Some stray thoughts that didn’t fit in other blogs….
I’ve been promising a picture of one of my favorite friends. 
And I’m finally keeping my promise! I think she is one of the most beautiful people I’ve met in SL – inside and out!!
And I’ve made some other, more unusual friends as well. 🙂 I was a little concerned for this friend’s well-being on the beach, 
but he assured me that he would be just fine. You do meet the most interesting people in SL.
Two of my SL friends got married yesterday – in SL. So I need to go back to my blog on July 3 (Scratching the Virtual Itch) and eat my words, so to speak. I was taken aback at the notion that anyone would ever formalize a partnership in SL. I’ve come so far since then that now I wonder how I could have ever written those words. LOL. My friends are SO happy! They are simply radiating joy to everyone around them. Obviously getting married in SL can be every bit as important as it is in RL. Of course every party has a pooper and that role was played by another acquaintance who remarked: “In general my impression is that monogamy usually works spectacularly badly in SL, for whatever complex reasons.” Let’s hope that for my two friends, that’s not the case. Everyone can use some happiness, wherever they find it.
But that does raise an interesting question. Do SL relationships flame out more than RL relationships? I suspect that may be true. I think the reasons probably aren’t all that complex. In RL, relationships are mostly pre-defined. By that I mean society has trained us all to think that “marriage” entails conditions a, b & c and responsibilities 1 to n, and so on. Everyone we know in RL has learned the same rules about marriage. So even if the couple wanted to change the rules, society is pressing in on them, enforcing the relationship. I haven’t seen that kind of societal pressure at work in SL. It may be that I am still too new. But I think that people form relationships in SL without clarifying the terms beforehand. If they are operating from different assumptions and there are no external forces keeping them together, the relationship flames.
Here’s my last fragment: I want to buy land. I needed some time alone to think and stare at the water and chill out. I tried to do that from “my” beach chair, but someone kept hitting on me. Sigh. So I fled to a friend’s house and sat on their beach. I want my own beach with my own view of the water. So where should I be looking? What should I know?
Ahuva's Blog 
Ahuva – We’d love to have you in Extropia, and we’ve got six sims of oceanfront options!
What to look for: price per prim. Prim count, not square meters, is *everything* in buying land, something people often don’t know before their first land purchase (like me!).
Think about what you want on your property: how complex a house, how much furniture, what other things, like a pool, gardens, landscaping. If you think you’ll start minimalist, then a small plot will do you. If you like detailed objects and lots of stuff, you might want to think about a plot that could support about 500 prims, and land that’s rated at 1.4 to 2 times the basic land-to-prims ratio (Extropia’s double-prim land – which means you can put twice as much stuff on a parcel there than you can on a standard property).
But, if what you want is a beach chair and a lot of open land, some companies offer open-space sims that give you half as many prims as standard – which means you get a lot of, well, open space. 😛
So, think about your needs, and compare by price per prim, what the land looks like and whether you can make any alterations to it.
Aak, that was me, Soph Stenvaag – I didn’t realize this site has me logged in as the official Extropia blog! D’oh!
Oh Soph! Thank you so much! I’ve never been to Extropia – I’d love to come see it. Oceanfront view is definitely on my “must have” list. I’m starting minimalist – looking for a “starter home”. 🙂 Thanks for all the advice. That’s the kind of information I need to figure out what I should be doing.