Old, Archived Dead Threads Graveyard 3

AdriannaSimmie wrote:

I snagged it the other night in one of my massive downloading sprees.

I've been trying so hard to be good. But recently I've become obsessed again with having more clothes and hair for my little people! lol! When it's not one thing.....

I have like a whole wack of stuff for farms (hay, tractors etc) and I've never built a farm lot in the whole seven plus years I've been playing TS2! But you know how it is...'just in case..'

Still, I would LOVE to have those lights. In fact, I'm pretty sure I NEED them!

OMG! They're like a bunch of rabbits! lol! How many babies in all? My head started to spin and I lost count!

I've not heard of that baby Maxis skin issue...I know what with some custom skins there is simply no baby version, but once they grow to toddlers (or children) the cc skin shows up. But I've not heard of that problem with defaults though. That's not very nice at all! But see what happens when they age up before we panic.

There is a way to change it in SimPe, but not to babies. I think they'd have to be at least toddlers. If they don't change, and it's really bugging you, I can do a step by step tute for you on how to change them in SimPe.

Bramble is yummy! and his wife is gooooo-r-geous! She looks familiar. Is she one of your offerings?

Echo looks lovely preggars!

Great photos Ari!

Lovin' your new game!

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Still, I would LOVE to have those lights. In fact, I'm pretty sure I NEED them!

I feel ya girl, I promise as soon as I can, I will try to find out where i got them and hook you up!

I am leaving for Nashville on Sunday for work and will be back late Tuesday night so I will try to do it sometime this evening or when I get back

AdriannaSimmie wrote:

I will try to do it sometime this evening or when I get back

That is so weird about the skintones. At first I had the same thought as what Toni just mentioned, maybe they skipped the baby skin, but that wouldn't explain why some of them have it and some of them don't.

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OMG! They're like a bunch of rabbits! lol! How many babies in all? My head started to spin and I lost count!

Yeah, it looks like your community is really growing. I like all of your nature-themed names.

I really need to update my thread. I still don't have all of my EPs installed or my sim files moved back from my external drive.

Yes, I've had custom skins that didn't have an infant version and had some sort of weird pattern on it. But it didn't revert to a Maxis skin and it resolved itself when the babies reached toddlerhood. But I've used this skin as a default in my other games with no problems for the wee ones. I have several offspring that are now children, and still have Maxis skins. I'm going to wait until teenhood to see if it fixes itself, but at this point, since the game was saved with the Maxis skins, I don't have much hope. Sigh. Populating the world with ugly spawn... If the issue did resolve itself at teenhood, I could totally live with it. It would be annoying, but I'd be ok with it. I'll keep you posted.

Bramble's wife, Meadow, may look familiar because I posted pictures of her earlier in the thread, maybe? She was a CAS sim, so any resemblance to any of my other sims is completely coincidental.

Rabbits, yes, indeed. I have my ACR set to try for baby always and they're all family sims. So the ladies are frequently pregnant. Bramble and Meadow, thanks to 2 sets of twins, now have 5 children and they're plenty young enough to have more! I think the Silverleaf Family has 3 now, I can't quite remember.

I'll have to decide if I'm going to let the teens choose or roll for aspiration, or give them family as well. I'm trying to do this realistically. If they all really were the last people on the planet, what would their hopes be for the future? By the time the first set of offspring reach adulthood, survival will be easy as they'll all be master gardeners and fishermen. So their hopes and dreams don't have to revolve around learning that - it will be all they've ever known. All their parents have family focused lives, everything they do is for the benefit of everyone, and having children is mandatory. I'm thinking the offspring may be family focused, as well. Maybe in the third generation, when more technology is introduced to society, then maybe they'll have more interests - knowledge, perhaps. I can't see the pleasure aspiration coming into play at all here - as the society is being raised to be productive. But on the flip side, I suppose I could argue that since the basic necessities of life are easy to obtain, some of them may want to slack off and just goof around all the time. Hmm.

As far as all the families getting to know each other, I'm theorizing that they were all on the same ship when it returned home and the couples already know each other. They've been too busy to spend much time visiting, but now that winter is here and they don't have a huge garden to tend or fish to catch, they'll need something to do. I fully plan on just simply teleporting families over for visits. They would all be in this together and would have understood for the need for their children to all breed to create a new society. After all, this is the mission they were chosen for in the first place, but it was supposed to be on a different planet. I'll have to try hard to make sure everyone meets and teleport people over all the time - I always forget to do that - to have people visit each other. Maybe because in real life I'm not that socially inclined. Or I get caught up in their everyday lives and before I realize it, they're nearing elderhood and haven't had a chance to get to know their neighbors yet!

Winter would be the perfect time for the families to upgrade their little shacks, but many of them won't be able to afford that yet. Things are getting crowded. All the families only have 1 double bed, one hammock, and one recliner - the latter two of which are outside. As it is, they sleep in shifts and often nap on the outdoor furniture. But it's getting too cold for that now. Things are going to be quite crowded.

One thing that really bugs me, though, and takes me out of the setting, is the fact that we have to buy and sell things for sims to survive and they have bills to pay. I have to sell their crops to pay for the bills, they have to earn money to buy more furniture or upgrade their house. I guess I'm just going to pretend that instead of actually buying out of a catalog they're hunting for raw resources and building things themselves.

Ok quick question - let's say the skin issue doesn't resolve. What do you two (or anyone else out there) know about in game skin changing mods? And if you know of any, are they safe to use with ACR and Inteen? I'm a little afraid to try one, but am more comfortable with that than with playing around in SimPe. Thanks for the offer to make a tute for me, Toni. I may take you up on that.

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I am very much enjoying my families and the simplified but very difficult lives they are leading. At this point, I'm not ready to start buying them their hobby benches because I like the way things are right now. Most of them don't have enough money anyway.

I forgot to comment on this. I'm thinking the same things about my families. A few of my sims have rolled wants for hobby benches (and I was very proud of them for it. ) but I don't think they're anywhere close to getting them. So far, the money they do have, they need to spend on expanding their houses for their expanding families.

That's so weird about the skintones. I don't have many suggestions for changing them. I don't have much experience with changing them myself. At one time I downloaded a painting that would let you change skintones, but I think it only let you choose from the Maxis ones. Using the sim surgery option in Simpe, is pretty easy if I remember correctly, I think you have to choose a sim from the neighborhood that has the skintone you want to use and apply it to the sim you want to change. Hopefully, Toni (or someone else) will know of something.

Interesting thoughts on aspirations. I haven't decided what I'm doing with my future teens either. I made their parents aspirations sem-random. I wanted to have each one represented and used family and wealth twice, since I had two sims left over. I may go with random or see if anything just seems to suit them in particular. I'm kind of thinking of their aspirations as being secondary to survival and continuation of the population. It's what they want and are interested in the moments where their larger needs are taken care of. So far it hasn't made much difference, because with their high nature enthusiasm they all seem to have the same wants to hunt bugs, catch butterflies, go for hikes etc.

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Winter would be the perfect time for the families to upgrade their little shacks, but many of them won't be able to afford that yet. Things are getting crowded.

That's what's happening in my hood too. Luckily all of mine (except for one household) have had enough money to add a second room and have been able to afford enough beds/cribs for everyone. Good thing, because I didn't give them any seating on their lots. They just had a double bed to start with.

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One thing that really bugs me, though, and takes me out of the setting, is the fact that we have to buy and sell things for sims to survive and they have bills to pay. I have to sell their crops to pay for the bills, they have to earn money to buy more furniture or upgrade their house. I guess I'm just going to pretend that instead of actually buying out of a catalog they're hunting for raw resources and building things themselves.

Yeah, the bills don't make much sense to me either, but I found by selling the boots they catch while fishing, 2 boots paid their first 2 sets of bills. Maybe think of it as a time investment, like the time they spent fishing or tending crops equals the time they spent hunting for materials and building? It would be nice if we didn't have to pretend so much and we could just have them do it for real. So far this part hasn't bothered me too much, because I haven't had them buy much yet. Maybe it will more as I get further down the line.

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I'll have to try hard to make sure everyone meets and teleport people over all the time - I always forget to do that - to have people visit each other. Maybe because in real life I'm not that socially inclined. Or I get caught up in their everyday lives and before I realize it, they're nearing elderhood and haven't had a chance to get to know their neighbors yet!

Me too. I started them off as one big household so they would know each other (and it would be like they all came over on the same ship), but they haven't had much time to socialize at all. Once in awhile I'll have someone greet a neighbor when they happen to walk by. I thought I'd make a simple community lot where they could go and meet, but they haven't had time for that either. Maybe when the kids get older and need to start meeting mates I'll teleport them over to each other's lots to get to know each other. I've used the teleporter in my Royal Kingdom hood too, because in reality, if you wanted to socialize and you didn't have a phone, you could walk over to your neighbors houses and since sims can't go to other sims' lots, you have to bring them to yours. That totally seems reasonable to me.

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I think you just took pictures of a real house and put them in your thread

I know! How do you do it? Your pictures look so rich (as in the color and contrast), it really does not look like the game (at least not the game I play.) And of course your fabulous decorating skills are just over the top. Beautiful.

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I have like a whole wack of stuff for farms (hay, tractors etc) and I've never built a farm lot in the whole seven plus years I've been playing TS2! But you know how it is...'just in case..'

That sounds like me too. You never know what you might need later on.

Astral Faery wrote:

What do you two (or anyone else out there) know about in game skin changing mods? And if you know of any, are they safe to use with ACR and Inteen? I'm a little afraid to try one, but am more comfortable with that than with playing around in SimPe. Thanks for the offer to make a tute for me, Toni. I may take you up on that.

I've used Christianluv's Custom Skintone Selector for years. It's how I changed Maxis-made sims' skintones. This'll include bodyshapes like Warlok's ladies of different shapes, and Beosboxboy's bodybuilder and athletic girl series. HOWEVER...it does conflict with inTEENinator, so you have to decide if you want your teens to have babies or not.

I use Jenflower's teenwoohoo so teens can...well....the name says it, and of course with ACR...teens woohoo anyway. It's inteen that allows the pregnancies. So it's a choice you have to make.

NOTE: I actually never checked with the modder of inTEEN to see how bad a conflict it was. There're conflicts and there're conflicts. But having been a tester for inTEEN until the second to last EP when the original creator Jace thew in the towel, I recall that inTEEN required a lot of tweaking around the wardrobe and clothing and body changes, given that teen's needed a pregnancy morph and all of that. So, I'm not surprised that it may use some of the same coding that the skinchanger does. Whether it's a game-imploding conflict, I never bothered to find out. I made my choice and ran for the hills. Unfortunately the creator of the skinchanger and the modder who took over inTEEN have now both left the TS2 community.

The skinchanger works like a charm, but if removed from your DLs skins revert. So it's all or nothing.

Of course there is technically a workaround to the teen pregnancy:

Both TwoJeff's SimBlender and Aaroneous Sim Manipulator (which I can no longer play without) have an 'independent teen' age setting, which makes your teens appear as teens, but the game flags them as adults and so therefore all adult features are available including pregnancy. The only caution is that if you forget to change them back to regular teens before they age up, they'll age to elders!

What I do is change them to indie teens to get them pregnant, and once they've had the baby, change them back to regular teens...but of course, that takes all autonomy out of it.

If you do decide to go with the skinchanger, please note that it does require an initial set-up for the tool to read all the skins you have in your game. It then appears in game as an object (painting) that any sim from toddler up can use. It seems overwhelming when you run the tool, but ignore all the tabs and buttons, and just follow the easy step by step instructions and it'll be done in no time.

About the bills...TJ's Visitor Controller allows you to ban mail and newspaper delivery. It also lets you ban townies and pretty much all NPCs...so if you want a really realistic scarcely populated new-world you might want to add this gem to your collection of must have mods...if you don't already have it of course!

Em - I think you're right about aspirations. No matter what they are, all my sims ever want to do are piddly nature related things that don't award many points. So they're all mostly unhappy, lol.

I've been having my families sell all the boots and rainbow trout, since no one has high enough cooking skill to grill them, anyway. A couple of my ladies are able to make blackened catfish (2 cooking points). That money is then used for bills and a housing upgrade. A second composting bin was also necessary, since I have the garbage cans blocked off so they have to compost everything. I sell half the fruit from the trees and put the rest in the juicer. I sell about half the crops and store the rest so they can have other meals besides fish - often, the kids are hungry in the morning, and the game won't let you grill fish until 10:30 am - I don't see why they can't all chow down on a fishy breakfast at 7, but whatevs. Game limitations. So they have cereal sometimes, and they'll need food stored for that. Some of the fridges are almost out of the food they came with.

Yeah, since visiting only works one way in this game, you have to get sims to your place. Otherwise you could just go visit whoever. It's too bad you can't actually do that, but that's ok. That's the main reason I let everyone have phones (even my peasants) in my RKC - because I theorized that they would simply walk to each other's houses to visit.

Toni - thank you so much for all that input and the InTEEN warning. My main usage for InTEEN isn't just teen pregnancy, I like the other things it brings to the game, as well, such as fertility and how it's affected by age. That gives more realism to the game. I never have made a teen get pregnant, because of course I really like things like that to happen randomly because it's more fun for me. I am not quite sure what I'm going to do yet.

I was hoping I could fix the cause of the problem and start having normal babies now - then I would only need to worry about changing the ones who got the Maxis skintones. So I copied all the default skintone information from my main game (which is working just fine) and copied over all the files in this one - allowing them to overwrite and hopefully fix any packages that were corrupted. But I'm still having Maxis skinned babies. But not all the time!


Lark was born yesterday with the correct Anva skintone. Isn't she a beauty? All of my babies should be this pretty.

So...next step is I test in other neighborhoods in the same game and see if it's a game problem or a hood problem. Maybe I'll also try taking the defaults out, starting the game, and then putting them back in so the game sees it. Seems silly, but that's the way it's acting - like it doesn't see the package all the time. If I go into CAS and spawn a bunch of random sims, they all have my defaults - I'm so confused over this.

The last thing I'll do to fix it is, when all the kids are teens and the adults are too old to reproduce (before the next generation starts). is make a note of everyone's personalities, clone them all, and set up their families anew in a different game. It would be time consuming, but it would be worth it.

I am, however, all over that visitor controller. Banning papergirls and bills? Heck yah - that will help the feeling quite a bit!

Here's a picture just for fun:



There is no toilet to throw up in, so sims just kinda do it wherever they happen to be standing. In this case, Ember was nursing her newborn, put him down in the middle of it, and kinda chucked all over him. I thought it was pretty funny, myself. Yes, she's also the mother that set her other newborn down in the waterfall. Great parenting!

Eeeeeeeeew....Ari that is so monumentally gross!!! Poor baby! Probably totally traumatized!

I hear you about the other features of inTEEN. It's an awesome mod. For me, the best part was being able to have families at university.

That was always my job to test that part and see what worked and what didn't. I had a test game. Jace (the original modder) would not allow any other mods in game while testing to eliminate all possibly conflicts. And every time there was a new EP, we'd have to go through the whole thing all over again. Those were interesting times!

Well, let me know if you want a step by step on changing them in SimPe when they get older.

Did you see the bit of my post at the end about TJ's Visitor controller that it allows you to ban mail and newspaper delivery? Just figured a hood like yours wouldn't have papers or bills yet.

Now for my two cents on the aspiration thing...I'm all for randomizing them. Kids growing up in an unexplored world might be inclined to be adventurous and want to seek things out (knowledge) or yearn for something else, something more (fortune), or want companionship (popularity)...or....well, I have no idea what makes a romance simmie a romance simmie! Just my thoughts. I think variation is more realistic. Plus it'd totally make your game harder!

And yes, I do believe we're in for some gorgeous babies!

Toni wrote:

Eeeeeeeeew....Ari that is so monumentally gross!!! Poor baby! Probably totally traumatized!

Ha ha ha - it's awesome, isn't it?

I agree with you about the random aspirations - yearning for more - except for the wealth bit. These kids don't really understand what money is. The only thing they know is the stories their parents tell them; that money was used to buy things, but that's going to be kind of a difficult concept for them to understand. But eventually, since these sims are supposed to be building society, wealth will need to be a factor sooner or later when a currency system is established.

I was thinking of introducing bookshelves the following winter. I'm going to pretend the new settlers found some loose pages of books that had been lost when their ship crash landed and painstakingly used some sort of natural glue like product, like sap, to put them back together. Also, I've been pretty content to just let the kids do their own thing education-wise, I've taken full advantage of Inge's Flexi-school hack (a wonderfully beautiful mod that I wish I had when I was filming stories with children - what a pain that was to work around their school schedule). Anyway, I remembered that I had said I was going to home school them. Now that the settlers have learned the fundamentals of surviving and have gotten pretty good at farming and fishing, they would want to teach their children all kinds of things, like art and history, science, math, how to read, etc. So I think after everyone makes it through winter, after the spring planting - which the kids can now take care of, I'll start some sort of home based education.

Then maybe I'll have a knowledge sim or two. I should probably introduce romance into the mix now - after all, people can't help their chemical attractions and hormones - those things are built in. Maybe I'll do pleasure and popularity now, too.

Toni wrote:

Did you see the bit of my post at the end about TJ's Visitor controller that it allows you to ban mail and newspaper delivery? Just figured a hood like yours wouldn't have papers or bills yet.

Yes, I commented on that - but it was just one or two lines squeezed in between two large topics. I said that I was definitely going to use it for that realistic stranded feeling.

How exciting to be a tester for one of the biggest mods out there! I like many things about InTEEN, as well. I like that teens reach a sort of independent stage, where they no longer go to school and can get a full time job. That kind of bridges the gap between teenhood and adulthood.

GUESS WHAT?? I solved the problem!! Once I figured out what the problem was, it was simple, but I didn't know that when I was poking all over the files trying to find something that was off. My Anva skintones are dependent defaults, and I must have already had the set of skins when I added the addon file and the skins to my game. Basically, I had 2 sets of the Anva skintones in the game, so the addon package was obviously confused trying to figure out what to do. I deleted the extra, and now I have beautiful babies! So for anyone that has a problem like this (defaults not working right), and it's a dependent default (requiring an extra addon file to tell your game to use certain skins as defaults), make sure you only have 1 set of the skins!

Onward, to beautiful offspring pictures!


The first child born in this challenge has just turned into a teen. Meet Willow Silverleaf.



Her little brother, Forest. Other siblings include baby sister, Lark, who you met in the post above and just turned into a child, and baby, Ash, who is a toddler. I think Aspen is pregnant again, as well.



Winter sunrise on the Silverleaf settlement.



This one cracked me up. I had invited all the other children over for the day, so the one chamberpot was seeing a lot of action. I just missed the second child who was standing next to (I think that's Thorne Moonstrider), who darted off to find something else to do when he saw the pot was in use. Otherwise, two children would have been standing right in front of Aspen. Privacy, please??

OMG your children are gorgeous!!!!

Now Ari, I'm quite sure by now your simmies would've built a latrine/pit...I think you just get a kick out of watching the squatting action! :muahaha:

Some suggestions should you ever take pity on your simmies' dignity Dr. Pixel's Thatched roof outhouse or Natalya's Loo "Alone with the nature" latrine. I have them both in my game though I've never used them! But you know....just in case!

Dr. P also make a swell Shipwreck shower...though your shower waterfall is wildly awesome!

I also stumbled across GOS' Apocalypse Theme uploads from May of 2010. I haven't gone through the whole thread but the offerings look pretty awesome.

I also don't know if you know of these awesome careers for unemployed or self employed simmies. They're like shell careers...they never have to go anywhere, but it stops them from rolling job wants. Great for a hood like yours or your Medieval hood. In my modern hood, I use mine for housewives, work from home artists and authors etc.

And finally (for this post anyway)....I came across this thing...that I think may be a dog, but if he doesn't look like a post apocalyptic canine I don't know what else does! Thought your kiddies might like a pet. Click on little 'Rover' to go to the download.

Awww thank you so much Em...

I do touch up my photos with GIMP and I use Fraps to capture screenshots....

Here are some more photos from the second cottage I was working on...I got a little carried away with decorating outside but my simmie is happy :))

I have posted photos of the living room and first bedroom already and I appreciate you all looking and for your very sweet comments

I acutally got to play my game a little bit yesterday and was going to play a family from a long time ago. I had forgotten in my last uninstall that I lost my lovely family :((

I hate when that happens

AdriannaSimmie wrote:

I acutally got to play my game a little bit yesterday and was going to play a family from a long time ago. I had forgotten in my last uninstall that I lost my lovely family :((

I hate when that happens

I'm so sorry.

The house by the way is perfection! Love all the rooms especially the bathroom! Just lovely. And the yard! Oh Jen! It's a wonderland!

Awww thanks. I was a little heartbroken when I realized that I my family was gone :((

Oh well, such is life with Sims 2.

Thank you for the lovey compliments sweetie. I want a backyard like that too

Giiiiirl, I have backed up hoods going back a year!

hahahaha, I don't doubt that girl!!!

Well I guess I will just have to create another favorite family then ;)

I agree with the others, Jen.
Some of your screenshots look as though you took pics of a real house.
Like Em said, the images look so rich in color and contrast...
Certainly NOT like the snapshots I take of my creations in game.
I simply do not know how you do it.
If it's a matter of touching things up with Gimp ... What, exactly, do you do to get that very realistic look?

That being said ...

Lady T wrote:

The house by the way is perfection! Love all the rooms especially the bathroom! Just lovely. And the yard! Oh Jen! It's a wonderland!

I admire your decorating skills so very much.
Your Sims abodes are SIMply stunning, both inside and out.
Love, love, love 'em!

I am sorry you lost a beloved family, btw.
I, too, hate it when that happens.

Thank you for sharing with us, as always.
It's so great to have you back, my friend.

Awww thanks my friend...

I think I honestly just have a really good graphics card. All I really do in Gimp is brighten the color and contrast and use a couple of effects. Since Gimp is free, there are not nearly as many effects as photoshop but I still love it.

I use Gradient Flare for the sunshine images in my piccies and the softglow effect on some of them too. One day I will get really creative and play around with it more to see what else I can do :))

Thank you sooo much for the lovely compliments on my cottages. I guess it just comes from playing with Barbie doll houses when I was a kid. I used to love to decorate them and make up my own stuff for them :))

I have really enjoyed decorating a cabin for Christmas :))

I am sad about my family but I know there will be another one to love.

Here is Ari's beautiful Sim of the month

She is married to Sam and they have a beautiful daughter Katia... (see I told you they make pretty babies ;)

Aww

Thank you so much for choosing Tatiana. She looks very happy. You make a wonderful sim mom.

Oh wow, Toni - I never thanked you for the Chupacabra desert apocalyptic dog. I haven't played in a bit and forgot to come back and comment. Thank you so much for all your wonderful links. Now that the families' lives are established and the simple act of just surviving isn't so hard, I was thinking of having the kids adopt some strays so they can have pets. This scary pup would fit in pretty well.

Yes, the family can probably upgrade to an outhouse style toilet - I honestly didn't even think about it, lol. I get so caught up in their daily lives that I forget they should be upgrading here and there as they go along. I actually have Dr. Pixel's outhouses in my MCC hood - with some medievaly recolors.

But I think I will leave the waterfall. It is so much fun to play with, really. And it sure is a blessing on those really hot days. I may add a tub, though, because it would be easy enough to fill it from the water from the fall.

I've thought about the shell careers before. I'm pretty lucky so far, though, because they mainly roll up 'have a baby' wants or nature related wants. But when I start adding more aspirations, I'm sure I'll get some job related ones, and these will come in really handy.

Well, I have a new favorite family...I had to recreate them as I was using the boolprop cheat and Sam bonked out on me and I deleted him from the family...ooopsie...

Sam and Tatiana are both Family aspiration Sims and they have three children so far. I went ahead and created them too and I am still amazed that they produce such beautiful children who need no work on their faces. They only thing I did was change hairstyles as we all know Maxis puts some jacked up ones on kids....

Meet the Blackfoot Family

Sam, Tatiana, Katia, Jacob and Caleb (he is the only one who took after Tatiana)


Caleb, Jacob and Tatiana


Precious little Caleb


Katia


Here is some picture spam from their house
Katia's Room



Living Room (I have been on a wallpaper and furniture downloading spree, well just a little)



Sam & Tatiana's Bedroom/Bath