2.05 Time Flies

Marcus put the finishing touches on his latest book, 'SkittyKitty Goes To School'. It was part of special triple pack, including 'SkittyKitty And The Wiggly Fish' and 'SkittyKitty And The Forbidden Garden'. His own children were about to age up, and although he had no desire to change genre, he had long ago decided that he was writing books purely for his children, and if other children enjoyed them and absorbed valuable life lessons, he was fine with that. Besides, his family was by far the wealthiest in town, and he didn't need to write for the money.

Casey and Lilli had the party preparations well under control by the time Marcus had shut down his computer. Marcus, Casey and Lilli had worked hard to raise the children to be the best they could be, and to give them a head start in life.

Caseys's sisters arrived with their partners, and Serena, whose flaming red hair was longer than ever. Lawrence Wong-Lum and his wife Ava put in an appearance for an hour before leaving for a historical reenactment in the town where Ava was born. Lawrence' brother Ernest also came, although without his wife and child.

Dylan, being the oldest by a minute was first to blow out the cake. He leaned right down to the cake, and huffed and puffed and blew the candles right out. Just like the big bad wolf in story Lilli had told him. Marcus had to lean back a little, as he was sure Dylan was going to singe his eyebrows.

Natalie was next, being the middle child by a minute either way. She made a big show of huffing and puffing like she had seen her brother do. She wanted cake and then a nap, or maybe cake, more cake, and a nap.

 

Dominic, who was youngest, was last to blow out the candles on his cake, he had been watching his brother and sister with building excitement, and now that it was his turn, he knew exactly what to do.
He huffed, and he puffed, and he blew those candles right out.

After the party was over, and the guests had left, Old Boney was released from her chamber to clean up, and Marcus and Casey herded the children upstairs for family photos.

"Hey Guys! Look at the camera!", Casey asked.

"Wow, that was so much easier than last time you aged up, thank you for your cooperation!", Casey gushed.

Casey went to soak in the spa for a while, suddenly realizing that one of the guests hadn't left yet.
His tag read 'Roux Wong-Lum'. She knew Lawrence and Ava wouldn't be back until the next day, so she sent Lawrence a text, and pulled out Gypsy's old bed for Roux' stay over.

Meanwhile, in an undisclosed secret location, a mad scientist continued with a bizarre experiment, in a secret room attached to the basement, Lilli was working on an invention. Originally Lilli had this room created to store the painting that contained the magic that protected the lot from her mothers assassin. It had more recently been used as an alchemy room by Lil in a failed attempt to heal Venice.

It was now housing a sculpting station, an inventing bench and other odds and ends, including an almost complete robot.

Once the paint was dry, Lilli activated the Simbot, and named it 'Astrid', after a legendary fae queen of old, Lilli requested that the simbot learn from books available in the nearby bookshelf.

Astrid's first book was on gardening, she managed to explore her surroundings enough to discover that they were in possession of a harden, and that said garden, was in dire need of weeding.

"Where does the time go?", asked Casey, admiring her husband, who despite no longer a young adult, still had his baby face looks. Looking out the window behind Marcus, she added "And who is that in our garden?"

"Seriously guys, I followed her down here to ask her a question this morning, and she was gone, just vanished!", stated Natalie. Dominic looked at his sister with concern, "You're not making this up? We've searched every inch of the basement for a hidden switch or lever!". "Really? Nat's never been one to make stuff up and lie to us about it, why would she start now?", Dylan glared at Dominic. 

CHAPTER NOTES:

Between the last chapter and this, I purchased a new low end laptop, and while trying to back up everything, the old laptop went into full on straitjacket mode, killing a 128GB usb stick in the process. Using a combination of 4GB & 8Gb sticks, I managed to rescue 90% of my stuff, including 17GB of sims 3 CC and related stuff. I did lose several chapters worth of caps and some CC though :(

Two Age-Ups for the kids in one chapter? When I started Sims3 on the new laptop there was an issue with my age stages being different to the settings on the last one, it set Marcus, Casey, Dylan, Nat, and Dom at 0 days to next stage, I thought I had five chapters worth of caps for story purposes, turns out they were corrupt. 

On my PC's over the years, I've used Windows 3.11, NT3.5,NT4,Win 95,A,B&C, 98,98SE, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, and Win7. and now Win 10, and I must say, each new version is uglier and less user friendly than the last :P

All of the tools I use for sims three seem to work fine, Dashboard, S3PE, TSRW, Sims3pack to package converter etc. I've been using a full version of Photoshop 7.0, with a zillion plugins, which came out in 2002, and I can't get it to install under win 10, which means I now have to learn GIMP :O

So far that's the issue I have software wise.

The new laptop isn't running much faster than the old one (Could it be the 7gb of CC I have installed?), but at least I don't have to constantly reboot due to digital hissy fits :)