has a high handiness skill. And nannies…well, I’ll get to that in a bit.

And when you can’t afford seating, your sims eat their meals on the only seat available…

This time around, I decided to focus on producing an heir as a young adult as opposed to getting Endometria’s career in order. The first thing that needed to be done was to procure a mate and to hell with Odin Crosby this time, I wasn’t gonna touch the same trash twice. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and go to the community garden to harvest plants, which I could plant in my garden at home, and also scope out a new mate with which to procreate. Enter Sherman Bagley. That’s him on the right.

This began Endometria and Sherman’s whirlwind courtship, with the goal to not only produce an heir, but to have a two income household so we could afford to actually build a house with STUFF in it. Sherman was in the military when he and Endometria met, but after she got knocked up (twice), proposed to him, got married and moved him in I discovered that his lifetime wish was to be a forensic detective.

As soon as Sherman, Endometria and their children became a family, my first order of business was switching his career track to better meet his lifetime goals. In the meantime, Endometria was on perpetual maternity leave as she gave birth to a baby boy named Zephyr, twin girls named Penny and Poppy and she’s currently pregnant again with possibly her 4 AND 5th children, seeing as I spent the extra happiness points and spring for fertility treatment.

And this is where the appreciation for The Sims 3 nannies comes into play. Neither Sherman nor Endometria has gotten the good night’s sleep mood boost for about a week as all 3 of their children seem to be on different schedules. The good news, though, is that being a two income household now, when Endometria finally goes back to work, the happy couple should be able to afford to hire a nanny while they’re both at work. I was worried in the beginning that that wouldn’t be the case and that Endometria (or Sherman) would have to put her career on hold indefinitely in order to look after her children and keep the social worker at bay.

What’s killing me about the legacy challenge is things just like that, how with these rules in place, the game really mimics real life, with things like possibly having to choose between being a good mother and having a career or having a job you don’t really want to have because the money’s good, meanwhile your passions lie elsewhere.

This is Endometria eating salad while sitting on a slightly nicer toilet in an actual bathroom with a door & everything because with being a two income household, she and Sherman could actually afford a bit of privacy:

The other thing with the Legacy Challenge is that you get 1 point for every 100,000 lifetime happiness points gained per bloodline sim in the household. Thus, I’ve been juggling money woes with keeping everyone’s wants and needs in mind which are often at odds with each other. That, too, makes the game a little bit like real life. I mean, when you only have $400 to your family’s name and your mother wants to buy a crib for the baby that could sleep on the floor technically, what do you do? Or what if your sim is exhausted but because he’s a neat freak, he wants to clean the bathroom and kitchen, what do you do? You do whatever they want because a happy sim means a productive sim more likely to get promotions at work and those happiness points you can accrue can be spent on rewards like “fast learner”, which enables your sim to learn recipes and skills faster, or “speedy cleaner”, in the case of Sherman, whose OCD tendencies with cleanliness border on pure lunacy and take up a lot of perfectly good sleeping time.

Movin’ on up…Sherman and Endometria can now afford CHAIRS! Sure they’re the cheapest chairs in the game, but it sure beats eating cereal on the toilet!

So this is what I’m going to be doing for the next month or so. As I stated in the beginning, due to my endometriosis I won’t be able to do much other than sitting in this chair, so I figured hey, why shouldn’t I do this and write all about my misadventures on Buttercup?

Have you done the Legacy Challenge for Sims 3 by the book? I know many people have and they post about their legacy families on the official Sims Exchange, but even with some of those that I checked out over the last few days, I think there’s maybe been a wee bit of cheating happening because in the beginning, there’s no way some people have had the homes or items they have only starting out with a $1500 budget. I mean, Endometria and Sherman are about 8 days away from becoming adults and so far all I have is one undecorated wall and a bathroom, everything else is outdoors.

Anyway, if you’ve done the Legacy Challenge, I’d love to hear all about it and if you’ve never done it, why not do it now and then tell me all about it? My plan is to write about my challenge all throughout the month or until I hit the 10th generation milestone, I figured I’d give everyone fair warning!

And now, I’m off to go hide in my Sims Bunker for a little while longer…I can’t wait to see how many children Endometria births this time!