My Sim Julian (Andrew's husband) says, "I think the solution is simple: if you don't want to be bothered doing laundry, don't wear clothes!" Andrew is shaking his head!

I find it funny when the welcoming wagon is made up of inhabitants a completely different subhood. Yeah, okay, these Bluewater Village sims walked all the way over to the outskirts of Downtown.

@Bulbizarre : I'm fascinated to see who turns up for the Welcome Wagon. The only rule seems to be that only Sims who are available at 12:30 p.m. that day are eligible to take part. i.e. They're not at work or school. In a vanilla game that would rule out teens, as then finish school at 1 p.m. But in my game some teens have dropped out of school, and, almost none of them are going to school just now, because it's the the Summer Holidays (Vacation) in Veronaville. So I am now getting quite a few teens coming. In the latest one Zara Higgins (a teenage foster mother with two adopted kids) got three teens, all of whom live in the same street or the next street. Often it's local Sims who come to visit, but sometimes they come from much further away, or they're townies. Sometimes two of them are locals but the third one comes from another sub-hood. Some Sims seem to be regular supporters of the Welcome Wagon and will travel quite far to visit new arrivals. Sometimes, especially in the earlier days of a neighbourhood, when there are fewer Sims around, only two Sims come for the Welcome Wagon, and/or they don't come till the Tuesday.

But I'll never forget the time I had 3 Sims come from Bluewater to Downtown. They came to welcome Bianca Monty to her little downtown house in Mendoza Lane. Bianca moved to that house quite early in my game, when I was starting to include the pre-made playables in my very loose rotations. No Welcome Wagon came on her first day, nor indeed on her second day, so we began to think she wasn't getting one. Needing money to live on, she took a job in the business career. It wasn't until her first Saturday that three visitors from Bluewater, all of them business owners, arrived to welcome her to Downtown. Maybe not surprisingly, she was out at work when they came. So they just hung around outside her house for about an hour, before going home to Bluewater. I had a suspicion that maybe the real purpose of their visit was to drum up business for their shops! In Sims time it was five days since she moved in. But in Real Life, such is the speed that I play at, it was over a year! I hadn't even bought Open for Business when she moved in, far less attached Bluewater!!

My welcome wagon is usually retired elders and pregnant teens. Quite the spectrum.

I think that Pescado's 'localwalkbys' fixes that, as I tend to only get sims that live nearby.

I think I prefer the variety of Welcome Wagon visitors that I get with Maxis rules. Here is an old picture of Jack Gill with his Welcome Wagon visitors:


I have enlarged this very old picture a little, to help you all to see it, but this lowered the quality still further. Sorry. The picture was taken on Jack's first day in his Mendoza Lane home in downtown Veronaville on 24th April 2013 -- eleven years ago today. The picture was featured today in the "On this Day" memories feature that I get with Windows 10 and OneDrive. Jack's Welcome Wagon guests were all Veronaville townies. Left to right they are Regina Tsvirkunov, Demi Love, and Edward Mellon. Demi shares my Real Life surname, which makes me think she must be a distant relative (though I hope I've a slightly nicer personality than she has!). Regina is one of the nicest Sims in my game, almost as nice as Tricou teen Ravi Bertino, who moved in with Jack a couple of weeks later. Both Regina and Ravi are extremely good Welcome Wagon visitors, because they're both extremely good listeners. I think one of the best ways to make a newcomer welcome, is to listen to what they have to say. Sometimes, when three friends who live near you come together, they just chat and play among themselves, and interact very little with the Sims they've come to see. Regina really did help young Jack to settle in. Within a month or two they had become best friends, and they've stayed best friends ever since. I'm sure Regina would willingly have taught Jack how to study, but Jack fairly quickly got an A+ grade through his own efforts. Jack then stopped going to school; by his logic, if he knew enough to get an A+ grade, he couldn't see the point of cramming even more knowledge in in school. After Ravi moved in, it took him a few weeks to persuade Ravi to drop out of school too. He then announced to the world that he and Ravi were "Students at the University of Life". Instead of school, the two of them started going to all-day nightclubs! I suppose they learned something there.


A quite unrelated thought -- I think Don Lothario is more popular with Sims than with Simmers. Especially among female Sims in Pleasantview.

I had a long convoluted dream today of my game during my nap, where how I was trying to synchronize a race between pixels in the game involving getting to X point. I think it involved using chariots.

Then I woke up and was slightly sad because it is one of the things you cannot do in game-there are no races of any kind possible. The animations for it are beyond the game's mechanics and programming.