house – Ahuva’s Blog

A Last Hurrah

kitchen stove dining room door Last night we threw our last party with our old kitchen. It was Memorial Day weekend, always a great time to throw a BBQ. We had several reasons, however, to throw a party. Our wonderful next-door neighbors are moving down (back) to Florida. They will be gone by mid-June. All of us in the neighborhood are heart-broken that they are leaving. We love them, we’ve had such good times together, it was a wonderful, wonderful relationship. I decided that we needed to do a good, fun send-off to remind them how much they like us all and that they would need to come back and visit. (I already have a promise of a return for our Passover seder. 🙂 ) When I first proposed the Bye-bye BBQ I thought that we’d have already lost our kitchen – that we’d be doing this kitchen-free. I’m very happy that we still had a kitchen to do food preparation.

Kitchen sink door to basement That was the second “last hurrah” – bye-bye to the kitchen. For 34 years we’ve been entertaining, throwing parties, feeding people all from this kitchen and breakfast room. Okay – I’m exaggerating. The breakfast room and deck are only 28 years old. Putting that addition on the house was a true life changer. When we do BBQs, drinks and appetizers are out on the deck and the dinner selections are in the breakfast room. I probably should have taken some pictures of that last night – we had a MOUNTAIN of ribs. 🙂 And LOTS of non-meat sides because we have a fair number of vegetarians in our gathering.

view from breakfast room to front hall Yet another reason for the BBQ was my brother-in-law’s birthday. He, like our guests of honor neighbors, is carnivorous so we decided on beef ribs. My sister has a membership in a fantastic warehouse called “Restaurant Depot”. It has every and anything a restaurant/food vendor would want/need. My brother-in-law and I went there on Friday to get the ribs. It’s probably not a good idea to let the 2 of us do this sort of adventure without a chaperone because we both believe that more food is better. No – more than more. We came home with about 30 pounds of beef ribs. But that’s fine, because in 3 days, we’re not going to have a kitchen, no stove, and we’re going to still need to eat. Leftovers!!!! I know some people HATE leftovers but I love them. Leftovers mean I don’t have to cook or prepare something. My husband is the real chef in the family (I bake) and he did a great dry rub on the ribs. For good measure we tossed in some chicken dogs and veggie burgers. view from breakfast room doorway We had sugar free cheesecake and sugar free pound cake with fresh fruit and whipped cream for those needing SF, and we had sugar full cheesecake and sugar full ice cream cake for those wanting that good old sugar hit. The appetizers were delicious also. I’ll also give a little mention to the fact that I nearly lost my husband last night. As in permanently. One of my guests brought a home-made keto dessert (she’s very big on all sorts of healthy diets) and I’m not really sure what these things were, but they were sugar free. So she gave 2 to my husband who, of course, ate them. I only found out after the fact when I heard her describing the ingredients which included macadamia nuts. I said – don’t give any to him because he is highly allergic to macadamia nuts. Which is when I heard he’d already eaten them. Everyone joked about it and teased him and her, but the truth is – he was somewhat sick from them last night. 2 little tiny doses but enough for him to have a reaction.

I originally planned to do this party today, but as I write this post, rain is thundering down outside, and our phones periodically beep with emergency alert notices about flash flooding. The weather forecasters got all of that right because that was the forecast they were giving a week ago, which is when I said better move the party to Saturday night.

breakfast room table pots and pans closet Eighteen of us on the deck – chairs and space enough for everyone, although I will admit there was a tight squeeze in one corner. I had the chance to show everyone the plans for the renovation, and got to show off the now-famous upstairs hall door (you remember – an essential piece for The Great Incarceration). We’ve decided on the faucet for the kitchen sink (somewhat steampunky) and I got to show pictures of that as well. Plus the really amazing steampunk faucet we are NOT getting. 🙂 It’s going to be a huge change.

I’m going to miss my kitchen. I know that many people look at my kitchen and go “ugh”. It’s small, old, kitschy, loud. But I do love it. I love the pink and yellow and bright and the art work and the decorations. I no longer love the floor (28 years ago) or the stove (15 years ago) and I hate that the cabinets and drawers don’t work properly. I’m not loving the current ant invasion, either. Despite all its flaws, when it’s clean and bright, it makes me smile. It makes me happy. I’ve been worried about getting a new, modern, soulless kitchen. I think we’ve made some good choices so that although we will have a new modern kitchen, it shouldn’t be soulless. Time will tell.

breakfast room cat tree Today, however, is designated as “pack up the kitchen and breakfast room day”. Tomorrow is probably the same thing. We are working out a plan for how/when to move cat paraphernalia upstairs in preparation for The Great Incarceration. We are trying to determine in advance where we will put all the boxed up kitchen ‘stuff’. We have a lot of stuff. Where did all this stuff come from? Do we NEED all this stuff????

Tick tock, tick tock….. Less than 48 hours til the wrecking crew arrives…..

Artistic Confidence

pottery Are you creative? Are you artistic? Do you have an eye for balancing an image? My friend, the Fundy Migrant, 🙂 is taking a course on photography. I’ve always thought she took great pictures but I do see her skill growing rapidly. I think that supports the credo “Practice Makes Perfect”. Or at least leads to improvement. Those of you who only know her as the Fundy Migrant or “that woman” don’t know of her long history of creativity, but you will learn. My personal favorite, of course, were the Drama Dolls. And my very own special Drama Doll. But I digress (as usual). Because this post isn’t about her but about me (as usual). *grin*

I am very conflicted when I think about my artistic abilities. On the one hand, I think I’m creative. I’ve made and sold my own pottery (for real money to people who didn’t know me). dining room palette I think I have a good eye for my gardens. I learned to make virtual trees (thank you Fundy Migrant) and I learned to script so items I created would move. I made virtual hair which people wanted. I bake well also – ask my brother-in-law about my sugar free rugelach. On the other hand, I was NOT considered the artistic member of my family. Museums exhaust me mentally long before physical fatigue sets in. I passed up visiting Florence to go back to spend more time in Rome. You might remember a posting about a picture in our family home – the picture that my mother declared separated those with an artistic eye from those without. I loathed that picture. So you know where I was slotted on the spectrum. 🙂

I have been very slow to renovate my house. The house is nearly 100 years old. We’ve been there 34 years. We still have the original kitchen cabinets, kitchen counter, upstairs carpeting, and upstairs bathroom. For most people of my acquaintance, this is little short of heresy. Almost taboo. We did an addition to the house. We repainted the kitchen and changed the lights, and we’ve done other repairs and such over the years. tropical ceiling fan But other than the addition, which we did nearly 30 years ago, I’ve not done anything BIG. Several years ago it was time to repaint the living room and dining room and my big-breakout designer action was to paint the walls something other than WHITE. I used TWO strong colors in the dining room, and the ceiling in the dining room was the same faint pink-overtones of white that were the walls in the living room. I loved it. I remember my mother making “a face” at the end result. I, however, felt vindicated and still love my palette to this day.

Last year about this time we needed a new chandelier for the dining room. While we were at the lighting store, I saw a ceiling fan that captured my heart. It had 5 blades, shaped like fat rubber tree leaves. We bought it and replaced the ceiling fan in the sunroom. I thought no more about it until my niece suggested that I make the sunroom my “beach getaway” room, my own little tropics in NJ. I’d never considered redoing an entire room with a theme. I know OTHER people do these things, but I never considered it. But the suggestion took root, especially when my niece gave me the color palette she thought I’d like. I redid the entire room, piece by piece, idea by idea, slowly but surely. Everything was done except…. except…. I wanted a big seascape above the windows across from my reading chair. ocean view I didn’t find what I wanted at craft shows or online. I found wallpaper, however, that triggered some ideas. The wall is mostly windows. I wanted something more “ocean, beach” for the little bit of wall that remained. I bought wallpaper that looked like a weathered ocean fence, and a border that was ocean waves, sand dunes with beach grass and blue sky. I told folks that I was going to put the fencing down the wall and across the top of the wall above the windows, then put the border on top of that so it would look like I was looking out over the fence to the ocean. The reactions I received ranged from a slightly skeptical look to “that’s ridiculous, the ocean isn’t ABOVE the windows”. It looks great. I love it. It’s everything I wanted. People who see it love it too (okay, they might be humoring me but I don’t care. *I* LOVE it.)

Ahuva's corner I’m feeling much more confident about my ability to design a room and pull the various pieces together. I have much more faith in my taste in furnishings and color and concept. That is a very good thing, too. Because in 2 weeks we will gut our entire kitchen, widen a doorway, and redo the kitchen we have had for 34 years. Big changes are coming….

Obnoxious Neighbors

This is one of the reasons why people hate the mainland. This is one of the reasons I dislike my next-door neighbors. This is one of the truly annoying issues of SL. I am up in the sky – WAY up in the sky. For months, nearly a year, it has been me and my skybox. In the last few weeks, 2 of my neighbors felt obliged to build sky boxes right at the same level as mine. Isn’t that thoughtful? I can almost ignore the skynet looking globe-thing. But a plywood box???? Oh for heaven’s sake. It’s UGLY. Do you hear me????? Not only did you place it right next to my personal space, but it’s UGLY. You put a landing field in the sky above your house so all your friends and flying machines are buzzing overhead. You put HUGE ugly artwork right up near the border, forcing me to build a wall for a time to block it out. You don’t have a single tree or flower in your entire parcel. And now you stuck a plywood box right next to my quiet personal retreat. You have no class. The sky is a BIG place, folks. You had SOOOOOOO much sky, so many meters, where you could have rezzed your totally ugly box. But no – you had to intrude. Yep, you are a real class act. Not.

So Rodvik – I want walls that neighbors cannot cam through. I want to enclose my retreat in impenetrable walls so I can relax in peace and quiet. ALONE!!!!!!!!

Yeah, I’m a bit annoyed at the moment.

Locks Cannot Stop Her

You would think that after all this time, after setting the property to LOCKED, that I would stop taking my house. Sigh. I was trying to make some room for more prims, doing a bit of cleanup around the property. I decided the flowers on my side dresser could probably go back into inventory. I clicked on them, did take, got the message that some objects were locked, did I STILL want to take the object. Well, I was multi-tasking. Not very well apparently. Bigger Sigh. Yeah, you stupid application, I don’t know why the darn flowers are locked but YES, TAKE them.

Oops. Was my house. Yet again. A lot of the day went like that. All I will add is that I also ended up wearing a gazebo at one point. *grin* I detached it. I decided it made my butt look fat. *grin*.

Do Not Operate SL

You know all those warnings on medications – do not operate machinery when taking this medication. Do not drive when taking this medication. I and others have blogged in the past about how alcohol and SL do NOT mix. Or do mix too well, depending on where you want to take that conversation. *grin* I have another warning to add: Do not try to operate SL when ill with congested head issues.

In a sense, this post is for my sister and my niece. I am missing them in a talent show tonight. My fl avatar has been battling some sort of sinus congestion thing all week. I thought it was gone Thursday, but I relapsed on Friday. Rats. So I went back to drinking lots of liquids and getting sleep – not that I exactly had a choice about the sleeping. When I tell you that I was so out of it last night that I forgot that Komuso was playing, you know that my brain wasn’t working. I logged on 5 minutes before his gig ended. 😦 I went to listen to Euterpe Queller and was also IM’ing with a friend. I realized 15 minutes into the evening that there was no way I could stay upright. So I logged out – missing Euterpe, Von Johin and Noma Falta. In other words – I missed four fantastic live shows last night. I make a conscious effort to see those artists and I missed them all.

Today I woke up and felt marginally better. That is – the mule has stopped kicking my head. *grin* Trust me – that is a vast improvement. So I attempted to login to SL, chat with friends and work on my house. There is actually BIG news about my house, but that deserves its own blog. So I was working on my house and Calli sent me a present. The folder looked great – a TEA PARTY!!! We’d been playing SL IM tag for 2 days. She didn’t want to drop the present on me until I was inworld, as she did not want it to get lost.

I rezzed the tea party. Uh oh. No tea party. OMG! I wasn’t wearing my group tag. That must be why. Oy. I put on my group tag, wondering if all the work I did on the walls of the house will vanish, and end up in my lost and found. Calli and I discuss the situation. I realize at the same time she is saying “You didn’t rez the folder into the house prim” that that is EXACTLY what I did. I took the no-mod, no-copy items and rezzed them into the floor of my house. Sigh. Now you know that I have come a long way. Because not only was I unlinking, copying and re-linking wall prims today, I got that tea party out of the floor and rezzed it. And I realized that was my signal to stop trying to function and to sit down and have some tea. Bamboo and I sat down with the Teddy, Doll and Puppy and sipped tea, while my fl avatar went back to sleep. zzzzzzzz

So, do NOT operate SL when ill. Or you’ll be drinking tea IN your floor. Just sayin’

NEVER Trust Your Friends

I stand before you a sadder but wiser woman this morning. I broke one of the great SL rules last night. SL and alcohol do NOT belong together. Especially for one such as myself, for whom a glass of white wine can pretty much be my limit. 🙂 Yeah, I know – world’s cheapest drunk date. My coworkers used to LOVE going on business trips with me – I could never drink my share. Of course, that was in the days when corporate travel was allowed and when people were allowed to admit they enjoyed a drink now and then. Good grief – I even knew people who – GASP – smoked!!!!

This story actually starts the night before last. I met someone new and stayed up WAY too late chatting. 🙂 It was lovely, but I really do need more than 3 hours of sleep. I relied on a super-large iced coffee, turbo’d, to get me through the morning at the office. By lunch I felt like I’d been kicked in the head. I actually left the office by 3:30 (omg – and the building didn’t collapse without me in it!!! rofl). But of course I logged back in to work when I got home. The rest of my family was heading out to the movies. I poured myself a glass of chilled wine, sat back and dealt with emails and such. A coworker contacted me about business – we ended up testing code, installations, etc. Poured myself another glass of wine, expecting to get some dinner when we were done. Oops. Moved into SL and floated in my pool chatting with a friend. Sipping wine, floating, chilling. It was truly lovely. Said friend left. Okay – time for dinner! But first – I went to answer a plea for help at an MM board. *grin* How could you NOT want a Toblerone chocolate sword?????

I tp’d to the board. Saw Dale logon just then so I tp’d Dale over for the sword too. *grin* Dale likes chocolate. As we stood there clicking the board – WHAM. That wine and the fatigue just came right up and slammed me. I truly could not see – my eyes simply teared, couldn’t think, and knew that I was way way past any coherent or reasonable behavior. I threw myself on Dale’s mercy. Explained that I was done-for. 🙂 I needed rescuing. LOL. Dale actually had to remind me how to get back home. Once there – how to climb onto my bed. Which I seem to recall missing about 3 times before I got there. Oura had logged on in the meantime and said Hi. I said – I’m trashed, contact Dale. 🙂 And that, dear readers, was my mistake.

Dale and Oura. OH, how ye have BETRAYED me. /me lets tear run down my cheek. My property is protected. You must be in my group to rez objects on my land. Only MY FRIENDS are in that group. I logged in this morning to get my MM winnings. Which – by the way – I never got because I was so stunned when my house rezzed. THEY TRASHED MY ROOM!!!!!!!!!! OMG – they stole my bed, they left garbage piled up (with FLIES no less), they obscured my artwork, left empty bottles. I recoiled in shock and horror. eeeeewwwww It was so GROSS!!!!! I still can’t quite figure out what is under my bears. 🙂 or the big white waving things (toilet paper streamers???) I’m SURE I did not have a ceiling fan. 🙂 Is that from the pool table downstairs????

Hell – here’s a public apology to you. *grin* I saw your plurk yesterday about being bored and wanting to party and live it up. When I saw my room – I thought you and Nat had been there and done that. *grin* I guess you were too busy doing whatever to Prad’s floor. *hugs*

So dear reader – learn from my mistake. SL and alcohol don’t mix. Never trust your friends. Don’t give anyone rez rights.

Um, Dale, Oura – could one of you PLEASE give me back my bed??????

Building “Do”s and “Don’t”s

This morning I was set to declare that perhaps I do indeed have a bit of a builder in me. Tonight….*grin*….another mishap that sent me IM’ing to Bailey! Bailey is simply wonderful. So kind, so patient, so helpful. No matter HOW many times I try to destroy my house, she is there to help me get it back.

Return with me now, however, to happier times. I need an office for a demo next week to my manager. I’d hoped to use an existing office in an existing world. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, that option no longer seems viable. I looked about at all the worlds in which I move and my eye fell on Bedrock Boutique, my mall in OpenSim. The economy has been tough on everyone – we still have empty stores in the mall. I decided to build an office in one of the empty units. Only one little problem: I don’t have any furniture in OS. Actually, I don’t have much of ANYTHING in OS. LOL. Ah, but I DO have hair!! Anyway, I contacted a friend and asked if he would allow me to move his furniture into my store and he graciously agreed. So I set up a table with chairs, some sofas and end tables, put the corporate manual on the table along with a cup of steaming coffee (or whatever). But the setup seemed a bit stark, not to mention too public. I thought that what was needed was a way to indicate that this unit was not open to the public, not for general admittance. I decided that posts and ropes and perhaps a sign were needed. I had a few false starts thinking about the rope, but the posts were a breeze. As was the sign. All in all, creating the posts, rope and sign took me less than 30 minutes. For someone who doesn’t know how to build and has darn few textures, I was quite satisfied.

Now we all know that you shouldn’t work on things when you are tired. I should REALLY know not to try to edit items in or near my house. How many times now have I managed to TAKE my house and have to get it restored??? Two? Three? I think that Hell, Bailey and Shenlei have all had to restore my house at one point or another. Well, some people (me) never learn. I was floating in the pool in one of the inner tubes (hey – it’s HOT here – temperatures were over 90 for the last 3 days) and working on scripting a book. The book was on the side of the pool. All of a sudden – the book was in the water. The pool was twice as big as normal. What??? A very long story short. I “missed” when I was clicking on the book to rotate it. *grin* I clicked on the concrete around the pool and flipped THAT. I KNEW that I’d messed up the rotation of SOMETHING. I IM’d Bailey to ask advice. As we talked and I tried to explain what I saw – that’s when I understood what I had done. In other attempts to undo that, I had also managed to flip the entire pool section upside down. *grin* No, I didn’t get a picture. Silly me. It was actually quite funny. And I’m not about to do it again just for your entertainment. You will have to take my word for it.

And now for the lessons I am learning. First – I simply do not understand rotation. I have a plea in to the script wizard to explain to me WHY what worked for a door does not work for a book. llGetPos, llSetPos, llGetRot, llSetRot. I have used these functions in nearly every scripting assignment from Hell. And STILL I can’t make them do what I want. Grrrrr.

I also learned something important about llRezAtRoot. I don’t know why I thought llRezAtRoot lined up the new prim with the bottom of the existing prim. No, it lines up the new prim with the geometric center of the existing prim. For simplicity – I have a 4m x 4m square. I want to rez a .3m sphere in the upper-left corner of that square. *grin* Should have been very simple. If you read documentation, that is. I, of course, just kept playing with offsets and such. I think my coworker found this approach a bit maddening. 🙂 But I got the answer (geometric center) just as he found that in the wiki documentation. Cheater! Honour is always telling me to learn by trying. 🙂 Is THAT what you meant, Honour? So much of this rezzing/scriptig is math. All formulas and calculations. I’m lucky that my coworker is EXTREMELY good at math. I tend to make careless mistakes. Gee, I do that editing also. *grin* Must be a character trait. But I have to say – it is fun to finally make the prims appear where and when I want. I wish I could have that power in RL too. 🙂

Just for fun….. here I am in OpenSim:

House Arrest

Lucky me!!! Lucky you!!! Oura is taking over this blog today to tell you how to deal with your inventory. And how to make your friends crazy. 🙂 Both are EXTREMELY necessary skills in SL!

Inventory out of Control? What to do about it? Well the only thing to do, buckle down and clean it out, get organized, or get an alt and start over. 🙂

I decided to buckle down – I put myself on House Arrest. I decided I was not going to leave home until I had some semblance of order. Priority #1: I could at least FIND the new stuff I had just bought. Otherwise I’d just have to buy MORE new stuff. And if I couldn’t find THAT stuff, I’d have to buy MORE new stuff and… well – you see the problem, I hope.

While cleaning my inventory, I found lots of things that you would expect: clothing, landmarks, notecards, skins, hair, shoes, and boots, chairs and more. But I also found all this stuff that I had no idea why I had it: old tires, dirty mattress, boxes (omg at the boxes), tents, trailers, lawn chairs, bean cans that make a gassy sound 🙂 “Hmmmm, now why would I have THAT?” I asked myself.

After about a week of doing nothing but staring at my inventory, I got really bored. After all, while sorting inventory can be soothing, too much soothing simply numbs the mind. I found a nice T-shirt in my inventory that read “Under House Arrest (You didn’t see me here)”. I decided it was very fitting for the occasion. So what to do when cleaning inventory, at home under House Arrest? Plan a diversionary prison break. Trash your sim of course!! I set up a Tent City. LOL. The only problem with trashing my sim – I shared it with 2 other friends, Sam and DL. So I was trashing THEIR sim, too. You’d better watch out when *I* get bored!

Luckily I happened to get an IM from a good friend Rickk Shippe. He felt sorry for me, lonely in my house arrest, and came to visit. I was going a little crazy having no contact with the outside world for so long. He was quite surprised to see my tent city and decided to join me in my ‘creating’. Rick was a huge help. He had many things in HIS inventory that I can’t imagine why he would need them, either. We had old Christmas trees on fire in a ‘huge’ camp fire. Wild horses started showing up out of nowhere. More mobile homes, fire barrels, bouncing tires everywhere. Seemed like a good idea at the time. 🙂 WE were having fun.

When Sam and DL ‘noticed’ the new additions to the parcel, they were less than thrilled. SL was pretty new to them at the time, and some obvious methods of determining the culprit had not become second nature to them as of yet. They didn’t know how to inspect items and determine the owner. They didn’t know their land tools. So it was a great deal of fun to push them a bit with this practical joke.

Cleaning it all up was very easy and quick… but alas, it seemed to just add more BACK to my inventory. What will I do for this next week of “House Arrest” to entertain myself? Maybe prepare a big folder of STUFF and give it away?? Look out…. it could be coming YOUR way!

Thanks, Oura!! LOL. /me makes note to refuse any inventory offers from Oura in the near future…..

Housewarming!

I love when my friends do fun happy things. This time it was Nat & Hell throwing a house-warming party at their new home. I got the invite the day before, which was great. I had time to block it out on my calendar. Lately if it’s not on my calendar – it doesn’t seem to happen. I’d not partied or socialized or relaxed all week. I knew that I had to be with this group of friends to kick off my weekend. 🙂 So an hour before party time I packed up my stuff and actually LEFT THE OFFICE and went home.

Of course, I left wrapping the present til the last minute. But I’m getting good at this! I’d already practiced wrapping a gift so that it would give a card and the present smoothly. So I grabbed my handy-dandy gift box, modified it a bit, wrote up the card, and made TWO packages!! One for Hell and one for Nat. 🙂 Hey, everyone likes getting presents. And since I had 2 gifts (one high prim and one low) I figured they could each have the fun. I am quite impressed with myself. I managed to change the color and texture of the box. I reminded myself of what the script did (Okay – honesty compels me – the script was so easy to understand because Hell wrote it for me the other day. LOL. That’s also why it works!). I packed up those 2 boxes and called for the taxi. To my great joy (and a little surprise) – both packages worked exactly as planned. Yay!!! What were they? Plants of course. I’m a gardener, remember? I love flowers.

I arrived at the party to find that we were starting outside. Some beef on the barbecue and a bit of brew. I’m not exactly sure why Hell was wearing the cooler, but he was, so that’s the big brown thing you’ll see in the pictures. Also – a word of advice to you all. Should you be invited for dinner – I’d ask for sushi. Or take-out. Or anything that does NOT require Hell to fire up the grill. As Phin found out, Hell has a bit of difficulty getting that grill to light. A flame-thrower is NOT the answer to this question. You were supposed to cook the food on the grill, dear, not the guests…..

After a bit we all moved inside to see the place. Since it would not be a party without being bombarded with “things”, we had the obligatory beach ball blast, with newbies thrown in for a little variety. 🙂 We all had our own little ways to avoid being buried. Some rose above the mess, some of us waded through to a quiet corner. That would be me, actually. 🙂 I found a spot in the corner to sip champagne, to watch the craziness and to take a zillion pictures. Go see them on flickr.

More folks came in to join us and we had the usual banter and fun that we always do. We ran out of seats fairly early on so Nat and Hell rezzed out a bed. I know that this is your first house together. Let me give you a word of advice. You feed people, you make them comfy, you amuse them – the next thing you know they’ll have moved in. 🙂 Like stray cats. You may not want to be such accommodating hosts, you know? 🙂

Housing Disaster

Oh dear. Just when I think I know what I’m doing, I do something amazingly stupid. 😦 Did you know that textures need to be rezzed onto a prim? Maybe I knew that, but maybe I didn’t. I have several photos that are defined as textures in my inventory and I open them up just as if they were photos. So until Sunday morning, I never really paid attention to the differences. Oops……

Saturday night I went to an art show opening. Callipygian Christensen, Sysperia Poppy and Trindolyn Beck are showing their work at Chosen Misery. Calli had shown me some of the current pieces a few weeks ago. I’d fallen in love with one of them. I didn’t know that I’d fallen in love until I realized that I couldn’t stop thinking about the face and the lighting and the mood. So I told Calli that I thought I was in love and wanted to see the picture again. Sure enough, when I saw it Saturday night, I was still in love. So I bought it. My first artwork for my beautiful new house. No – I’m NOT posting a picture. If you want to see it, you have to come visit me. 🙂 I also fell in love with a photo by Sysperia. In for a penny, in for a pound – I bought that one also.

Sunday morning I decided to hang my new artwork. I was quite excited to put them up on the walls, see where they would look best, how to size them for best viewing. I started with Calli’s. I rezzed it, sized it, put it on the wall next to the fireplace. It looked wonderful – just as I’d been imaging it all these weeks. So without thinking much about anything, I rezzed Sysp’s texture, to hang on the wall. Oh dear. It was a texture, not a texture on a prim. It GLOMMED onto the wall of the house. Full size – covering the wall upstairs and down. Okay, no big deal, I thought. I’ll just take it back and start again. Except……. It’s like this, for you RL friends…. the texture becomes part of the wall. Not only that, but this particular texture – it’s “no-copy”. That means I can use it only once. So….. my wall now had this picture all over it instead of being wall texture, and I couldn’t re-rez the texture onto a prim to hang because it was already in use. So I’d damaged both the wall and the texture.

And then it got worse…. As I said, I figured I’d fix everything by “taking” the texture back. So I did. But I “took” the wall. That is, I “took” my house. Suddenly I was up in the air with no house. I was falling. I looked at my bare empty land with my furniture floating 3 stories up, and my pool where it should be and my heart stopped. Oh My Word. I destroyed my house. I didn’t put it in place – Rez and Shenlei did that for me!!!!! Oh my. Oh no. Having RL pains in my chest, can’t breathe. My house…. Frantically I look at my friends list. No Shenlei. Bailey!!! Bailey is on!!!! I IM Bailey, hysterical. Bailey tells me to start breathing again and she tp’s in to my rescue.

I give Bailey all rights to my inventory, I rez my house again (floating detached from the pool now) and stand back to watch. Bailey nudges and tugs that house right back into alignment – perfectly!!! I don’t even have to fix the furniture or the flowers or anything!!!! My house is BACK!!!! She made it look so easy. I think she accomplished the whole process in less than 10 minutes. I think it took her longer to stop my hysteria than it took her to move the house into place. 🙂 The wall was still textured with “Still Waters” (the Sysperia Poppy work), but Bailey needed to get back to work. I did not have the texture for the walls, so Bailey suggested that I contact both the architect who built the house and Sysperia, to ask for the textures. So I sent off notecards to both.

As I caught my breath and settled in to wait for replies, Shenlei logged in. I IM’d her to tell her of my latest fiasco. 🙂 Shen, like Bailey, immediately jumped to help, despite being up to her chin in her own work. She tp’d over. She has a house similar to mine and she gave me her wall texture. Then she began to teach me how to retrieve that texture out of the wall. The woman has the patience of a saint. LOL. I’m sure there is something ironic in that sentence, but you KNOW that I adore you, Shen. 🙂 Anyway, I was still being incredibly stupid (maybe I shouldn’t attempt SL until AFTER I drink my coffee??) and we must have gone through the same set of instructions five times before I understood how to get it right. Bingo! THERE was that texture within the content of the wall prim! I dragged it from there back into my inventory. YAY!!!! Shenlei trusted me to fix the wall texture and rez “Still Waters” correctly at that point and so returned home. I did indeed apply her wall texture successfully and it was a fairly close match. Not exact. But at that moment the architect IM’d me and sent me the correct texture. 🙂 YAY!!! My house was in place and textured properly!!!!! Next I rezzed a prim, textured it with “Still Waters” and hung it above my bed. It looks fantastic!! And while I was doing that, Sysp came online and IM’d me to help out. She too was very kind and comforting, saying (as did all the others) that everyone makes mistakes like this on occasion.

Everyone was wonderfully helpful, kind and supportive. Each one of them took time from their busy lives IMMEDIATELY upon hearing of my distress. I am always so touched by the kindness and generosity of the people that I meet in SL. I know that some people blog about rudeness and incivility. I have been extremely fortunate in the people that I know and meet.

So….. it seems to me that I need to repay the generosity and kindness of my friends. Some big, dramatic, tell-the-world gesture. I don’t think that simply giving an object as a gift will suffice. I think that something more personal may be required. I am thinking over how best to implement my idea…….