Fancy

Round 4: February 2011 (Winter)
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Cheng is 71, Ping is 70, Jun is 51, Jia-Li is 49, Mei is 17, Xia is 15 and An Hu is 8

(Darren Stevens is 16, Tony Mendez is 15)

Narrated by Xia

I'm starting to get a little bored with living on the farm. My parents, grandparents and now Mei wake up at the crack of dawn, weed, harvest, fish, run the store, sleep and repeat... everyday.

I help out doing other things around the house (I've gotten much better at cooking since last year) and worked at the store for a little while but it's not really what I want to do.

Mom and dad don't pressure me, so while they're all busy tugging at the weeds in the cold, my nose is in the books. I'm in the honors program at school so I have to make sure I keep up with all my assignments.

And since I'm thinking about becoming an architect, my parents surprised me with an easel so I'd have somewhere to sketch. It's not the drafting table I wanted but it's a start. We really don't have the space for one anyway.

Mei works at the store after school some nights now and I think she really likes it. She says it's really busy there so the time doesn't drag at all. Next year she'll be taking classes at the technical school to earn her certification in sales, so she'll be doing even more at the store.

The store's inventory gets pretty low during the winter months. When our pond freezes over, they can't restock the fish. And the fruit trees are dormant now, so only strawberries are available until the spring.

Even with the inventory troubles in the winter, dad loves working in the store. He says things are going so well that in another few years, he'll be ready to open up the second store in Summit Heights.

While everyone's so busy with farming and the store, I'm usually stuck watching An.

She's usually pretty good and can keep herself entertained, but she gets bored easily.

So we take many trips to the park after school and on weekends. I usually end up playing chess with some random stranger but she has a good time catching up with her friends from school.

Some days she's not a problem but other times she can be really annoying. She wins 1 game of chess against me and I never hear the end of it.

I think it's because she feels left out. Mei and I are much older than her and we can't help but leave her out sometimes. She's grossed out by boys and we're over playing with dolls and jumping rope.

Besides school, boys are the only other thing that's been on my mind. Well, boy, not boys. Recently I started dating my friend Tony.

At first I was scared that dating would mess up our friendship but so far it's been good.

We've always had fun together as friends so it makes sense that we'd do ok as boyfriend and girlfriend.

But it's still pretty early in the relationship so we're taking it slow.

Mei on the other hand, I don't know. Ever since she and Darren kissed for the first time last year, they've been going out together a lot more. But they both claim they're not dating each other.

They could have fooled me and anyone else, I'm sure. I guess you can fool around with a guy without him being officially your boyfriend but that's not something I'd do.

I told her not to get too serious with him, though. He is very smooth and friendly with other girls at school and I don't want to see her get hurt if she sees that.

Notes:
-This entry is a little bit shorter than my other entries but I think I touched base on everything. I was struggling for a while with this family trying to see if they'd do anything else interesting to make this a little longer. After playing them for the whole winter, I gave up. The shorter updates might be better for me anyway to get things moving along in my hood a little faster and because of my lack of time to play.
-Neither of the girls are extremely boy crazy. Mei constantly has wants to go out/sneak out with Darren, but not go steady. Xia didn't have the want to go steady with Tony but she had the fear of being rejected. So I took it as her fear outweighing her want to ask him out. I made her do it anyway since I knew he'd say yes :).
-The honors program I mentioned is still a work in progress. I want to somehow reward my more ambitious sims for working hard. Basically, after they're out of college (which will also have an honors program), I may allow them to enter a career at a higher level than those who weren't in the honors program. Since I work in an admissions office at a college in RL, I've been trying to copy how we do things. I haven't figured out if that's a good or bad thing yet :). I've been revamping my higher education requirements and careers and will update those posts next round when I have everything worked out.