Whew... my body is all achy and tired. I feel fatigued a lot. It's partially my period and partially having to be used to adjusting my usual habits at home I guess. Ah well, I'll have time to myself in a week or so.

I bought a Zune yesterday (had to stand in crazy line to get it) but it ended up being some sort of broken refurbished version and we exchanged to get a new one. I hope this one works. I mostly wanted a mp3 player so I could have music to listen to while I'm walking alone ('cause sometimes I get anxiety from loud noises, I could drown them out with music.)

I have to say I REALLY HATE earbuds though. They're uncomfortable for me. I suppose it's also because I only have the one that came with the Zune though, and it kind of blows. :P

Now to continue my "let's not stay inside and be a hermit" efforts, I'm going out again today. Hopefully I will be in a good mood this time. I'm wearing clothes I like and I feel ok (I even got a decent face wash so my face feels clean) and my ear infection is going away.

I always feel kind of silly posting about "OOH I'M GOING OUT" but as I've said before, for me this is often a big thing. My mix of depression and anxiety leads to agoraphobic tendencies (especially now, while I'm still waiting on various papers and IDs) at times, and I have to fight that a lot so I don't end up languishing away indoors.

Anyway, I'm mostly going out to get a sound card for my computer. And I think we may go out to eat and see a movie cause we never got to last time. I'm going to be back by the time Kalli finishes work (hehe, 10 pm is "Kalli finishes work hour" now.) She wanted to play Last Chaos with us -- though OOH, she's going to be able to renew DR very soon now! I was telling Terra I was starting to get a little DR-apathetic, and having her in game again would TOTALLY reverse that for me.

*goes before it gets too late* :O

I'm tired but I wanted to post a bit...

Earlier, Manze (my friend from DR) was poking me about trying this MMO called Last Chaos (Aeria Games, same makers as DOMO that I tried a little while ago). So I did, and I got Jon to join and maybe Kalli will later.

Here are our characters (I'm the blond healer) and here's a closeup of the mage cause it amuses me Manze is playing this dommie-ish chick (he wanted to play mage, but unfortunately LC doesn't let you choose your gender.) Jon is the knightly beefcake. :D

now, about the rest of the day and yesterday...

Okay, so I tried restarting Sims 2 and it just wouldn't start. At all. Jon went and looked for a solution for me 'cause I was busy fuuuming. D: Turns out that I needed to delete my groups.cache and accessories.cache from C:\My Documents\EA Games\Sims 2 (or the Vista equivelant which is more like C:\Users\[myusername]\Documents\EA Games\Sims 2).

I guess either Freetime itself, or the patch, ends up writing garbage into those caches, so I had to delete them to force the game to remake 'em. (Of course, I backed them up first, and you should too if you want to try this).

Other stuff... (mostly RPish)

So, the next expansion, the 8th (?!?) is going to be "Apartment Life" it looks like. The concept seems somewhat like University except with no school, and it applies through a Sim's entire lifespan.

Man. I know I am going to buy it. =_=

I recently uploaded a patch for Freetime that included a Securom update that borked my game. Well, I got the dreaded message indicating a conflict with emulation software (which I don't haaaave. This computer is clean!) I was despairing I wouldn't be able to play, until I found this link to a forum explaining how to fix it.

To put it short, rename your SIMS2EP7.exe (found here, assuming you did the default install: C:/Program Files/EA GAMES/The Sims 2 FreeTime/TSBin) and download this new version straight from Securom.

Worked for me! :O So thought I'd pass it along in case others who play Sims 2 PC and run into the same problem come across my site.