Here are some more recent pictures from the vegetable garden. Everything's doing pretty well, except for my sad eggplants and one surviving melon plant. I do have a baby eggplant on one of my three plants that didn't die, but other than that, they're not looking so hot.

( Garden pictures behind cut )

( Music meme behind cut )

Hopefully I'll get a set of Sims posts up tomorrow for those of you following them. I've been distracted by watching House the last couple of days now that enough people convinced me I was missing out on it and we Netflixed the first season DVDs. House is pretty awesome, I must say. Thumbs up!

Another meme, courtesy of zhie!

FANFIC MEME - Answer the questions about your own fanfic - if you're a fanfic writer and you're reading this, you've been tagged!

( Behind the cut because it's long )

And now that I've done all this blabbing about fic, I should probably go work on some.

Yeah, the ominous subject header means I created another set of fandom-related sims. I'd told myself that I wasn't going to do any based on the Lunatacs, tempting as the idea was, because juggling a house of six is a little crazy. I also thought, "well I can't make Amok or TugMug look at all like they're supposed to" as a great excuse, never mind that I ignored such limitations for the DW characters. Well, then last night I had a freaking dream about making Lunatac sims, so obviously, it was meant to happen, right?

And now here they are. Forgive me, people on my friends list who have already O.D.'d on my Sims 3 posts. Because now there will be more to go along with the Fearsome Sims.

( We are Luna-Sims, from the streets of Sunset Valley )

Yesterday we caught raccoon #2. That one looked a little rougher than the other one and had a wound on its arm. I think it came from one of our chickens while it was fighting for its life. So that one went to the same place as the previous one, far from our house and our chicken pens. We set out traps last night but they came up empty this time, and there was no new damage in the pens either. I'm hopeful that means that we caught the main culprits causing problems. I don't doubt that there are more raccoons around here, but if it means that there aren't any who have already decided our chickens are dandy snacks, I'm okay with that. Hopefully the new lights, bolts on the housing, etc. will prevent any more from getting attacked.

On the fandom front, I posted the first chapter of a new Darkwing fic on fanfiction.net yesterday. Here's the link if you're interested: Tension Convention. The premise is that Quackerjack hears of a Whiffle Boy fan convention in town, and goes to get Megavolt, Bushroot, and Liquidator to help him get his revenge against Whiffle Boy. It'll be the first of an ongoing series of fics, much like my Voltron stories all build on one another.

I'm still tinkering with Sims 3, although not as much as I have been in the past couple of weeks. I leveled my Riverview F5 guys up pretty much as far as I feel like, with that Bushroot now up to mad scientist, Negs as Emperor of Evil, and Bud already past his CEO goal. Actually his is kind of funny, because after he got his lifetime wish I accepted the thing that let him switch to a political career. He was Leader of the Free World for a while, but lost his job because I kept saying yes to "He has the opportunity to steal money from his campaign fund! Does he do it?" ('cause we all know he totally would, Licky's not known for his honesty, haha!) So poor Bud lost his job and then the computer sent him to get a criminal job all on its own. How appropriate. That Megavolt in the medical career also made it to the top but wanted to quit once he hit the maximum level in that field, so I let him. Quackerjack in the "jack of all trades" is still on career #3. He got to 5 in journalism and culinary, and now he's in medical at about 3. I like to think of this as the "I am Dr. Heebie" stage from that ep where he and Megavolt pretended to be doctors at the stress relief clinic. ;)

For ha-has I also created a Sim game set in Sunset Valley with one character. The notion of a character with the "heartbreaker" goal amused me, but I could never manage that many relationships in a multi-sim household. So I created a sim of the sluttiest OC I've ever written or RP'd as, which would be my Thundercats half-tiger, half-psi Lunatac Fantasy. I gave her classy traits like flirty, great kisser, mooch, snob, and schmoozer and the heartbreaker goal. Then I used money cheats out the ass so she wouldn't have to have a job and could spend most of her time juggling love interests in an already nice house. I threw the Darkwing characters into the town but didn't set them up first like I did in Riverview so they've been totally computer controlled from the get go. As a result, most of them don't have jobs either. Fantasy found Launchpad first and made him her first victim boyfriend. (Funny note: My Launchpad sim makes the stupidest laugh ever during woohoo.) She also got Steelbeak up to romantic interest and woohooed with him hours apart from seeing LP. She hasn't lost any faction or gotten daggers from them because they don't know how she's playing them yet. LOL. It'll be funny the first time this all blows up in her face.

Also the F5 lives across the street from Darkwing's family in that game. I don't know about Negaduck, but Bud and DW are great pals and one time after Launchpad invited Fantasy over, Bud came by and chatted with DW for some time. Also, a baby was on the floor by the name of Lindsey Mallard. Don't know where she came from or where mom is, but geez Drake, can't you even buy the kid a crib? Then again, there was only one bed in the house, too, which he and Launchpad and Gos must all share, or someone sleeps on the couch.

Another funny thing in that one was Fantasy getting herself electrocuted fixing a dishwasher at level 4 of the handiness skill. I thought you had to have basically no handiness to get zapped, or low skill starting on something harder like fixing a computer or a stereo. She is obviously more bimbo than any other sim I've played. The mooch trait is also funny because she gets wishes to mooch money and food from all her friends and romantic interests. She mooched 2 bucks from LP once after woohoo. Shameless! The "snob" trait also means that you admire your reflection in the mirror constantly. If she's idle and anywhere near a mirror, she will be off to admire herself in a flash. So anyway, yeah, that amused me for an afternoon.

On a totally non-computer related note, I'm psyched to have some baby summer squashes growing in my garden. I've got several female flower yellow and a couple green ball squashes. Oddly, I have no male flowers blooming yet, so I have to hope that the bees are importing me some pollen to make them viable. One of my hubbard squash vines is pretty big, and almost all of my pumpkin and squash plants seem to be doing well, with lots of buds but no flowers quite yet.

Well, we caught at least one of the culprits attacking our chickens last night. At the advice of my brother-in-law, we set up solar lights around each of the chicken coops and we also dug our have-a-heart traps out of the attic (my mother used to have problems with squirrels getting into her basement at her old house, but they came in handy for this too). We baited them with some chicken meat and set them up near the pens. Just after dark Coldy went to check on them and they'd already caught one big fat raccoon. Looks like it was coming back for seconds.

This morning we went out there and the inside of the babies' pen was trashed again, even with the one raccoon already trapped, which means there's at least one more still trying to get them. The ducks and chicks were safe, and the predator was not able to get the door open, although it was obvious that it tried because the sticks we propped against it after securing it were knocked away and the hay all torn up and dug in around the pen. The bait was also gone from the smaller traps, but they didn't get whatever took them. (The raccoon was in our one big trap, the other 2 we have are smaller.) Also, we noticed that the fence was bent in two spots, one where it was pushed up underneath near a low spot in the ground and at the top by one of the poles where it looks like a fat raccoon or something that size went over and in. Worst of all there were fresh dig marks around Cookie's pen today also. It seems our chickens are now prime targets, and not just the babies. Oh, and this was icky, but they dug up the chicks' remains that I buried yesterday with some tulip bulbs also. I guess the hole wasn't deep enough.

After Coldwin takes the raccoon to his aunt's woods to let it go (she lives pretty far, 10 miles or so away), we're going to set the traps up again tonight and try to get predator #2. He's also going to look into the solar-powered electric wire for the fence to run it around the tops of the pens, and tack down the loose parts we found where something pushed in.

Other stuff that's been going on... on Wednesday Coldy and I went to see Transformers. I still can't get over how awesome it is to be in a small town with a small-ish cheap theater. Two tickets, a large popcorn and two sodas cost us a total of $17. In NY the tickets alone would've been that for a non-matinee show. And at the Palisades theater I think the popcorn combo was $10 for a large popcorn and one soda. As for the movie itself, I enjoyed it. I'm one of those 80s kids that's only mildly familiar with the original show and canon, unlike hubby who knows much more about it, so I can enjoy the movies for what they are and not notice inconsistencies with the old canon for the most part. Points that stuck out for me: I liked Starscream more in this movie. He reminded me more of the cartoon version and I liked his voice as it was reminiscent of the original. Simmons was pretty funny, although Leo annoyed me more than not. Also, and this was probably written that way intentionally, I kept wanting to smack Sam for being an idiot. C'mon dude, you're this big a dork and you got the girl you thought was out of your league for most of the first movie, and now you can't say the l-word to keep her when you know it's what she wants?

And I still can't see Shia LaBeouf and not make the mental comparison of him to 80s-era Dave Gahan.

I've also started poking at a couple of my Darkwing-based writing projects again. I have one story I may post a chapter of soon. I'm still edgy about posting a WIP rather than episodic complete works like I did in the Voltron fandom, as I remember the snippy remarks from years ago I used to get about unfinished stories or stories not updated frequently enough in the Thundercats fandom, but I think I'd like to try it again and see if I can keep up with it. Maybe my dry spells between scenes/installments won't be as long this way. I just have to get over my "but once you post it, that's it, no more editing earlier stuff" hangup that I have.

I've been so into playing Sims 3 lately that I haven't made a real post in a while. That game is a blast. Coldwin downloaded the extra content recently, including a second town called Riverview which is a more rural setting. My Fearsome Sims game has been fun but I wanted to try the new town and stuff in that. I also wanted to see how fast I could skill up characters if I only had a couple to balance, so I created a small household of just Bushroot and Liquidator. It's so much easier to skill up two rather than five because I can warp speed through things like work and sleep and reading.

I did discover something hilarious though when I went to move them to a larger house. Riverview has this property that's like a sixties hippie commune with a huge garden and orchard, a pond, and a decent sized house. The decor is equally hideous, but it forced me to learn how to paint and refurbish. (Yeah I know, it's not that hard, but none of the other places I lived in were that butt-ugly that I couldn't just ignore the blah-to-mildly-ugly painting and flooring.) I think it's because some of it was a little too much like the 70s-looking stuff that was in my old house that we had to remodel around. It was like I went "Oh hell no, I lived in a house like this once, I'll be damned if I subject my sims to it!"

Then I spent ages decorating it and the yard just so. How typically Libra of me, I know. LOL! But it did leave me with the desire to start an alternate Fearsome Sims story in the new town. I'm going to put the guys in the commune and redecorate it to be this rural bad guy hideout with dark rooms and a creepy cartoon villain look fitting them. I'll just move in the same exact family with the same exact traits it started with in the other one (the only pre-defined relationship between them was having Megavolt & Quackerjack paired) and see if it plays out differently. I think it will, because I programmed my Riverview sims (alternate versions of Liquidator and Bushroot) with the same traits and goals, just slightly altered names so as to not alter the other household, and I see subtle differences in their behavior. But before I advance them at all I'm going to move other sims like Darkwing and his family, Rhoda, and perhaps others like Steelbeak and Splatter Phoenix into town so that they can run into them like NPCs. In a small town, they're much more likely to run into one another, mwahahaha!

Also I have to share some funny screen shots from the test sims I made later, probably after I post the next Fearsome Sims update. That Bushroot made it to level 10 in the science career (Mad Scientist) and his outfit is hilarious. He looks like Doc Brown from Back to the Future in green and purple.

Other than playing Sims 3, I've been tinkering with a new story (a Bushroot/Rhoda fic, which was an idea I had started before playing the Sims game, but this has really fueled my desire to work on it), and doing some reading. I finished that book The Uninvited, which was far creepier than the episode of A Haunting that it was based on. Weather-wise it's been hot and humid and icky. My plants are mostly doing well. I've got lots of baby tomatoes now, and I've been eating my fresh lettuce in salads. The blackberries are starting to ripen, too. Yum! In a couple weeks I'll be able to go around the property and pick tons of them. Some of the paths that Coldwin mowed have made berries that would've otherwise been inaccessible easy pickings.

Oh, and I almost forgot to add, on Dragon Adopters my Chelithi hit "Ancient" yesterday, and just a few hours later Rothqueli turned 60. I was so glad that there was no equipment overlap because it bugs me to have my dragon wearing stuff they've outgrown.