Snuggles and More Sims

I should just give up doing anything on a daily basis. Blogging, taking pills, writing, reading, exercising - I'm just no good at it. I'm definitely a "do it when you feel like it" or "do it when you remember" person. Ah well.

I've recently been thinking about knitting for charity. I don't have a lot of money for yarn right now, but I do have a lot of acrylic yarn that I purchased for practicing stitches and for machine-washable gifts. I don't really have projects assigned to all of it, though, so I don't know what to do with at least half of it, and along with some odds and ends leftover from finished projects, I have quite a bit of extra yarn that's just taking up space. It'd be really good to put this yarn to good use. I am particularly passionate about animals, and found something called The Snuggles Project online. Basically, you knit, sew, or crochet blankets for shelter animals, as they're usually in cold little kennels. I think something like that would really make me feel good. I like the idea that I'd be making something to provide comfort and warmth for poor little doggies and kitties who don't have homes or families. I can't adopt any animals right now, as much as I would love to. So I think it'd be nice to help them out and give my love to them in some other way. I have a gazillion knitting projects that I want to do and am in the middle of, but I think this would be good for some simple, mindless knitting when I'm watching TV or need to unwind.

I've recently been playing WAY too much Sims 3, so much so that a couple fingers in my right hand got strange carpal-tunnel-like pain all yesterday. We're talking hours-long Sims marathons. I find that the Sims games are most interesting for me when something is going wrong with the family, rather than everything going right. Not all wrong, but something to add a little drama to the game, I guess. Otherwise, everything is just a routine - get up, go to work, make sure you don't screw things up, take care of basic needs, go to sleep, start over. And that gets a little dull since you're basically just doing a replay of your own life. I've recently discovered a blog called "Alice and Kev" which chronicles the lives of homeless Sims. It tells a really compelling story, rather than being a simple, mildly sadistic way of making life difficult for the Sims. It's based off a Sims 2 Challenge, called the "Poverty Challenge" where you move the family into a vacant lot with just park benches (maybe a teddy bear), remove all their money, and don't take any easy-money opportunities. Then you just see what happens. It sounded like an interesting Challenge, so I just recently decided to try out my own homeless Sim family. However, I find that I'm a little too soft-hearted to allow even fake people to go without food and sleep on benches. I think I'll end up only playing that family sporadically for now until I get used to it. For now, it hits too close to real-life social problems to be amusing. I guess conflict is good in the game and keeps things interesting, but too much is just kinda sad.