Chit Chat

So I made it to New World Notes with the blog post that I wrote about family stuff! You can read about it right here. And a big thanks to Hamlet for the questions because as many times as I’ve been asked to write about SL families, I have rarely been presented with many questions other than “So why are you doing this?” *laughs* Which is a valid question, of course, but doesn’t lend to a very long conversation.

Speaking of family, we had our traditional 4th of July party this past weekend! It was wonderful, as usual. This was actually the first time in a LONG time that the whole family was able to be together, so that made it more wonderful. We had food and music and dancing, and of course, fireworks! If you follow me, or any of my family, on plurk, then you have seen a lot of our photos and gifs already.

Hm…what else, what else… Oh, our house is basically finished as far as decorating goes. I really love it. I still have a bit to do in my blogger room and the dining room, and the downstairs bathroom needs a few more things [other than a sparkle tub and Birdy’s zombie] but for the most part, everything is finished. I am totally in love with it in a way I haven’t been in love with a house in a long long time. I think what I love best about it is that it’s not “perfect.” If you follow the home and garden bloggers/Flickr folks, the photos are always so perfect. Everything matches, everything is ridiculously pretty. I didn’t go for ridiculously pretty. I’m sure the H&G people would look at it and slowly back out the door. *laughs* But to me it’s warm and homey and very much us, so I’m happy. The only problem is that I’m so happy with our home, I want to be online all the time, and that’s not good! But … it’s not bad either. 🙂

And on that note, I’m going to log in!

What had happened was…

So we switched houses again.

If you’ve known me for a long time, you know that in the before kids days, I used to switch houses frequently. Aldwyn used to complain that he never knew where exactly he’d be logging in at most days. When you don’t have kids and you have an abundance of new houses and a partner who never decorates, it’s no problem at all to switch houses. PLUS, back in the pre-mesh days, we didn’t have so much stuff. Have you all noticed that? If you had 500 prims to work with, you had a small house that probably took up half your prim allowance, if not more, and a few trees, a bed, a couch, and maybe decorations and that was that. Now you can literally have 500 things on your 500 prim parcel, and houses are sometimes not even 100 prims. That’s a lotttt of picking up to switch houses. *laughs*

But after we got kids, I didn’t like making them pick up their rooms too often. And houses started to feel a lot more like homes and not just places where we stood around in. So when Birdy joined our family, we moved into a very big house and stayed there until last August when we moved into a new house. Then we moved back into the big one. And now… well, I needed a change. So we moved into a house that I absolutely loved a few years ago but that we hadn’t stayed in long.

It’s been really fun decorating! This house is a lot smaller than our last one. Rooms are smaller and it didn’t have a feel to it already. In our huge house, I felt like everything had to be very neutral and clean. In this one, I’ve been letting my boho girl flag fly free. I had to ask Aldwyn if I was going a little overly boho because basically nothing matches. *laughs* But it’s making it feel very homey and more like me, so I’m happy with it so far.

But sometimes…

See, what had happened was… I put this tv out. And I wanted to see if I could use the tv. But I could not. So I pulled out another tv to match it to this tv. And then I went up to our movie theater to turn on a movie to see what would happen. And well. Then I just laid down and watched a movie.

That’s what happened and why I still have other rooms to decorate.

Packing Up Again

Well, we’re doing it again! We’re… switching houses!

I know, I know. It used to be something of a joke that I liked to change houses all the time. But in the past few years, we have really just stuck to whatever house we’re in. I’d say it’s mostly because I hate making the girls pick up their rooms too often since a LOT of care usually goes into putting their rooms together. And also, I don’t have quite as much free time like I used to, so once I get a house set up, I am happy to just enjoy it and not be fussing too much. But … well, we needed a change.

Okay, actually, we’re going back to our previous house. *laughs* We needed a little bit more space than our current house has, but all of the houses I have looked at recently are either too small, too large, don’t have enough rooms, or have way too many rooms. Or they are very cramped and we like a more open concept home. Our previous house really has everything we look for in a home. As much as I love the layout of our current house, we just needed something with a little extra space. So…back to the old house we go!

I’m actually quite happy because I loved that house a whole lot! It just felt so warm and inviting to me. Even before we had used it as our family home, I had put it out on my platform to blog in or just hang out in from time to time. I have modded the house to put up some walls downstairs [because it was a bit TOO open] and I just love it. I can’t wait to get it put down and “go home” again. 🙂

Plus! We have some big plans in the works! I can’t say what it is now, but I promise, by next week, I will tell you guys! We are very very excited, I can tell you that much!

Back to packing!

A Little Picky

My birthday train keeps rollin’ along! 🙂 On Saturday, I spent the day with my parents and got taken to lunch. They’re the ones who brought me into this world, so you know, it only makes sense that they should feed me. *laughs* Then that night, my family threw me a laser tag and dance party!! We did more dancing than shooting, but the shooting was fun, too!

We’ve been slowly picking things up on Bluebonnet in preparation for the 1st. Not everything yet, as I don’t want us living on a completely undecorated parcel for a week, but a lot of things. I didn’t really realize how dang many prims I used up in just trees! Honestly, once I picked up the majority of trees on our parcel, I freed up almost 2000 prims! Crazy!

The second part of us getting ready for the big change is wondering about our house. We love our house a lot. It is spacious and open with all the room we need and then some! In fact, it was a little TOO much room since 2 of the rooms almost never got used except for me decorating them for blog pics and keeping some random gacha items in there. Abby has been saying for a while that she felt like her room was too big because she could never decorate quite the way she wanted. But there are not too many really awesome home builders in SL these days that I have found. Either the houses are too small, too big, ridiculously outdated, SUPER primmy, have too much baked in lighting [don’t need the sun streaming into the living room at 10pm!] or they are straight up ugly. [Yes, I am picky.] So I figured, after 2 days of searching marketplace and grid hopping, eff it. We’ll just keep our house.

But last night I was looking at my Barnesworth houses, put one out, and thought, “Wait. This…could work.” We all went and walked around in the house. It’s the Hamptons Cottage that came out at C88 back in May, I believe. It’s only 3 bedrooms [I would have preferred 4] but it’s open enough to not feel too enclosed and yet small enough where we can decorate without feeling too spread out. The girls will have their own rooms upstairs and the master bedroom downstairs is awesome with a lot of windows. There are also two little spaces upstairs that I already have ideas on what to do with! I may end up changing the floor texture because the floors are dark and it makes the house feel just slightly cold to me, but we’ll see. It’s all exciting to me to get to decorate a new place for us to live. We’ve actually been in our house now for over a year! We put it up when Birdy had been with us barely a week. It makes me laugh now because I remember the days of where we had a new house almost every couple of weeks, plus I had 6 or 7 skyboxes up at any given moment. Things change. 🙂

Anyway, I’m in the middle of a step challenge with friends today, so I better get off my butt and get to steppin’.

Parcel open, and hey, we got a deck!

To start off: I have a parcel available on Bluebonnet! It’s a small parcel, 2944sqm and 673 prims, and is a corner lot. It is NOT pre-decorated, you get to do all of that. 🙂 We’re a fairly quiet, family friendly sim. If you’re interested, send me an IM in world, or if you have me on plurk, you can private plurk me there and I’ll give more details!

So I’ve been wanting to do something with our backyard. We have the little garden that I have the gnomes and fairies in, but I really wanted a pool and a deck thing. But good grief. Some people in SL are charging ridiculous amounts for a pool area! You’d think we were buying a real pool! Sorry, but $2500L for a big prim with a water prim in it is not happening.

When The Arcade started, Abby really wanted the pool from The Loft. It’s a simple thing, just an above ground round pool. When she got it, she gave it to me. It’s sat out in our backyard for a few days and I kept thinking that I wanted to use it, but I didn’t want to just stick it in the yard. I looked at tons of pictures and searched all over and then suddenly tonight I got inspiration after looking at the hot tub set Trompe Loeil has out at FaMESHed.

So I built with regular ol’ prims and I textured with some old wood floor textures and I yelled when SL would undo my work and I’d do it again and I laughed as my girls almost drowned themselves twice in the ocean and I set out items from different sets and then it was done. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much just what I wanted.

To celebrate our new deck, we had dinner outside. Birdy got grounded for saying dinner is a once a month event, and Abby got grounded for reasons, and Aldwyn got grounded not liking pickles, but it was a pretty good time to just hang out together as a family and talk about our day. And they all get grounded pretty much daily, so I’m starting to think they’re not taking me seriously.

After our little ones headed off to bed, Aldwyn and I decided to break in the new hot tub and hang out for a while longer.

I definitely see us enjoying our new deck this summer! I have to do a little landscaping and decorating around it still, but I’m pretty darn pleased with myself.

Day 330 – A New Home!

New house! New house! We went out tonight and picked up our new house! I’m more than a little overly excited about this. 🙂 But looooook. It’s so pretty!

It’s from Roost and it’s the first time I’ve had a house where I asked other people first before using it. Honestly! Aldwyn and I have lived in probably a dozen different houses in the almost 2 and a half years we’ve been married and not once have I asked him what he thought before picking up the old house and plopping a new one down. He’s never seemed to mind, though, and would probably be just as happy with me if we just lived on a platform. And while we had a different house when we met Abby, she’s only ever lived with us in the old house. So while that house had many good memories, I’m still me, and oh man, was I ready for a change.

While this house is spacious, it’s not as OPEN as some of our previous homes have been, and I like that a lot because it means I can clutter it up in the way that I like and make it cozy for us.

We worked a bit around the pond area today, too. Abby asked me if we could make the pond more enchanted, and of course I said yes! She went and bought herself a tree house [well, it’s more of a look out since it doesn’t actually go in a tree] and she wants to put it near the pond so we need to find just the right spot for that. But we have some butterflies and fairy lights out there now, and I’m going to add some more flowers and other things. My little nature girl loves to be outside so I want to make it as awesome as I can for her!

But I’m exhausted now, and freezing cold, so it’s time to crawl into bed and sleep!

Day 268 – Dream Baby

Oh my goodness, what an evening!

I’ve been meaning to sign up for the SL Home Decor Tour that Tymmerie has been putting together. We did a similar thing back in 2009 just for our little group and it was so fun! [Although I think I didn’t participate because I didn’t actually have a house or something. I don’t know. That was a weird year.] I definitely wanted to do it this time because I thought it would be the final push I needed to get our home finished up, and because you don’t get the list of SLurls of participants unless you participate yourself. Let’s face it, I’m nosy! 🙂

So I signed up. But in doing so, I started to get a little nuts.

I do home decor posts on occasion on the style blog. I enjoy it, but here’s a little secret. When I do a decor post, often times, it’s just a LOT of stuff popped into one little corner of a room. Just one little corner. The rest of the room is bare. So while people may see it and think, “Omg, that room is awesome!” It isn’t really. It’s half a room, or a fourth of a room, that’s awesome. And as great as that is for blog posts, it’s not that great for living in!

If you happened to see my post on last month’s The Garden, I still had that set up in the room, so I decided to expand upon it and turn the room into a small computer/tv room. Of course, I crashed about 320948 times because I keep getting the “Textures discarded due to insufficient memory” notice every few minutes [Can someone PLEASE help me with that?!] but I managed to get it done. I have ONE more room to finish up this week, plus fix some of the landscaping, and then we’ll be ready for the tour.

BUT, I still have to set up a party area, too! Our anniversary is coming up this week! We’ll be having a party on Wednesday the 18th at 8pm SLT. I can’t wait!

Only tonight… I’m pooped out. It’s definitely time for bed. Moving furniture is hard work!

Day 255 – 42 Groups and a gumball

Last night I spent time setting up a kid’s room. I don’t know why. LOL It’s just fun to do.

Btw, Flickr STILL hasn’t re-reviewed my photostream so I’m still on my new one. If you could add me, and add me to any groups you think I’d be interested in, I’d appreciate it. I miss all of my Flickr groups so much. 😦

It’s Monday, so you know it’s time for a meme from Berry! Today she’s asking us about groups.

Have you reached the 42 group limit?

Right now I’m only in 36 groups, which surprises me. I’m usually hovering around 40, but I’ve left a few event groups lately because the events are over.

Do you do a lot of group hopping to keep up with all the groups you want to stay a part of?

Not really, but mostly because the majority of my groups are blogger groups and they’re invite only. I am in a few store groups, but the ones I stay in are the ones that are mostly pay groups now and I don’t want to leave. [More on that in a minute.] The other groups are land groups that I need to stay in.

What makes you want to join a group?

Well, with the blogger groups, that’s easy. I stay in them for review copies and event information, and sometimes to chat with other bloggers. If a store group wants me, they need to pony up with some incentives. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t any more and that’s kind of sad. I used to join a lot of store groups when I was new, even if I didn’t really know the store, because of a gift they were giving. Some of the stores I still frequent today are because of that initial gift. I am in one social group [my own] but we’re not as social as we used to be because some of my friends are no longer in SL often, and group chat for a while was so spotty, it was impossible for us to chat any way so people moved on. I’m still friends with most of them on plurk, so I guess it doesn’t matter really.

A lot of store VIP groups have a group fee which you have to pay to join. How do you feel about paying group fees?

I hate – HATE – group fees. Not because I’m cheap. Trust me, if you have a wonderful group with lots of incentives to join, I will happily pay the fee. But most of them do not. Yes, a discount on your items is nice, but it needs to be instant if I’m in your group, not one of those store credit things. Those are awesome and I like them, but not if it’s group based. Plus, what’s with the $1k and up group fees??? They say “Oh, our gifts are worth it.” But seriously? I don’t find that’s the case 99% of the time. One recolor of an item every 3 or 4 months is not worth someone ponying up $1000L or more. I also tend to feel kind of trapped in a pay group. Like, okay, I paid the fee – now I can’t leave because I don’t want to pay again. Especially if it’s a group that rarely does any kind of gifts or discounts. A designer might think they are worth the price, but we have limited group space. Make it worth our while to be in your group. Also, if you don’t have a current group gift out, consider having free open enrollment once in a while just to get more people in your group. The more people in it, the more people remember to come shop you when you do a new release notice, you know?

Name a few groups that you are a part of that you feel everyone should look into joining and share your reasons behind that.

The Gos Boutique group is a good one, if a little chatty, because of the 10% discount on items and sometimes Gos has an awesome group gift. The price is also only $50L to join regularly, and $500L if there’s a group gift out. You get 10% back on your purchases if you’re in the group, so you do make the fee back quickly if you shop often. The Stellar group is also great because Lexi does at least one monthly gift, sometimes more. It’s a $250L joining fee but you do make that up in gifts. The SLink group is chatty and helpful, even about things that are not SLink related. If you don’t like a lot of group chat, it’s probably not for you, but you also receive a discount on items in the store, and it’s only a $10L joining fee.

The rest of my groups are land and blogger and event based, so I can’t really recommend them because you can’t join them. LOL

Man. I need to be in more social groups.

Day 252 – There’s Always A Seed Before There’s A Rose

So we’ve been taking a break from our vacation to spend some time on Bluebonnet because I’ve been wanting to decorate and get our new home situated. I think things are coming along pretty well so far. The outside looks decent, but as you all know, the inside of the house takes me foreverrrr to do. But I’m having loads of fun because I adore decorating and have a billion things I want to put out. It all takes time, but it is hard to not want the whole house instantly decorated immediately! Of course, the Piglets were the FIRST things that I put out because I didn’t want them suffocating in my inventory! I’m looking for a better shelf for them, though. Something more delicate and adorable. The second thing was a couch because you know I need to have somewhere to sit with my honey!

Earlier tonight, I went exploring with my sister and brother in law at this really cool place called Partington Cove Lodge. Our brother and his family have been on retreat there and I could see why, because the sim is lovely! Takeo even rode an orca! LOL!! But he made fun of Lolita and me for carrying bags of soil around with us. Hey, you never know when you’re going to need to garden! We talked about renting a cabin to do a long weekend at Partington. I think it would be so much fun!

Ooh, I’m so sleepy I’m actually shivering, so I think it’s time to get into bed.

Day 236 – Crazy Eyes

Oh my god, could I look more crazy in this picture? My eyes look ridiculous and … Well, whatever. It’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m coming down from some caffeine I accidentally drank.

Tonight I was invited out to see my friend Kirsten’s home. It was so much fun to finally meet her in world [we’re plurk friends] and to see her home. I even got to meet her cowboy! I don’t get out a whole lot to peoples’ houses, but I think that’s mostly because most of my friends live on platforms where they build or blog and well…that’s kinda not as interesting. :-p

But it made me realize that our own home is quite unfinished. Basically we’ve got pigs and a couch. Almost everything I have shown you guys was specifically set up for a blog post and that really makes it a lot less personal, you know? It’s PRETTY, but it’s not terribly personal, and a lot of the time my “sets” are torn down right after I finish the photo. [Except for the fact that I have 3 of Barneworth’s skyboxes up in the air and I have junk in each one. I really need to clean the air space at some point but I forget about it unless I’m up there.]

So since Aldwyn was not able to be in world tonight, I spent my caffeine fueled evening decorating our bathroom and finally setting up our bedroom. Neither room is finished because I got caught up looking for mirrors in my inventory, but they’re well on their way. I still have to finish our living room, too. And the dining area. And our kitchen is COMPLETELY empty. I need some really good kitchen stuff. I probably HAVE really good kitchen stuff and just don’t realize it. Has anyone made any amazing mesh kitchens?

Oh my goodness, I’m yawning like crazy. Bedtime!!