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.
