My hero

Round 27: Winter 2026

last update/next update

Claudia Kirby is 25 and Patience Draper and Josie Benton are both 24.
(Rose is 31, Jacob and Rob are both 25 and Troy is 23)

Narrated by Patience Draper

Earlier this month, I went back to Suffolk to attend Rob's graduation from law school. Undergraduates have their ceremonies in the autumn or spring but post-grads have theirs in summer or winter.

The ceremony started with a speech by the minister of education and got more boring after that.

I remember being pretty bored at my own grad, just watching hundreds and hundreds of people shake hands.

I guess law school graduation is just as dull.

Rob told me I didn't have to come but I wanted to be there for him. The complete dullness of the ceremony aside, he graduated summa cum laude so I wanted to make a big deal out of it!

I'm so proud of him. He worked his ass off delivering pizzas to pay his way through. If he never sees another pizza box again, it'll be too soon.

Luckily, he was hired straight out of law school, so he's already working at a firm in Exeter.


We wanted to go out to celebrate his graduate but I was completely broke and Rob's still in debt from his student loans. So we just stayed in and he made us dinner at his apartment. When we're both in a better place financially, we can go out for real.

Rob feels really bad about it but it's not going to be forever. Law school was expensive but ultimately, it's going to let him earn much more money than he could without it.

I've brought up the topic of moving in together, mostly as a financial decision but Rob is against it, for the mean time. He doesn't want me to take on his debt.

It's probably not a good idea right now. There's no way Claudia or Josie would go for Rob moving in with us and there's only just enough room for Rob in his apartment, without adding me. It's seriously tiny.

Speaking of Josie, she's almost finished her third year of med school and is really busy. She's still surgically attached to the computer most of the time.

Next year, she'll be an intern and she'll finally get to quit her job at the lab. She's really come to hate that place.

When she first started, she didn't really complain about it much, probably because it was still new. Now she says the entire place is filled with idiots.

I'm hoping we'll be able to hang out a bit more when she quits the lab. It seems like we only ever hang out early in the morning before I leave for work these days. If I didn't live with her, I'd probably never get to see her!

She's home weird hours. Sometimes she works nights, sometimes days. Sometimes she's not working and she doesn't have classes either, so she's home all day while Claudia and I are at work. Troy drives taxis right now, so he works weird hours too. If they happen to coincide with Josie's, they try to take advantage.

He's looking around for work in the gaming industry and he's losing motivation a little bit. Josie is endlessly optimistic about his prospects of finding a job in the field and gets him on track again.

If all goes well, I might be an aunt soon! Rose and Joanna are adopting and they're in the middle of a home study right now.

Rose came over the other day to hear how my interview with the social worker went. They're collecting multiple references from just about everyone she and Joanna know, to check that they're fit parents. And I was one of them.

I think it went well, which Rose was relieved to hear. This whole process is so nerve-wracking.

I wasn't sure what to expect from the social worker. Rose had told me that Joanna couldn't stand Tamara but I keep forgetting that there are a lot of people Joanna can't stand! Tamara seemed okay to me. I was still totally freaking out! I was so worried I was going to say something stupid and ruin it for them.


I didn't, thankfully. I think Tamara must have thought I had the nosiest roommates known to man though. Josie was hovering by the doorway for most of the time. Suddenly she had no work to do!

I don't know how many excuses Claudia found to wander through the kitchen while we were talking. They were so obvious! It's not like I wouldn't have told them everything afterwards anyway. It was nothing secret and I said all good things.


I never thought I would have become friends with Claudia but that's what's happened! When Josie and I moved in, I definitely felt like Claudia thought I was encroaching on her space and that she was suspicious that I was still hung up on Jacob. We've never really talked it out or anything. We just naturally got more comfortable with each other and none of that stuff seems like it's an issue any more.

It really has been so long since I've thought about Jacob in a romantic way. I'm really happy with Rob now, so I don't feel like I'm missing anything not being with Jacob.

I think Claudia and Jacob are better matched than we ever were.

I feel like I'm a totally different person than I was in college. I wouldn't dream of making moves on someone else's boyfriend now. I'm kind of embarrassed about the way I acted back then. I'm glad Claudia didn't hold it against me.
As much as I like the people I'm living with, I'm not as keen on the place I'm living. I love our house but I have never lived in the suburbs before and now I'm in the outer, outer suburbs.

There's like a silo that we can see from the living room window. A silo! This place isn't really me. I'd love to go back and live in Exeter, where I grew up and where Rob lives.

I'm hoping that I'll soon be have saved up a bit more of a nest egg to make that more of a possibility. I've started getting a heap of roles in commercials and even some print work - all of that pays much better than the bit roles I was getting previously.

Don't laugh! I got paid more than $800 for one day's work to wear this ridiculous thing!

Notes:

• Title is from My Hero by Foo Fighters.
• The graduation was kind of fun to do but I won't be doing it all the time. I was just thinking about my own (very boring!) grad earlier, so I stuck in something about Rob's The lot is really very laggy, as much as I like it.
• I don't know how I had Pascal, Mina and baby Jonas living in an apartment the size of Rob's at one stage (when they were first starting out, they lived in his building). It is so incredibly small! They lived there for several rounds too. I must be less tolerant of tiny, tiny lots these days!
• The simDNA cheat has stopped working for me. :\ I have no idea why. I have screencaps of the readout for all my current Sims but dammit, I need it for any new Sims too! If you've got any ideas as to why it might have stopped working, please share! Maisie? I know you had a problem with it at one stage. Do you remember what it was?
• Patience's "print work" is something I'll be doing when I get around to it. Something Laura said on Twitter about the posters for her women's clinics made me think of it but I'm going to make up some posters for my bridal shop with Patience as the model. The ones I have now are pictures of real women and they look a bit out of place. I might make some for Naomi's boutique too and see if I can recolour those H&M clothing booths to put the posters on the sides.
• These girls finally have more than $1000 to their names! I put Claudia into some major debt to decorate this place and managed to just pay it off last round and this round, they managed to earn $11,000 cushioning. I managed to get Rob to pay off his law school debt too. He had about $3500 left to go (it costs $16,000, which is half the cost of med school, by the way) so I noticed he was a Film & Literature Sim with high creativity, so I had him write a novel. After that and his promotion (I think he's a Law Clerk now), he was all paid up!