Welcome back to Ruth’s (un)Officially Wacky Boolprop Challenge! It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? Well, lesson learned, and I will be doing all my building in the “rebuilding” ‘hood from now on.

I know I don’t usually recap, but since it’s been a while, I’ll try. Glen successfully acquired alien twins: Nanki-Poo and Deadeye. There was the Night From Hell, where just about everyone died… twice. Then the ‘hood blew up. There is one career reward left to earn, one novel to write, one person who needs to learn the xylophone trick, and two Plots to use. Old Adam has arranged a marriage for Pitti-Sing and has promised Glen that one of his sons will marry Leila’s eldest child.*

*See “Alone, And Yet Alive!” and “Oh Joy, Oh Rapture Unforeseen!” respectively.

Since I was rebuilding, I had to bring over all the ghosts as well as all the live Sims. Because moving tombstones is every bit as bad as moving live Sims, I had to bring over alive versions of the family members who had passed on, and then kill them off.

It was probably the least fun part of the whole rebuild.

And this was probably the scariest part of the whole rebuild. To get the urnstones from the lot where everyone died to the actual (u)OWBC lot, I put them in Old Adam’s inventory. This is the safe method recommended everywhere, provided your courier Sim does not die with the urnstones still in inventory. There’s no fear of that with Old Adam -- just look at that life bar! -- but all the urns I found in his inventory looked like this.

“Rest In Peace,” not a name. This looks very very bad.

Meanwhile, out at the curb, there were five new tombstones, each of them labeled with an actual name. I was certain that I had managed to clone the tombstones again, and that my brand new rebuild was already well and truly woohooed.

Fortunately, the “Rest In Peace” tombstones are a perfectly normal side effect of transporting tombstones via courier. Place them all on the lot, save, leave the house, and come back. The “Rest In Peace” stones will be gone, and the real ones will still be there.

And that method of restoring ghosts must have worked, since Valerie came out to haunt nice and early on the first evening of the rotation.

With a little lucky, the Night From Hell will not be repeated, since none of the ghosts have any beds to miss, all of them had their needs reset by moving into a new lot, and everyone got a little aspiration bump before re-dying.

Not enough of a bump to make them a platinum ghost if they weren’t before. Just enough to offset the aspiration loss of the death that happened two minutes before theirs. Nothing cheater-y.

Not everything went 100% smoothly, of course. Someone whose initials are e.i. had the bright idea to add a longer dining room table -- eight seats for eight Sims. Makes good sense, right?

Except that the room is too small for such a large table, and everyone spent all the time stompy-waving instead of eating. I switched it out for a regular six-seater after everyone finally finished with it.

And Olga tried to burn the house down. She failed, thank goodness, but she gave it the ol’ college try.

Old Adam bought back the Tacky Flamingo, turned ownership over to Lisa, and went over to re-establish the business rank. Thanks to the OFB Customer Satisfaction Star by Squinge, the business made it back to Level Four by the time Old Adam needed to head home.

Don’t worry! Once I have restored the Tacky Flamingo to its rightful rank, I will remove the Customer Satisfaction Star. I personally think it’s too cheaty when you’re not rebuilding.

We had three birthdays this rotation, one of which was a Teening.

Pitti-Sing rolled Pleasure for her aspiration. She likes men who are good at cooking and cleaning, and she’s not wild about plantsims. Okay, so technically Pitti-Sing doesn’t have a gender preference yet, but it will be for males.

It has to be, for reasons of Plot.

Pitti-Sing’s brand of Wacky is still kinda-sorta-reminicient-of-EAxian-Far-Eastern.

Deadeye’s is still Nautical, and here he is wearing the most nautical outfit in the EAxian catalog. The matching hairdo glitched through his forehead, and so he is wearing a reasonably nautical cc hairdo instead.

“Musical” is probably the hardest brand of Wacky to convey, which is why I am going with “rock and roll” instead. As you can see, EAxis still didn’t give me much to work with.

As you can also see, my idea of “rock and roll” is firmly stuck in the 1980s.

Since Old Adam doesn’t need much sleep -- What the censor blur, Valerie? There is no reason for you to be scaring anybody! You have FIVE freaking NICE POINTS! I swear, if it was legal, I’d send your urn to the graveyard so fast, it’d make your head spin! And could you have popped out while people were still awake to run down and plead? Nooooooo, of course not!

Crapnuggets! Crapnuggets! Crappnuggets!

Yes, Lisa, that’s exactly how I feel too.

In fact, it’s how everyone felt -- except Olga.

PITTI-SING: It’s so awful, Grandpop dying like that, so suddenly! (fearfully) Do you think the Red-Headed League is involved?OLGA: Don’t you worry about a thing. I have a secret plan that will make it all better.

Note to self: This table configuration doesn’t work either.

Or this one.

And not this one either. How the heck did they eat before? I never used to have routing issues!

But enough about tables. Later that day, Olga put her secret plan into action.

OLGA: I’ll be paying the full amount, thanks.

OLGA: Yes, cash on the barrelhead.

I swear I only wanted Old Adam around long enough to activate a servo. I completely forgot that using the Bone Phone resets the lifebar back to the beginning of the life stage. If you think this is too cheat-y, please let me know and I will set his lifebar back to where it should be.

It’s amazing how quickly things can return to normal. Deadeye made friends with Draupadi Couderc* his first day of school.

*You may remember Draupadi from Already in Progress. If you don’t read that story, I can highly recommend it. [/shameless self-promotion]

Olga was no nicer to Pitti-Sing than ever.

PITTI-SING: Ow! Hey! Stop it!

OLGA: What’s that? You want me to tell the Red-Headed League where you live?

PITTI-SING (through gritted teeth): Thank you, sir. May I have another?

OLGA (cheerfully): Don’t mind if I do!

And Old Adam went right back to being both integral and helpful.

With both Teen granddaughters, actually. Of course, given that Old Adam is a Knowledge Sim and that his LTW is Become Education Minister, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

What is a bit of a surprise is that Pitti-Sing decided to pay it forward, teaching Deadeye to study!

Did you know Teens could teach their younger siblings to study? I didn’t.

Pitti-Sing seems to be pretty close to Deadeye.

Now, I’m not saying that the girls are playing favorites. Or that there’s any sibling rivalry going on. But I will say that when Pitti-Sing started paying more attention to Deadeye, Olga started paying more attention to Nanki-Poo.

NANKI-POO: You’re my favoritest sister!OLGA (amused): Am I really? Why?NANKI-POO: Because, because, because you always play with me and stuff. And because the way you dress is -- is rock and roll!OLGA: It’s Goth.NANKI-POO: That’s different?OLGA: Yeah. I’m not rebellious -- I’m dead.

Old Adam also spent time passing along the family’s accumulated Business Perks.

Or, well, no he didn’t because the business Officially belongs to Lisa and she’s the one who’s been accumulating them this time round, but The Sims is all about pretending and anyway the perks and the servo are why I resurrected Old Adam in the first place, so just go with it, okay?

Old Adam really did introduce Lisa to Mr. Big, though -- no foolin’.

OLD ADAM: Lisa, my dear, allow me to present Mr. Ravi Downie. Mr. Downie, my daughter, Mrs. Lisa Shankel.

LISA: Charmed.

RAVI DOWNIE: A pleasure, Mrs. Shankel. I loved your work in All The Things She Said.

LISA: Oh, you saw that? (laughs) Well, you’re one of the five non-relatives who did.

The business is doing very well, as you can see. Next time around, it should be back to Level 10 where it belongs. I tell you, that customer loyalty star is worth its weight in gold!

How much does a pixel weigh, anyway?

Leila and Abhijeet continue to be happy. Leila is progressing up the career ladder nicely -- no promotion yet, but she did get a bonus for loyalty. Abhijeet is working on rebuilding his stock of potions from before the rebuild (the one craftable I can’t replace via a hack), and Cat is reluctantly learning to not sleep on the bed in exchange for fish-flavored treats.

Although since more reluctance means more fish-flavored treats, I do have to question his sincerity.

I know I said last slide that Abhijeet’s craftables were the only ones impossible to restore with a hack. You could argue quite convincingly that fish and produce are not craftables, which is why you can see here that Phoebe’s whole family is working to replenish their stock. Except for Nicholas, who is selling lemonade instead. He strikes me as a natural-born salesman, what with his (possible) mind-control powers and all.

Apologies for the visual line leading right to Saigon’s butt. It was hard to get an angle that would show everyone without hiding them behind trees or posts or something.

I bet I don’t have to tell you what Family Sims Rose and Dmitri immediately rolled a Want for upon realizing that Ivan had hit Toddler, do I?

I bet I don’t have to tell you what they did about it, either.

And yes, I did eventually download some default replacement maternity wear. Seven years is plenty long enough to look at the EAxis styles. Although yellow isn’t really Rose’s color.

Phoenix may be a Romance Sim, but he’s clearly the kind who prefers much romance with one person than much meaningless woohoo with a lot of people.

PENELOPE: Yeah, my parents are trying for a Dream Date again. I’m gonna have to hang up now and go put my earphones in.

Peneolpe is still enjoying working on her car, not enjoying doing her homework, and starting to learn the keyboard. She’ll be heading off to college soon, if she Wants to. Or perhaps a trade school instead, since academics are not her favorite.

Skye has graduated college and started a completely unofficial Awesomesauce challenge. (Unofficial because I am sure I’ll get bored of it or be completely unable to play Sims well before I could get through ten generations. Heck, it’s taken me five real years to get to Generation Seven in the current ’hood!) Right now, everything is quite blue and Skye has not found a man yet.

And those are all the updates I have for you. Until next time, Happy Simming!

Notes, disclaimers, and other trivia

The “secret plan” really was Olga’s idea. While everyone else cried hard about Old Adam and then rolled Wants for a puppy, Olga cried hard and rolled a Want to resurrect him. I just decided to go with it.

The title of this chapter is a song from The Gondoliers. “List” is an old word for “listen,” although since the song is ostensibly sung to a bunch of roses, the more usual “lean to one side” meaning makes about the same amount of sense.