Second Life, Take Me Away!

Kind of like the Calgon commercials a while back (okay, I've dated myself), where the housewife gets to take a bath in Calgon crystals and it takes her away from life's everyday hardships. That's one of the reasons I use SL: Take me away from the rough day of work I had.

But sometimes when logging onto SL, things aren't always a fantasy, wonderful virtual life. Instead, people can have problems and issues and sometimes just need an ear to bend or even a shoulder to cry on. But that was not the case on this day. On this day, I desperately needed to get away from my real life and enjoy some time in SL.

On this day, I was able to logon and go swimming in my lagoon. I jet skied around the island. I flew my helicopter around the place, played a few games of Greedy Greedy breaking my high score by quite a bit! I went and snooped through my daughter Neva's house, my new neighbors house and even went exploring some new places I'd found in search for cat and I to hang out at.

I went up to the building platform and started making beach blankets. I already have beach blankets down on the beach. If you lay down on them, you can choose between several animations and lay there taking in the sun. It's a great way to hang out with and visit with friends. But I wanted different blanket textures. While I was out shopping for L$60 things, I ran across a full permission animation. It was not much. Pretty lame actually, but I got it anyway for my new beach blanket. I suppose I could make my own animations but that takes time and I never know how much free time I'm going to have in SL, so I went for it. I then went to the most invasive internet presence in the world, google, and downloaded a whole bunch of beach blanket textures. Only a few of them needed editing and Photoshop made quick work of that.

Upon uploading the textures to SL and applying them to my beach blankets, which I added a sculpted pillow to, I added an animation player and adjusted the pose to look realistic. I then made a bunch of copies and placed them out on the beach. They looked good and only cost me the expense of uploading the textures to SL at L$10 apiece. Then I remembered, I had some sort of texture changing script that I picked up a few weeks prior. I had to wonder if I could use that script somehow for these blankets.

After some fiddling around, I found that yes, I could click once on the beach blanket to sit and run the tanning animation and a second time to activate the texture changing menu. What was really nice about this texture changing script was the fact that I didn't have to load the blanket with textures and have the script choose them. All I had to do was load the UUID number (Universally Uniquie IDentifier) for the texture. Now a single beach blanket can have any of the textures I uploaded. I have tie-dye, superman, striped and swirled to name just a few. I will have them up for sale sometime soon, just as soon as I get more time online.

Then cat logged on. Let's just say that she and I had the very best time imaginable. I lost myself in her and lost all track of time. Before I knew it, it was way past time to logoff. It was the perfect way to escape RL for me.

Ari and Hell Hound's Wedding

My daughter Ari and her man Hell Hound are into VAW (Virtual Attitude Wrestling) wrestling. So after a long courtship, and when it became time for them to wed, of course it's going to be an exciting production at one of the many wrestling venues in SL. But first, there were a few events to watch. Three wrestling matches in the ring before the wedding of Hell Hound and Ari.

In attendance left to righ, cat Olu, Neva and Chica

I'd never been to a wrestling event in SL so this was all new to me. When we first arrived, the place was so laggy that it took several minutes to be able to sit in the audience. Olu was there and informed me that there were 50 people on the sim. Well that explains the lag! But after a while, we were all able to sit. Olu, Neva and Chica and I all sat together. Chica left a seat open next to me for cat to occupy when she showed up. But as it turned out, the wedding was relocated. Good thing too because at that point my computer locked up and closed the SL viewer. So I relogged to my last location and was offered teleport to the new location, which was much less laggy by the way, from Neva. Refreshing. So our party and a bunch of the regular wrestling audience all had fun with the seats. The way they work is that you simply sit in them, but it's not all that simple. You do not necessarily sit where you click. After you sit you are allowed the choice of adjusting your sit or swapping sits. If you swap, you end up anywhere in the row of about 8 seats. Whatever happened to pose balls? With pose balls, you knew which seat you were going to end up in, the seat with the pose ball on it! It was pretty simple. I can understand wanting to hide pose balls but if you cannot control where and how you sit, what is the point? But finally, after lots of laughing at the ridiculousness of trying to manage the audience seating, we got settled.

At that moment, two things happened. I was offered teleport by Hell Hound to get setup back stage and cat logged on. I waited for her to rez so that I could say hello before tping backstage. I met up with Hell Hound back there and we worked on the gadget that would allow me to walk Ari down the isle to the altar. I also met up with Ari's daughter (my granddaughter) Arianna. Not to be confused with her mother Ari having pretty much the same name. Anywayz....

The vows

There were three wrestling matches before the wedding. It was sort of fun to watch the wrestlers in their costumes and performing their animated moves. Just like RL, the winner of the match is decided ahead of time, but it's still fun to watch. But the best part was the two announcers. They sat off of the side of the ring and were in local voice chat with the whole place. Because my voice chat radius is restricted to 20 meters from my camera's position, I had to cam over by them to listen. They were lively and funny and reminded me of Cheech and Chong. I wish I could remember their names. You should check them out sometime if you ever get a chance. Just search for VAW group inworld and go from there.

Then there was the wedding. After the last match, the ropes came down from the ring and the altar and decorations were setup immediately. I moved the isle walking gadget in place as Hell Hound and the minister took their places. And there was Ari next to me, in a gown that I must say was breathtaking. I saw the picture of it that Ari passed to me a while back, but that picture did not do the dress justice. Maybe it was made better because Ari was wearing it? Yeah, I bet that's it.

Chica, Neva, cat, Arianna, Ari, HellHound, Me and Olu

I walked her down the isle and gave her away. I took my place off to the side with Arianna who was the flower girl and had gone on down the isle before us. I kept her close to me and it's a good thing too, because after the vows and the presentation, Raiders Redstar jumped out from the shadows and clobbered Hell Hound with a wooden bat. He scooped up Ari and ran off with her! The crowd went wild! Hell Hound quickly recovered and chased off after his new bride, eventually finding them and freeing her from Raiders' keep. His motives are still unknown to me at this time.

Afterwards, we went to Cherry Street club to have a nice reception. There was dancing and pictures taken and a good time had by all. After that, cat showed me a new floating dock she put in the water behind the house. We did much more than just float. The perfect end to an amazing evening.

Home Sweet Home

I think it's safe to say that Goetz is now our new home. We had issues early on with stuff vanishing but nothing has happened in the past week so I'm thinking we might be okay. There were problems that Linden Labs were dealing with at the time we were filling our new parcel with stuff. I've had a handful of doors vanish, which is not a huge deal because those still reside in my inventory. But losing cat's beach loungers was a hard pill to swallow. She and I, and I would imagine countless others, have made some very fond memories on those things.

And we have some new neighbors now. The old ones who were not happy with us for unknown reasons, have moved on and a new bunch of D/s minded people have moved in. They have a wonderful house and nice roadways over there. I'm looking forward to meeting them someday.

Me, Olu and Neva chillin' at her place

Hanging out at the nude beach and at Neva's and playing Greedy Greedy has been a real treat. This is what it's supposed to be like. It's so wonderful to have my daughter and my woman with me at home where we all belong. I have other daughters and sons in SL too, but they have their own places and their lifestyles are a little bit different than ours. But for cat, Neva and myself, we tend to think a lot alike and like the same sort of things, people and experiences. We like the same things out of our SL so it only makes sense that we stick together.

Neva has had a few guests over to the new place, but I have not had a whole lot of free time yet to socialize. One afternoon, cat and I were christening the beach when my hostess with the mostest, quietygr popped in. She said she saw me stuck in the sand on the beach and left. Apparently she did not she that I was stuck in cat instead of a sand dune. Both cat and Neva have had guests but quiet is the only guest of mine so far. I plan on bringing lots of my friends over soon. Ambriel is rezzing there when she gets time and I think that Nezzy is too. So things are starting to settle down and it's feeling more and more like home every day.

Goetz

Now this worked out pretty well! We shopped for and found some good land. It is 1/2 of a full sim. 7500 prims. My exciting submissive cat and I along with our amazing daughter Neva purchased the place and are in the process of setting up home there. I say "in the process" because for some unexpected reasons, this move is more difficult than the last move from Styll to Sensual Freedom.

The differences between the two locations is that now we have a huge house on the ground. On Sensual Freedom and Styll, we have a simple skybox. So this has made the move a little more complicated. And due to a large barrier that needed to be erected between our parcel and the neighbors, there is no room for the club on the ground not to mention room for the shop.

Giant 1/2 sim wide wall of privacy

On Sensual Freedom we had 3 other neighbors as it was a 1/4 sim sized parcel. We never had any issues with the neighbors on that place. Goetz is a different story. The neighbors started contacting me immediately complaining that my guests needed to stay off of their land. Well, I'm okay with that except for the fact that I had only owned the parcel for 8 hours. How could my guests become a problem and how could they be my guests when nobody but cat, Neva and myself even knew where the place was? See how this is shaping up? The neighbors are blaming things on me before they even have all the facts. Not a day goes by that they (meaning there are at least 4 of them) don't contact me with one complaint or another. They want to keep their land parcel private, which I respect, but they are on a residential/commercial sim. They own a nightclub FFS. What do they expect?

So I had cat put up a huge border which covers half of the parcel and Neva is going to put up another one to completely block them off. I've never had so much problems with neighbors before. They need to understand that others have rights too.

All of that aside, the new home is wonderful! I let cat and Neva have at it and decorate the place. Needless to say, they did a fantastic job! I'm still working on the club move and the builder's sandbox, etc., but these girls have everything else pretty much finished. Of course land is always a work in progress here in SL, so I expect many upgrades and improvements as they become required or available. I have put up the sex/orgy/dungeon place along with the castle and our new couples cuddle forest attraction. These all exist above the ground level. I have scattered teleporters all over the land so be sure and use them to find the fun places to visit. More fun and places to come too! Be sure to visit http://slurl.com/secondlife/Goetz/183/151/23 This will bring you to the nude beach so be sure and take your clothes off before clicking :-)