Tired today

I'm really tired today. I keep getting asked what is for dinner but man, I just don't have the energy to cook. Not to mention it's flippin' hot in my neck of the woods, for all that I'm having to wear a sweater in the house because the AC is freezing me so badly, the arthritis in my left fingers has me holding my fingers in pain. Typing isn't easy but I know I can't just stay still or it will get worse. But mostly, I'm just tired and I need quiet for a bit.




My Aldwyn came home yesterday and I spent the first half hour we were together just talking his ear off about this and that. I'm lucky that he's a good listener and he seems to like to hear me babble on about nothing. Once I finished telling him about the past few days, and he finished telling me about his trip, we discussed my ideas for the wedding while having a region message war with Ulaa. She and Al are my only estate managers [besides my 2 alts, Aidan & Piper]. I was *this* close to making it flood on the island, but since most people were up in the air, it wouldn't have been very good.

I have a lot of ideas of how I'm going to terraform for the wedding, but I won't know how it's actually going to turn out until I can do it. It's times like these I wish I had a spare sim for a couple of hours just so I can work a bit. Maybe if I ever win the lottery, I'll buy another sim. :-p

Maybe I need to make a wedding To-Do list. Although the first thing we really need to do is set a date! That would probably be quite helpful!

Pretty sure we can do better.

Since Aldwyn is STILL being mean and is STILL out of town, I decided to go check some wedding venues tonight for inspiration. We are going to have the wedding on Bluebonnet, and I have ideas in my head of what I want it to look like, but inspiration is never a bad thing. So I looked up some wedding places and off I went!

Did I find inspiration? Well, if I wanted to see what not to do.

I landed at a place that advertised free weddings. When I landed, immediately their bridebot invited me to a group and sent me an IM. She's a looker, no?




They did have an altar and all kinds of poseballs set up. So I GUESS if you were super short on money, it would be a good place to go. But the funniest part? They have a minister set up. And you just clicky click the minister to get the service going. It's REALLY freaking funny!




Father Mosely: The couple are now going to register their partnership.

Indeed.

But I guess it's not unusual to have a prim minister because I wandered to another place and found this guy ready for action.




He won't do the ceremony for less than $500L, though. I guess to pay for that face.

Yeah...I think we're definitely better staying on Bluebonnet for the wedding. And hopefully our officiant won't be a noob. Hopefully.

Hello, new profiles!

So Linden Lab rolled out their new SL profiles pages today. I had been playing with the beta one for a bit and essentially it brings a little more social networking into our world. Naturally this is cause for much alarm from some people because they really don't want to be social. Hey, I get it. I'm not always the most social person either! There are some privacy settings, but not as many as people would like. But maybe some of what I'm going to show here will help you out a little bit.

Okay. First, find your settings. It looks like a wrench.




That's going to allow you to do pretty much everything you want to do to your profile anyway, so you need to know where to find it. As you can see, you can change your picture, edit your bio, all that good stuff that you used to have to log in world for. Now if you want to handle things while you're out or at work or you don't want to log in because someone you dislike is online, you can do it all from the web. I'm going to assume you know how to do all that, so we'll move on.

Next, go into the Privacy tab.




These settings will allow you to lock things down to a friends list level, but no further than that at the moment. It could change later, but for now, it is what it is. As you can see by my settings, everyone in Second Life can see my wall and post on it, whether they're on my friends list or not. I did change that to only letting my friends do that, once I thought about it a little more. I have it set that everyone can see the basics of my profile, whether they're logged into Second Life/the SL website or not. You, of course, may only want friends to see your profile. Of course, if you're a blogger or a creator, you might not want to have your profile locked that far down, as I expect it might get troublesome. And really, who is THAT flipping important that they have to lock their profile down that hard, am I right??

EDIT: There is a now a JIRA for allowing the option to not let anyone post to your profile.

EDIT AGAIN: It's been handled! You can choose now to not let ANYONE post on your profile! Linden Lab DOES listen on occasion! :)

Now click on the notifications tab, because this is a biggie.




If you don't want to be spammed to death with in world notifications of people posting on your profile or commenting on your posts TURN IT OFF. That's right, just clicky click and turn that mess off. I have it set to email me when someone posts on my profile, but I think email notifications are broken anyway, since I haven't gotten any emails.

I kind of dig the new profile set up. I can post things and comment to others without ever having to see them in world [that social thing, you know], and I can handle my friends list online, which is awesome!

But of course if you just hate this, you don't want this, you can't even believe that Linden Lab would want people to be social, you can always just turn off all your notifications, use a third party viewer that still shows old style profiles, and never think about it again. :)

The last house?!

So Aldwyn was totally mean and went away on another trip today. MEAN, I TELL YOU. Yeah yeah, he'll be back on Wednesday, but that's not the POINT. The point is that he left me. Hmmph.

Since I was on my own today, I decided to work on wedding music. I was kind of afraid that I wouldn't find a good "walk down the aisle" song since I gave "my" song to Rylan for her wedding. [Not that she knew that. It was like my private gift since I didn't think I'd ever get SL married.] But as I was flipping around listening to music, I stumbled across something so very perfect! Oh, I have to say, I have dread for whoever we end up getting to DJ for us. We could get married on a flat platform in the sky, with only two people in attendance, and I could wear a dress off the rack and it wouldn't matter as long as the music was PERFECT. Rylan and Sixx were pretty lenient with their music choices, as long as I played their song at the right times, but I'm afraid I'm not going to be that easygoing. Not with the ceremony music, anyway. The reception music will be mostly up to the DJ. Mostly. Probably. Ugh. Someone stop me from DJing this all myself. I will have other things to think about!

Oh, so, while I was listening to music and stuff, Ulaa showed a picture of one of her new houses on plurk. It's a rather large family style home, and I thought, "Oh, that might be what we use after we are married." Then it struck me.

The house I'm in right now might be the last SLingle girl house I ever have!




I mean, I'm assuming Al is coming to live on Bluebonnet with me after the wedding. [No, we don't live together right now. I've been down the "live together first" road before and when we started seeing each other, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't go down that road again!] So given that after the wedding, the island will be non-beachy and we'll need a new house, this really might be my LAST SLingle girl house!

I think I have to go lay down now.

PLURK! COME BACK!

Wah! Plurk is down! It's been down FOREVERRRRRRRRR. And from what I have heard, it's scheduled to be down until 5pm SLT. CRY WITH ME, LOVES. CRY.

Okay, so I'm a little overdramatic. But I do miss it. I miss not being able to check in with people, especially on a Saturday when I have the day to myself. It makes me do stupid poses and faces on top of the chair on my roof.




Do you use Plurk? I love it. I have so much fun there and it's the best way to keep up with everyone at once. I doubt people on my friends list would like me popping up in their IMs every few minutes with mundane things!

"Omg, starvin' like Marvin!"

"It's really hot here!"

"I keep putting my Lip Smackers on and licking my lips."

"I don't understand why people charge so much for nothing."

"Haha! My cat fell off the table!"

"Vague plurk is vague! Do it again, you whore, and see what happens!"

See? Would that not drive you insane if I randomly came into your IM with it? But on plurk, it's somehow more acceptable. Maybe because we can mute plurks or unfollow people. I unfollowed almost all of my list earlier this month because I knew I'd never be able to keep up while so much was going on. Little by little, I'm re-following folks as things here calm down, but there are some that I only like to check in with periodically. Hell, there are some that I should unfollow as it is because their plurks make me roll my eyes so hard, I'm almost in danger of losing them into the back of my head. I doubt everyone on my list actually reads my random junk, so I figure it's all balanced out in the end. :)

I think Aldwyn and I have decided that we'll be having a forest wedding. I have some ideas, and my part of Bluebonnet is going to be a MESS while we set up for the wedding. I hope my renters don't mind that!! But that's not for another month at least, after we go back to being a grassy sim in September. The girl that I hope will be doing my dress just came back from her trip, so I'm going to throw about 20 pictures at her pretty soon. I hope she's ready for them!

No, really. Starvin' like Marvin. I'm going to go eat.

You go, Glen Coco!

I was in a mood tonight. Just a mood to have some fun, do something silly. So I did what any good sim owner would do.

I flooded the sim.




Aldwyn had to put up with me laughing and laughing in his ear as I ran around without an AO, screaming "Save the meeroos! Oh no! Water damage in my house! What will we doooo???"

To his credit, he didn't tell me to shut up. And even more to his credit, he pulled out his coast guard boat and we sailed around after I raised the water even more.




I love a man who can play with me when I'm being completely stupid. :)

I've been trying to give more of my attention to him this week when we are in SL together. Not that he asked me to or anything like that, but I wanted to do it for me mostly. There have been so many times in the past year when we simply haven't gotten to be together. The more I started to think about the wedding, the more I realized that we haven't had the most normal of SL relationships. Maybe that's why it works so well? :) But there haven't been all the nights of slow dancing, or going to parties together, or posing for lots of photos, or things that most couples do. We get busy with other things and other friends and so sometimes there hasn't been time for more than wishing each other goodnight. It's definitely nobody's fault, it's just how we have been. :) So this week, while we both have some free time, I've been devoting that time to him. I certainly hope no one thinks that I'm ignoring them!

So the wedding. Oh yes, I have been thinking about it. We talked about it for a while the other night. I want to have it on Bluebonnet so I can spare anyone my Bridezilla wrath and design the venue and do all the terraforming and stuff like that. Al is really awesome and he says whatever I want that will make me happy is what he wants, although I did tell him if he had ideas, he should tell me. [Of course, then he suggested an underwater wedding or one with a tardis and I almost called the whole thing off.] I'm thinking we're going to do this in September. I really don't want to push it out much further than that, but it's going to depend on RL commitments, how quickly I'm satisfied with the wedding venue, and when my dress will be completed.

Thinking about wedding stuff makes me a bit giddy. :)

I'm planning an Old SLchool party in the next couple of weeks. Tacky is the word for what I have planned, but I think everyone is going to love it. Especially since when I brought it up on plurk, folks went nuts for the idea. :) Most of us no longer go to clubs in SL. At least, not like the way we used to as newbies - going to "Best In..." contests to attempt to win some money to fund the next contest outift, hoping that no one would start TPing in all their friends to vote for them at the last minute, putting your last $10L into the sploder in hopes that you win something back. I've already started putting together the party area. I think the structure is appropriately old school just on its own, but it will look better by the time I'm done with it.

I'm really rambling and it's 4am. It's time for bed.

Everyday I'm Shufflin'

I've had that Party Rockers song thing in my head today, hence today's blog title.

YEAH! HENCE!

Anyway.




A bunch of us deleted our Google Plus accounts today. It only took them 2 weeks to start pushing SL avatars out for being "fake." Well, considering I've been Alicia Chenaux for almost 4 years, and that's what most of my friends know me as, it would be pretty silly for me to use Google Plus under my real world name. Do some people know it? Of course. I have some SL friends on my RL Facebook. They have allowed me to share in their lives beyond SL and that's pretty darn cool. But that's a choice we made, not something that had to be forced under the threat that we might have our Google accounts suspended for being "fake."

But it goes beyond Second Life. There are MANY bloggers and other online personalities who choose to go by a nickname. With identity theft so rampant, why the heck would you want to take the chance that some asshole with a computer and too much free time would read what you said, get butthurt, and choose to compromise your identity? I chatted for years with people that I truly loved and some of them, I never knew a real name, or a last name. It didn't matter. They weren't some video game character. They were, and some still are, my friends.

So yeah, I left G+ today. I did get an invite to Diaspora, which is similar to G+, still in its alpha stages, and seems to be more welcoming to avatars. If you're interested in joining up, IM me with an email and I'll send you an invite.

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Social networking aside, we got a Kinect recently. HYSTERICAL! Bouncing around trying to kick bubbles or whatever really made me laugh! But it got me thinking. Could I be in SL on the Kinect? That would be AWESOME. I would love to run around my island, or dance my own dances. [Not that I have much rhythm. Or energy.] I could do my own stands, not be reliant on an AO! I COULD ACTUALLY KICK AVATARS IN THE FACE!

Someone get on this! Please!

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I truly should be doing something productive. Or baking cinnamon rolls.

Wall

So it's been a week since my dad's surgery and everything is pretty darn good. I feel myself starting to lose some tension and smiling more than I have been in the past couple of months. I've signed on to blog for a new monthly event [it's going to be awesome!!!] and I'm starting to think about wedding stuff. I'm talking to someone now about making my wedding dress and she's amazing, so I know she will do a wonderful job when we really start designing.

I spent most of yesterday decorating my new house. Of course, then I spent today just sitting on the wall.




I HAVE places to sit inside! Heck, I even have chairs to sit outside. But I'm just chillin' on the wall. With my bird.

That's what SLife is about, I guess?

I think once a week I'm going to pick a new location to go to and then blog about it. I really don't do much exploring these days, and that needs to change. Plus it'll keep me from just sitting on my wall. Do you guys have any suggestions of places I could go? :)

This blog post has taken forever to write because I keep watching Toddlers & Tiaras and looking at myself.

What the...

I just have to say at the moment, I'm totally confused.  Somewhere in the week that I've been without blogging, Blogspot decided to change the dashboard and how we post shit. I...I'm scared.

Anyway. Hi!

We made it through the surgery and all, and I came home yesterday afternoon, much to the delight of the cat. Going back into SL was a little weird. Do you all ever feel that way after you've been away for a few days? Aldwyn was awesome and logged in as me to clear my messages while I was gone, so I didn't miss a thing, but I kept looking at my shape wondering if he'd made my hips wider or made me taller, since I seemed a little taller and fatter in my eyes. He also didn't dress me like a tramp, but I'd pretty much logged out looking like a tramp and I doubt he could have found anything in my inventory anyway. I was kind of sad, though, because I didn't get to see him.




He's off living in a van down by the river like a hobo. Probably eating beans with ketchup. Beans that he cooked still in the can over an open fire.

Okay, so maybe that's not completely true, but he is at a river doing some rafting. I don't know for sure that he's eating beans. I've never been camping, so all camping makes me think about hobos. Like this.




Getting back into SL and blogging seems strange to me right now. I know I need to because it's a creative outlet for me, but this past week I met a man who was about to have a mitral valve replacement, watched my daddy, the strongest man I have ever or will ever know, have to use a walker just to move around the house, and saw a family in tears as one of their own died before any of them could get there. Somehow blogging about a new dress or listening to peoples' online drama seems a little less important to me at the moment. But "at the moment" is the key phrase. I'm sure I will get back to enjoying all of this soon enough.

Oh..hi there.

I find myself getting excited for a moment about things, but then pushing them aside. I guess RL stuff will do that to a person. I'm trying to keep everything as simple, nice, and easy as possible right now. It's not that hard to do in my SLife, though, since I don't get out much.

Aldwyn is adorable and bought me an ugly outfit simply because I wanted the phone that came with it. The outfit truly is not that great. But the phone is my current most favorite accessory. Aside from my engagement ring, of course. Now I can just walk around texting!




Oh. And remember what I said about not fangirling much anymore? Yeah. I met Miel Nirvana yesterday and ...




I don't know if that counts as fangirling or just being obnoxious. But he's totally sweet. lol

This might be my last blog post for a week or so since I'll be away from my computer after Tuesday for I don't know how many days. Have a great 4th of July, if you live in the States!