Howdy hi! Welcome back to Ruth’s (un)Officially Wacky Boolprop Challenge, the story that puts the “Savoy” in “Wacky”! We are closing in on the last two Plots, and the last few points to earn. Do you think we can finish the story before the fourth anniversary in August?

Neither do I, but I hope you’ll have fun following along until whenever it is that we do finish.

We open with Old Adam being his usual awesome self, helping yet another grandchild Learn To Study.

OLD ADAM: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all you need to know.’”*NANKI-POO: Sure, Grandpop, but I can’t spell “beauty.” How many O’s does it have?

Never mind that Nanki-Poo shares zero genetic material with Old Adam. A grandchild’s a grandchild.

*John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (n.p.: 1919), lines 49-50. Available from http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html, accessed 25 April 2014.

Old Adam’s tutelage has certainly been helpful for the older kids.

OLGA: Dad! Look! Look! An A+! I got an A+!GLEN: Woooo! That’s my girl!OLGA: Grandpop! Look! An A+!OLD ADAM: Felicitations! Truly, the apple does not fall far from the tree!

In addition, Old Adam has made a Servo. He will initialize it too, so that he will always be with the family -- but not until the house empties out a bit.

I deliberately included the popup in this shot because I found it funny. Olga was always going to be named Olga, whether she was a boy or a girl. And Olga-the-boy was going to be a very butch football player. (Although since American football is rugby for wimps, hypothetical Olga-the-boy’s hypothetical butchness might still have been dubious.)

Old Adam has successfully restored the Tacky Flamingo to its pre-rebuild Level 10 status. Detractors might argue that this is entirely due to Squinge’s Customer Loyalty Star, but the predominantly female clientele would beg to differ. The Customer Loyalty Star simply accelerated the inevitable.

Old Adam even fixed the problem I was having with the dining room table.

Or, well, he didn’t really, but he’s so cool that I’m going to give him the credit anyway.

The problem was not the arrangement of the table(s). The problem was the chairs. Switch out the chairs, and the routing issues vanish like morning dew.

I’ve had problems with those OFB chairs before, so you’d think I’d’ve figured it out sooner…

I only placed six chairs, so Old Adam ended up eating in the kitchen anyway, but now I know what the problem was, I can rearrange things to make the dining room work better and allow seating for the whole family.

Were you wondering who the young lady in the white pajamas was two slides back? Well, wonder no longer! That was Casilda, all aged up to Teen, with a new look.

Casilda rolled Fortune, with a slight preference for males. She likes full-face makeup on her men (but not the regular kind) and is especially thrilled why they’re good with their hands. Her de-veiled hair is from Celebration Stuff (de-veiling by Simsbaby at MTS) and her dress is from the Store.

The other kids in the house are doing well, and are quite happy… according to what they like to do best.

GLEN: Come on, kiddo, time for bed.NANKI-PO: In a minute, Dad. I’m almost done.GLEN: No, not in a minute. Now.NANKI-POO: Yuh-huh, just one more minute. I just wanna --GLEN: No “just,” mister. I’ll carry you if I have to.NANKI-POO: Okay, sure, just a second. (wails, as Glen picks him up) But I didn’t finish getting under the rim! I hate you!

And what makes Olga happy is not what makes Pitti-Sing happy.

OLGA: Move it. I want to go online.PITTI-SING: Tough. I got here first, and I’m playing SSX.OLGA (menacingly): Do you want me to call the Red-Headed League?PITTI-SING: Y-y-you w-w-wouldn’t! …Would you?OLGA: Not if I get to go online, no.PITTI-SING: Quitting the game right now! Please don’t call them!

The first two nights of the rotation, I got lucky and no ghosts came out to haunt. On the third night, I saw Myrna. I immediately snapped into action, saving right away, and every three game-hours after that.

You may think that was overkill, but (as this post-rebuild file photo clearly shows) this family’s ghosts are not to be messed with. They are entirely capable of killing everyone in the family before I can do anything about it. If that happened, I think I would be perfectly justified in calling a mulligan and restoring from the most recent save prior to the massacre.

The other person you may not have recognized in that picture of everyone around the dining table was the clean-shaven white-haired gentleman. That would be Glen, freshly stransitioned to Elder, and doomed to the fate of all Elder spouses: painting.

Admittedly, this is pretty well what he did all day before aging up too, but never mind.

Lisa has been unable to find a job in the Science career (the last career for which we need a reward) and so she has been working her way up in the Show Business world.

Hey, they don’t let just anybody be the dancing French Fries, you know.

On the third day of the rotation, Casilda settled in for a nice long afternoon of practicing the xylophone trick.

…And then she got it on the fourth try, even with her little brother belching into the microphone behind her, when he wasn’t giving his very best imitation of goats, pigs, cows, roosters, and so on. Deadeye can imitate a farmyard like nobody’s business.

Said little brother also spent a fair amount of time on the obstacle course. Deadeye is far too Nice for the military (even the navy), but running and jumping and crawling and climbing and getting absolutely filthy in the process? Yes please!

Olga was able to head off to college right on schedule the last day of the rotation, with the following scholarships:

SimCity Scholar’s GrantBain-Gordon Communications FellowshipQuigley Visual Arts Stipend

I hope that you will forgive the lack of the traditional “taxi to college” shot: the game decided it didn’t want to send a taxi, but that moving Olga in from the Uni screen was fine. Now that Olga is in Uni, setup for the last Plot but one can begin in good earnest.

In other news, Leila and Abhijeet have started talking about babies, and even started working on obtaining one. (This is still a possibility because Leila’s lifebar was reset following her resurrection.*)

No success yet, but the fun’s in the trying, right?

*See The Jack Point Home For Pedestrain Playables, available at my LJ.

Over at Oakapple Farm (which I have decided is the Official name for where Chant and Phoebe live), the kids have grown up quite nicely. Nicholas is the one on the left, and Draupadi is the one on the right. Nicholas did age up first, but Draupadi caught up by the end of the rotation.

Nicholas is a Knowledge Sim who wants to be a Mad Scientist, and Draupadi is a Romance Sim who hasn’t rolled a LTW yet. (I’m sure she’ll have one when she wakes up on the morning of Day One of the next rotation.)

Rose and Dmitri’s third pregnancy simultaneously proves that restoring recessive genes in CAS really does work and that randomizing with the Batbox is an excellent idea. From left to right, we have Pop Sim Alexander, newborn Mikhial, and super-Nice Ivan. Mikhail is almost certainly going to be called Mickey. Doesn’t he look like a Mickey?

Dmitri’s maternal grandfather was a redhead, as was Myrna’s maternal grandfather’s mother. Old Adam also carried a recessive red hair gene. So you see, Mickey comes by it natural.

Leila’s cousin Jo and her husband Phoenix have aged up, and Jo has gotten her first new hairstyle in forty years. (I think it suits her.) Age has not diminished their tendency to act like three-bolt teenagers.

Jo’s twin brother Cecil has aged up as well, which you will see in his own story, Cecil’s CCL.

You read the CCL, of course. All the cool kids do, and you are very cool indeed. But if you’re a bit behind, you can find back chapters at my LJ. [/shameless self-promotion]

Jo and Phoenix’s daughter Penny has headed out to college. Academics are not her forte, and I debated whether to send her to Uni at all, but she’s not going to meet any eligible bachelors at home and Uni is more interesting with more students, so she will be keeping Olga company if she doesn’t fail too many classes.

She will be getting a makeover.

Skye needs to find a spouse and start producing children. She “meh”s everybody, regardless of boltage, so I have unilaterally decided that two-bolter Dawson Seiff is the lucky guy.

They’ll come around, I’m sure.

And I will break with tradition and show you something mildly amusing that I couldn’t fit in anywhere else… One night, as I was getting everyone tucked up safely in bed, I heard a terrible commotion. I couldn’t figure out who was fighting -- I thought I had the whole family accounted for. Can you guess who it was?

A random wolf and a random stray! I can only guess that they don’t get along very well.

And since I am now completely out of pictures, I will leave you here. Until next time, Happy Simming!

Notes, disclaimers, and other triviaThe title of today’s chapter comes from Princess Ida, and is sung when the members of college all sit down to eat. Perhaps a “breakfast bell” would have been more appropriate for this chapter, but Gilbert & Sullivan didn’t write any songs about that.