Jalee and I have been building and decorating our own lots for ages. I've been forbidden to tell you exactly how long we've been playing, but I can assure you that our Simship (Sims relationship--new word? Someone alert the people at Oxford) is over a decade long. We have also been skulking around The Sims Resource for a significant length of time. Only recently did we start toying with the idea that we could upload our own lots to share with other people.

Cut to a few months ago, when Jalee called me up to tell me that YES, FINALLY, her house was finished. You have to know her to know what this announcement meant. She has extensive experience in interior design and that definitely translated into her game. She has probably been playing with that house for over a year--decorating, re-decorating, scouring the internet for that ONE PERFECT RUG that looks just like the one in her real house. The list goes on and on. For her to tell me that it was done was a monumental moment.

"I wish I could see it!" I said excitedly. "Take pictures! Email them to me! Maybe you could make a video with your phone and send that!" So she did. They were gorgeous! I wanted that house in MY game. I could place it near my Sim's house, move Jalee into it, and we could hang out in the game ALL THE TIME. How could we make that happen? Why, EXPORT IT, of course!

Not so fast. We're hardly tech-savvy. Our husbands handle all the computer-related business in our houses. But even we can manage to click the "share" button, right? WRONG. We've been clicking this button for months for several houses we're particularly proud of, trying to share them on the TS3 exchange. We always get the same message: "Export failed." This is, of course, exceedingly frustrating for those of us with no understanding of WHY we are failing. Surely our games were just broken. The beautiful resorts and houses we built in our games would just have to stay there.

Then, magically, several days ago, Jalee sent me a text message: "OMG!!! I was finally able to share my Monta Villa resort!! I expanded it and it worked." (Please do check out her resorts, they are gorgeous! The first one will be published tomorrow.)

Me: "WHAT. WHAT??? What did you DO?!"

Jalee: "I think maybe it was the patch."

So I drove home and loaded up my game and still--I FAILED.

However, now there was hope! Jalee could do it! I could probably figure it out! So here we are, today, having spent about 5 hours on the phone with each other, trying to figure out why my beach resort won't export. I have done everything I can think of, and done everything the internet told me to, and finally I chose to run my game with no CC, and BAM--it worked. I then had to go in and replace the things that went missing, of course, so it isn't quite what I wanted it to be. Now, I will admit, my resort is not nearly as COOL as it was when it was chock full of the beautiful custom content that I've been downloading from TSR artists for years, but it works.

I want it to work the next time, too--only maybe NEXT time I can keep my CC to share with you all. Does anyone have any hints or tips? I'm sure someone out there has the answer...

Happy Simming,

Maggie