As it happens, I had to sing a piece called “We’ll Dress The House” at my real-life church this morning, for a Pointy-Hatted Person. And now my virtual home is dressed, or mostly dressed, and ready to receive visitors at the party in just a couple of hours.

There are still a couple of details to work out – such as how exactly does the streaming music work for my DJ (I have a pretty good idea that I just paste a URL in my “parcel music” boxen, as I have 2 adjoining parcels). A friend took a look at the scripts I cobbled together for my “white elephant” gift giver object, which is going to end up looking like a pinata and NOT like a pachyderm at all. And another friend noted that it’s somebody’s birthday today, but scripted cake she gave me is apparently A LOT OF PRIMS and I can’t even rezz it with 40 prims free…

But this morning I managed to throw together a fairly attractive food table with 2 prims, using a freebie sculpty shape and some texture I happened to have that makes it look like inlaid wood. I have some food and drink that I can set out, anyway. And I put away the high-prim, nice quality furniture I picked up somewhere in favor of some extreme low-prim beanbags and things. I even have an eye-popping Kokopelli dance floor and dance ball, also using stuff I either already had, or actually finding a texture on Flickr with Creative Commons licensing and uploading it. So the dance ball I was given as a gift is now transformed and in keeping with the Southwestern theme.

Found myself thinking about buying another cheap parcel of land just to have the prims, but that would increase my monthly tier to $10.00USD, and I have a self-imposed budget that would be busted. Heh, joke: it’s a sort of incentive card I have from Budget Rental Car, and whatever amount I have on it would be used for tier payments. I have $45.00USD on it, which is enough for 9 months’ worth of tier, or more if I follow my friend Pb Recreant’s advice about groups.

UPDATE:

The party was a success!! So fun, and there were lots of people there. So many that I was busy typing welcomes and IMs to people, and not taking pictures, especially when the crazy particle and emitter action was happening. The “random gift pinata” worked, too – my friend Redwood looked over the scripts before hand, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. She thought it would work the way it seemed to when I was testing it, so up it went. With my lack of skill, building an elephant from scratch didn’t happen (although I considered taking apart one of my elephant tinies to see if I could use it as a kind of mannequin). But in reading up on traditional Mexican and Southwestern US Posada celebrations, there were several images of old-style pinatas with pointy cones radiating from a spherical core, something that I COULD in fact build and texture well enough.

It’s over there on the extreme margin of this picture, taken late in the party after about two-thirds of the guests had left. Most stayed for the whole two hours, though, and a few diehards partied on. It’s a good sign when people from different groups enjoy meeting each other, and my friend Bobbo even showed up in his ludicrous pants!! I was so happy.

From SecondLife

It’s over there on the extreme margin of this picture, taken late in the party after about two-thirds of the guests had left. Most stayed for the whole two hours, though, and a few diehards partied on. It’s a good sign when people from different groups enjoy meeting each other, and my friend Bobbo even showed up in his ludicrous pants!! I laughed so hard when someone pledged allegiance to his pants, as he’s come a long way, Baby Ruth!. It was epic.

Mary and Joseph were handed on to me by another parishioner of the Second Life Anglican Cathedral, in a pleasant little home ceremony where she dropped the inventory in my profile (as things are done in SL) and then we said a few words about taking Mary and Joseph into our homes.

Rather than try to create a stable and donkey from scratch (no loaner donkey was available from the Donkey Club, strangely enough) I settled for creating a simple wooden shell using a default “old wood” texture, and repurposed a scuplted gear that was part of an artistic panel that I got in the STEAM hunt. It’s much too primmy to put on display, but I’ve been cannibalizing it for parts… the result, after resizing the most star-like of the cogs, was this:

From SecondLife

It looked very nice, very quiet, and was unobtrusive.

I was happy when people wandered into the house to snoop around, I left a little joke for them to find in the fireplace, and at least one person got it:

Those are standard prims, with a “bark” surface and texture on some faces, and the plain plywood texture on others. That’s a bog-standard 0.5M box in the back. And yes, it’s an indoor-outdoor fireplace just because you wouldn’t do that in real life.

I’m over the moon that the party was a success, cleanup was a snap, and now I have the fun of sorting through the crazy stuff in my inventory that came from the pinata. And also tonight, I built a kitchen counter and re-used the Nativity shelter… turned it into a wooden bread bowl like the one that used to belong to my grandmother. So that’s one lost thing recreated…

But in the background, in the building you can see through the “window,” the neighbors are having a sex party. Other than that, they seem nice enough and are quiet, which is more than I can say for myself what with all the building and tearing down and moving and deleting and partying that’s been going on here.

Welcome to Mainland home ownership, Lelani!