"hey lara! congratulations! you're now 2!"

"2 what???"

that's the first thing i heard out of leigh yesterday and "2 what???" was my response.

leigh is currently hooked on a sims knock-off game called villagers or something. her population is up to 20 and she's having fun giving them names alternately from lord of the rings and from her sphere of acquaintances. 7 "years" older than me in the game is little z, who when he became an adult (age 14) got upgraded to dr. z. if you haven't figured it out, that one's named after my advisor. he's going to be an actual medical doctor if leigh can convince him, but last night he developed a strange compulsion for doing laundry and she kept picking him up from the wash hut and dropping him in bushes to try to make him work. it was funny.

lara, on the other hand is still a child so she doesn't do much but dance and explore and occasionally pick mushrooms. after leigh named the character after me, it developed several likes and dislikes. this is remarkable because in the whole village population, most characters like/dislike nothing in particular (the computer decides, not leigh), and the rest like/dislike at most one thing... so one guy likes the color red, another dislikes flies, and another dislikes the ocean. not so with lara... she happens to be the most complex of all liking rocks and jokes and disliking surprises. how awesome is that?

unfortunately leigh let her villagers multiply too quickly and apparently she's not allowed to teach them to ration, so last night's 11pm update from her was that there's a food shortage and her top researchers are going to get weak and die from hunger before they earn enough tech points for her to help them get to the next level of food technology... cross your fingers that lara and dr. z. survive the famine!

not that i'd have the attention span to maintain the game long term myself, but it's rather entertaining to live vicariously through leigh. ;)

the end.