It’s been a good few months since I did anything productive around my mainland holdings. I finally did some tidying up, and spent some time thinking about what I’d like to do next, and what my goals might be for accomplishing that.

I will probably be selling off some of my mainland holdings and throw in my lot with the excellent folks in Steelhead; they are a terribly creative bunch when it comes to home and store builds, air armadas, naval junks, and what-not.

My plans are up in the air, though; I will have to give matters serious thought.

I didn’t participate in this year’s Posada celebration for the Anglican Cathedral, because my house went to space for a while and it was never quite the same when it came back. Yet I really enjoyed having the house, and building it seemed to help me work through some issues from long ago, as it was roughly based on old childhood memories of the family home in the American Southwest.

It was fun having a posada party last year, with a friend DJing, but I didn’t get involved because I’ve become something of an online recluse. That needs to stop, because frankly the party was FUN and I’ve missed that.

Back in June, I went a little wild buying land – adjoining parcels became available – and then I sold off one of my first two parcels after the house ended up stuck between 2 large buildings, with no view. That’s when I moved my home to a little teahouse in the sky, built platforms for building and working on things, and spent very little time in the ground floor “shop” other than fiddling with the radio.

I had enjoyed my house on the back of Tintagel, but the neighbors to one side were very active socially (VERY, very, very publically active, ifyouknowwhatImean) and then I lost the nice view out the front windows when the land in front sold and a large building went up. That’s what prompted me to start buying land out on the sloping western edge of Tintagel, but it was not adjoining until the wild buying spree, when the biggest parcel of all became available that touched all but two of my holdings. That’s where I eventually spent the most time building, because it was convenient for rezzing large items from hunts and such.

I’m not sure why, but I became very frustrated with my lack of progress with creating things, especially with making little doodads with Sculptypaint. In the meantime, I kept acquiring more and more textures, and spent most of my time just sorting them into a texture viewer. Very boring, ultimately.

And I went on STEAM hunts 2 and 3, of course, but didn’t feel sufficiently inspired or empowered to make anything new.

Not sure why. But I’m trying to break through and come up with some inspiration, motivation, and direction; also I’ve let my modest GIMP skillz slide, so will have to make up lost ground there, too. But today I at least learned how to do something useful in GIMP that helped with a real-life web project that I’m responsible for, which I hope was an ice-breaker for me.

Finally, it was good to run into my friend Clover, who gave me a lovely birch-log holiday centerpiece she made. It’s outstanding, creative, and decorative; she’s the best at making nice items for the virtual home. And I hear that my friend BookemJackson Streeter might be hosting another author evening with Keith Thomson, and I would love to be involved with that again if possible. So I hope to get my second life back on some kind of creative track that can be enjoyable again, and not leave me feeling unable to start because there’s so much backlog of “things” and “stuff” to make, finish, or improve.

Not to mention actually OPENING a store, rather than having it perennially “coming soon.” Have to make stuff, to sell stuff, or so I’ve been told.

Besides music, exploring, and chatting with friends, I did enjoy building things -but I got more done when I did it in a classroom or structured educational environment. Need to do that again soon.

Dhughan continues to sell his walking sticks, but he’s not sure why because he’s become rather morosely convinced that they are not very good. He did make some progress the other day with an open-source walking stick script he found, which had totally baffled him several months ago. He would like to finish the rather attractive swirled Steampunk cane and get it working correctly; if he can do this, he will find it easier to correct some minor issues with his existing canes (he recently left his shop muttering something about hand animations and the ancestry of the Linden responsible for them).

My funding sources for Second Life, thank goodness, continue to be steady,  so I’ve changed the billing for both myself and Dhughan to PayPal (I feel for my friends who can’t use this method, it’s a US-based Resident thing only, apparently).Recent changes in the way Linden Labs accepts payment (ie., no longer via currency transactions in the old XStreetSL ) actually are simpler for me: I merely have to “increase credit” and the funds come from PayPal, from the correct source.

So I suppose I’m a Steampunk lady of independent means, as far as SL is concerned. Time I was about doing something productive in the New Year.