My friends, the end has come...

The formerly unthinkable must now be thought:

I've never been in the habit of making backups. And whenever I delete a file, I *DELETE* the file; the trash bin on my computer never sees any use.
This has always served me fine, because making mistakes is also not one of my habits. I always check twice before I press the OK button. However...
At some point I must have made an unrecoverable error. Because after a thorough cleanup action, I found that the folder "My Documents / EA Games / The Sims 2" has gone AWOL..
This means that all my 'hoods folders and, more importantly, my Downloads folder, have gone to the great beyond, where no Sims live.
And with nothing in the bin and no backups, there is no way that I can ever find and bring back the tens of thousands of files that made up my Downloads folder...
So, in light of the fact that Simming had become somewhat of a rarity for me anyway, I'm not even going to try to recover from this disaster.
Therefor, after 16 years of happy simming, I must call it quits. My last Simming day is behind me.

I bid thee all 'live long and prosper'.
Permission to disembark, Captain?