January Update

I keep coming in here and starting posts and getting distracted and forgetting what I meant to write about. I guess I’ve lost the knack for really blogging. I’m trying to write more lately over on the style blog, but after years of basically doing a picture and credits because I was told that’s what people wanted, it’s hard. But I’m trying anyway.

SLife has been really good lately. Oh! Oh my gosh. I .. wow, I just went back to re-read my last post and realized that I have BARELY said anything! For all you guys know (if you don’t follow me on Facebook or Plurk) is that I started dating someone new a while back. Um…

That’s right, we’re engaged! I know, some of you are probably like, “Wow, every time I look, you’re engaged.” To which I say…bite me. 🙂

Jeremiah makes me so incredibly happy, you guys. He just GETS me in a way that no other man in SL has done before. Now listen, I’ve been with some really good guys in SL. I am not talking badly about them at all. But when someone truly understands who you are, just the way you are, right in that moment? It’s priceless. He’s not going along with things I want just because. He’s not waiting for me to change to fit what he wants. I get to be just who I am right now. Do you even know how incredible that is for someone like me? I tend to think people don’t like who I am, or that they want something from me, or that I’m not good enough to be around. He doesn’t make me feel like that. I always feel wanted and loved.

I think one of the best parts about all of of this is how quickly Jeremiah picked up on being a father to my little Birdy.

They absolutely adore each other. I did not let him meet her for a little while. I wanted to make sure that he would be staying in my life. I didn’t want to be one of those stupid SL girls who was in lovelovelove for 3 days and then single again. And plus, I had some other stuff going on and there were hurt feelings and weirdness … well, other things I won’t get into. But I knew, and he knew, pretty quickly that this was meant to be. So one night he finally got to meet her. And y’all. When I say that after 10 minutes I probably could have left and they wouldn’t have noticed? I mean it!! They hit it off so immediately, it was crazy. My beloved nerds. 🙂 (Yes, they make fun of me for not being very nerdy. But they love me anyway. LOL)

I’ve definitely been more immersed in SL lately. More than in the past 2 years combined, I’d say. I am still very into my Twitch streams, of course. But if I’m not streaming or gaming, I’m in SL. It feels like home again.

And the wedding? Oh, it’s gonna happen. We’ve actually got quite a bit of it planned already! Jeremiah is much better at planning than I am, so he has really taken so much pressure off of me as far as the wedding goes because I don’t have so much to do myself. I’ll talk more about wedding plans later.

And…I guess that’s all the update for now!

It’ll Happen One Day

So I haven’t had a chance to update lately because we’ve been so so busy! But I thought I’d answer the biggest question I got after the last blog post.

When is the wedding?!

Well…here’s the thing. I don’t know if we’ll do the big wedding extravaganza. I’ve done that before and while it was lovely, I’m a much different person than I was in 2011. Neither of us feel the need to have this big massive thing. In my head, it’s just the 3 of us (Birdy is included, of course!) doing a private little ceremony, maybe with just family in attendance. I do want a wedding dress, but I picture myself in something boho and/or vintage styled. Maybe one of these days, I’ll do a live stream and go dress shopping! But I couldn’t buy anything because Michael does watch my streams, and I’d hate to ruin the surprise. Some traditions MUST be upheld, of course!

I do think that I want a party to celebrate later, though. Nothing massive, just friends and family and music and dancing. Lots of fun!

But other than there being no real news on the wedding front… That’s about all I’ve got. We are all happy when we can spend time together. Trying to balance our time has been a bit of an issue, but we’re definitely working on it.

I hope everyone has had a great February! I really am going to try to update this blog more with our adventures, but that whole balance thing I was talking about kinda makes me push some things to the side. If only there were an extra couple of hours in the day! Someone get to work on that, okay??

Maypril Update?

Okay, okay, okay. I know. There wasn’t an April update. I actually DID start writing one! Really, I did! But I got distracted and wandered off and then tried to write more on it and got distracted and wandered off and… well, you see where this is going. 🙂

But, April was a decent month, and so far, May has been as well.

(And yes, I’m brunette now. I think that has been the biggest change of the past two months.)

YouTube has definitely been taking up a good portion of my SL time. I have fallen completely in love with livestreaming! I love doing my regular videos, too, but livestreaming is so much more fun because I get to chat with people at the same time. I also have done a couple of videos with people and that was super fun! I’ve always said that blogging is often a very solitary project, but YouTube can be as well. Being able to interact with people in different ways is REALLY awesome to me.

Oh! And earlier this month, I did a live presentation out at the Blogger & Vlogger Network. I just talked about my vlogging experience and took some questions. It was SUCH a good time! I’ll link the livestream to that at the end of this post, just in case you want to see it. It’s about an hour and a half long, but my real talk was just in the first 20 minutes.

Let’s see, what else… Well, I’m working on learning how to do my lighting better in SL for my photos. The picture I have above, that was just one of me trying to play around with windlight and projectors. I have a tendency to just coast along with my pics for a while when I’m doing other things, but you can’t coast forever. You need to always be improving how you do your hobby.

We’ve seen our whole family a little more this month than we have in a while, because birthdays and stuff. I’m happy about that because I love family time and it makes me feel better when people are online. The girls decorated the house and gave me gifts yesterday for Mother’s Day, which was incredibly sweet. And I did a video on landscaping with my sister! You should check that out if you haven’t.

I mean, really… Things are good. I’m super busy with SL and RL lately, but it’s not a super overwhelming busy, thankfully. I am still trying to figure out how to balance everything I want to do in the time that I have to do it, but I am horrible at time management in general, so that would be a struggle even if I wasn’t really doing anything!

I guess that’s it for the moment. Before I get distracted, I guess. *laughs* I will try to update again soon! ❤

(My livestream from the BVN talk, courtesy of Miss Strawberry.

Better Days

Whaaat? Two whole posts in one month? Girl, get out. *laughs* Okay, so the last post was just showing my house tour video, so I guess technically that wasn’t really an update. But who gets technical around here anyway, right?

So March has been a LOT better than February, that’s for sure. I kind of figured it would be because of the time change [yes, I’m one of like probably 7 people who LOVE “springing forward” and HATE “falling back”] because for the past 20 years, that’s basically been the case for me. Plus, I cut way way back on my news watching. I pretty much just keep up with just a few news accounts on Facebook now, and of course there is Twitter, which I have been slightly more active on lately. I know it sounds almost irresponsible to not be constantly up to date on what’s happening in the world, but I also feel like for me personally, it was necessary. And yes, I have the luxury of being able to do that. I fully realize that is privilege.

Being that I’m not constantly weighed down with current events and all, my creativity has slowly been returning to Second Life. I haven’t done as many blog posts as I probably should have done for the style blog, but I’m averaging about 2 a week, even though some of those are video posts. It’s not that I don’t WANT to blog more. I just simply haven’t had the time to devote to coming up with a photo. Vlogging, for all that it is more time consuming, is easier for me these days.

And honestly, that is something I thought I’d never say. *laughs* When I started vlogging, it was weird to me. That people would want to listen to me, and see things that I show. There have been bumps along the way, that’s for sure. Being an introvert with extreme social anxiety, the whole “Omg, let me just stop at your house because you showed it and obviously that means you don’t mind visitors” thing that was happening for a while… yeahhhhh. But you have to take the ups and downs, really! The good has outweighed the not so good, definitely, so if on occasion I have to tell someone “Could you not?” Well…that’s just something that has to happen.

So what else? Mmm…I don’t know. Things are fairly good right now. I am attempting to be a tiny bit more social. I am brainstorming new video ideas. I am thinking of more photo ideas. I really want to start making more poses again.

But that will all come in time. For now, I think I’m going to go play a game. ❤

A Little January Update

Soooo….January update? *laughs*

The truth is, I’ve had some writer’s block lately. I sit at the desk and I open this blog and I try to write and it’s like… hey, what’s YouTube doing?

Well, if I’m being honest, I’ve had a creative block altogether. My videos have not been great, mostly unboxings, which are not always THE most interesting. Although one of my videos this month DID almost get 1500 views!! That is pretty big for me. AND I’m almost up to 1000 subscribers!! I cannot even believe. I mean, seriously. I can’t. But I’m utterly thrilled!

So let’s see. What has been going on that I haven’t talked about in videos. Well, we got a new house! Abby had mentioned a few weeks ago that she needed a new room because she couldn’t decorate hers properly. And it was a weirdly shaped room, I’ll admit that. So I went on a house hunt [which I did a video about!] and then I utterly fell in love with a home that I saw. My Birdy actually gifted me the house as a late Christmas gift because, as she put it, “You blog for EVERYONE and you have EVERYTHING except your dream house!” She’s basically the best. ♥

I’ve spent the past week decorating it up and ugh. I love it so much. I do. I loved the crazy boho-ness of our last house. I really let myself go boho nuts in there. This house is a tiny bit more polished, but still with all those special touches that make it homey and cozy. I will be doing a house tour video once the girls have their rooms done a little more. I created custom sleeping areas for them in their rooms, but that’s about all I’m doing. And our bedroom is *just* about done, but I think I need a few more touches to make it just right.

I don’t know, I guess that’s pretty much it. It’s been a heck of a month for everyone, I think. Our offline lives hit us all a little harder than we’d like, but hopefully February will be better. And if it’s not… well hey. It’s a short month.