Moving On

Good Bye Audrey
I think it is over.
My RL is looking good. New job and the new home well on the way now.
I think it is going to be good times for a while now. Cross my fingers
Good bye to all who made SL a very special time for me
x

Hiccups

Ahhh I have the hiccups... so I am bobbing in my chair as I type today! Are they a metaphor? In a little while will all the hiccups go away if I am patient?
So it is Saturday morning:
I have sent my dear Taz off to bed and am now fiddling with blogs, bunnies and will soon join D2 in Wizard 101.
I spent a little time at the Pirates and Zombies RFL dance but I simply couldn't locate the donation jar. No idea what kind of blindness I was suffering from!
And now I am uploading a few photos of the progress on the home front. I still haven't received my settlement but the builder has started without even waiting for his payment. Trusting fellow. It is totally exasperating that I can't pay him. I am trying to view it as a hiccup. It will all be good eventually and won't kill me in the meantime!

RL and SL

Welcome to Suburbia!

This has been excruciatingly slow. I guess everyone who has done it will have their own stories about the difficulties of separating from a spouse. No need then to catalogue mine here. Today I got served notice by the government land authority to finalize the sale in 14 days or else. It's not my fault
sigh

Never the less! I am feeling optimistic! I think I should have things sorted before 14 days. I really do! And the builder isn't even going to wait for the land to be in my name! He has paint marks on the ground and an excavator booked to come dig my block.


My dining room is now more than 2 layers deep. I really am ready now. The time it will take to build will be exciting and agonising because I am so ready for the next thing.

SL is really about my 6th life these days. I check the bunnies and pay tier and that's about it. Taking this photo caused me to crash twice.
I gave another online game a shot. This is me as a wizard. It held my attention for a couple of days but honestly without the building component, it just doesn't ring my bells. I have run up and down streets fetching messages for the wizard world and casting spells but... it isn't SL My name in there is Grace Spellsomething or another. Should be Ghrace Spell Badly

Judo

Hello!
Well over the weekend, I think it was Friday I got a tap at my IM window and it was Miss Magz. She wanted to know if I was still making tiny clothes and if she could commission a tiny Judo set. I just can't make myself say no as I do love a project. I knew I would be too busy with RL for the first day or so, but come Sunday I was ready to flex my stiffened building muscles. I crashed around about 14 times.

sigh

but finally the tiny Judogi was made. I am putting it out as a Swagtastic offering in Raglan this coming weekend and then it will join my regular stock

Pendulum Swings

Sighs heavily. I was 5th out of 42 for the job I went and interviewed for. They did say it was for several positions, but they have offered and have been accepted the first and there is no talk of any more immediately.
The land sale has hit a snag. The property settlement for me to leave this house to be able to buy the next has gone a lot slower than my lawyers could have expected and so it isn't ready. i face large penalties if i do not have the funds.
It is rather exasperating.
Add to that a full moon that is making the vast majority of everyone round me (and including me) act like lunatics....
I bet one day the only time I will blog will be full moons!

Oh!
Turn your blog into a book
My friend Sylvia has turned a year worth of her blog into a book. It is completely sensational. I so badly would love to have this blog made into a book! Mostly the early times before I lost some of my SL Zing! but it would be lovely to be able to pick it up and flick through all the photos and stories.
Sylvia is the queen of blogging. her book is full of the most wonderful photos of food, friends and stitching
Sylvia's Blog

Today

Today I have had good news. My land is ready and I have some days to find the money. I will try not to think how worried that makes me.
And I got great feed back from the interview. I got to read the report and as my Taz said.. I might end up with a big head as a result (actually he didn't say 'might')
So that leaves me feeling a bit dazed and enjoying.....
What I am listening to.....

Rio Bravo

Ah... well... the land diet? Well I have had to do something.

I haven't had enough prims to rez a skirt, so I checked the profile picks of Syn Short and found a little corner of SL for me to rent at a good price. For fun over Easter I set up with bunnies again. I don't plan on the full on obsession this time and after a little while I will remove a few. I allowed myself $20 holiday spending and when that is done, it will be byebye bunnies. Once they are gone, then I will furnish the house and start dress making again. I have a notion to make tiny wedding dresses. I have two stores now and thought one might become the formal wear store? Dunno.. just thinkin'

But it is nice to have a place to call home

uh oh

I have a long weekend... it was an April long weekend that got me hooked in bunnies last year! I gave myself $20 to play with and bunnied....and now it's a long weekend again...and the ozzie dollar is looking mighty powerful... and I have bought 6 so far and run out of prims.... gulp

Dear kids
You are what keep me here
Love Mum

Mark!

Second Life Nesting

Today I did what I have needed to do for ages. I persisted against the evil lag and finally settled into Glengary. I have turned the shop round and added a garden. I have installed the platypodes

I got to thinking while in SL for a longish stretch for the first time in ages...
I miss the old folk
I want Zealot making me laugh
I want Gabbi and Hotspur sparing
And the dances where people talked in open chat
And scandal rocked our world from time to time
and the widows rocked while lamenting lost loves
When all the old folk would M'Lady and M'lord and in cultured tones say the naughtiest things
And I could build and build and build
Idon't like to lament the passing of time, but I do miss these things

More real life nesting

Today I finally paid off my Mastercard with all ts accumulated goodies... even left a little bit of positive there.. and then swiftly went about buying a little more..

While I was in Sydney I drove down Parramatta Rd looking for 2ndsworld...
Parramatta Rd must simply be the Mecca for the home builder. My eyes boggled at all the places I wanted to stop and shop but I was so nervous with the traffic I didn't dare stop in case I could never pull out again. As it was, when I stopped at 2ndsworld, I couldn't actually head off in the direction I was planning and so had to go back down past temptation.
I found myself in the middle of a cluster of lighting shops. I wandered into the first one which was about as big as a shoe box. The man was friendly but nothing was priced so he followed me round the shop with a calculator and pencil and made up prices as I cooed.

I could have bought loads. I bought 6. He didn't have one style in store so he promised to post them to me for $15. Not even covering his cost.

They arrived in the post in just day!.. I can't find a photo of them on line, but they are sort of like this:

Black cane, but mine are not vertical lines, mine are horizontal ones.

The next set were a drum shaped light fitting. Sort of like this:

I bought the cane ones for the family room and the drums for the lounge. However the cane ones hold just one globe each while the drums hold three. I am thinking it would be better to have more light in the family room so I will now probably go the other way.

Well.. the debt from my light fitting jaunt was cleared.. long enough for me to go and investigate the Harris Scarf store that has opened and low and behold they had massive reductions off cutlery. Well I have been trying to get Taz interested in my plannings but I think the talk of the cutlery purchase might have been the last straw (taps were the second last one).

Anyway.. these are they! 12 persons worth at about 1/5 of the price. Well we all know they mark things up to reduce them, but they are a nice classic style with enough pieces for me to have guests.

For the foreseeable future, Audslife will become my building and home planning blog. Taz is tired of the stories already so I am going to bother myself with them instead :P

Progress

It's been quite a week!
I went to Sydney to help open the new store. The store there will eventually be the Big sister store and the one I run will have to toddle along behind. Something my pride isn't too easy with. However the first day's trade pretty much said it all! Nice to be able to say that I helped.

And as if timed to perfection, the public service department that interviewed me phoned and arranged a conference call with Chris my boss. I hear on the grape vine that they said something like "She sounds like just what we want" when Chris described how I have managed things here in Canberra.

I will miss this job so much. I love it. I do it pretty well. There are days I feel like the swan.. gliding smoothly across the Hobbysew waters while the feet are paddling like mad under water.
But most of all i will miss the Hobbysew family. I don't think any one could ask for a better group of people to work with. Sometimes the closeness is half the problem, but they have supported me through the 4 toughest years of my life.

I suspect I am going to cry when it is time to leave. hmmm make that "know" not "suspect"

The contracts on my new home have been exchanged but it seems the government has not progressed with the land development so it is not ready for release yet. Goodness knows when.

They had better hurry up as my dinning room has run out of room. I have added 6 boxes of light fittings, three boxes of pantry containers, 3 boxes of 800x 800mm tiles.

I have been having fun on EBay buying "art". Once you have seen too much of them they start to not lok so much like art as photocopies, but in isolation, I love these purchases. Am now plotting getting them framed.

sing in my chair

I dance in my chair when I hear....

I guess this is not to everyone's taste.. but this is just so happy i can't help wanting to hear it again

Relay for Life

This time last year I was helping build for the Caledon RFL team. This time, with full time work I don't have time to contend with the lag that is SL. So I haven't been even reading the IMs on the subject let alone joining in.
So I was kinda chuffed when Autopilotpatty asked me to build a lantern for her as part of the RFL activities.
I built the lantern... eventually and Patty was very happy with it and asked if I would be happy to put it in a RFL vendor. Well of course!
Only thing is that I was then sent the vendor to set up! Well with my lag it tool three crashes and the better part of an hour to get it all happening. But it is happening and you can buy a set of three copyable lanterns in the three shades.

The Interview

I arrived on time (no thanks to the traffic) and sat waiting, preparing myself for the written part of the test. It had said I would be given material that I would then have to produce a document from. Potentially a letter.
Well, the kind fellow took me in 5 minutes early and I am sure he gave me extra time. And the task was so easy that I fear I have misunderstood it. I spent 5 minutes working on perfect formatting.

Then on to the interview!
I was given the three questions and 20 minutes to prepare. I had some answers semi prepared, ready to adjust to the exact question. I decided to go with one whole new example of "seeking help from a colleague".
And I thought hard
Sent a txt to my tiger to tell him that I had finished part1, then wondered where the toilet might be in time for a smiling young lady to come shake my hand and lead me off to the interview.

The room had three people. Two younger ladies who smiled, and made eye contact and an older gent who did not make eye contact after first shaking my hand. I had been told not to expect any eye contact but just hurried scribbling, so two smiling ladies put me at ease. At one point though I wished they would scribble something. I hoped I was saying something worth recording.

At last I said something magnificent and they cooed and made notes so I did at least something right. Actually, I think I did as good a job as I could do. I suppose with practice I can do it better, but for the time being I don't regret much from that interview.

We got through to the end and I was elated and could have hi-5ed when the older guy looked up and barked
"but are you comfortable with a keyboard?"

What do you think? I told him I was and didn't let on that actually I am obsessed with all things keyboard :)

Looking for a Job

There are somethings about my job that are simply great. The people.. the environment, the things we get to deal with every day. It is a wonderful lucky thing. But at the bottom of it all, it is retail. My experience is that in retail everyone thinks you are a bit more stupid than they they are, unless you own the business, which I don't. As a result, the pay is not so great, your successes are attributed to people higher up the food chain and there is no "career path".

So I am looking for another job. I am aiming at lowly levels and the pay there will be several thousand a year more than I currently get. 10 days ago I was requested to do some on line testing as the second round to an application. I was excited. I rather like testing.

Well... oh boy! I managed my time badly and didn't come close to finishing the tests. The first one I could have finished if I had more time and if I had managed my time better. But the second one was plain old hard. By the end of the time there, I wasn't finished but my brain hurt so much it wasn't in the mood to go any longer anyway :)
So I figured I had flunked. I imagined all the youngsters who were still in the exam mode blitzing past me.

Today I got an email.. I am on to the next round! I am above average in the Inductive Reasoning part and well above for Verbal Reasoning. Yay! My brain isn't too old after all.

If I actually get the job, I will die of fright. I do love my job. There are aspects about it that are not so good for me. But I do love it.

oh!

Hello folk
Sometimes I forget that people are out there listening and I was very pleased to hear your voices after my last post. It was brief but there is a much fuller story behind as you might guess.

In SL I have two corners of land still. A shop in Raglan and a home in Glengary. I think The Glen is a laggier place than Downs was. Don't know why, but the 5 bunnies I have there don't seem able to breed without me interfering... so they don't breed because right now I am not so much into bunnies.
I did say no more bunnies but it seemed too still and lonesome without something bouncing round. So I have a few who insist on hopping out onto Des's land and then autoreturn throws them back into my inventory. Sometime I will build a new shop and a garden so that it all sits better with the landscape.

With less land, my sales of bits and bobs, mostly tiny clothes, are seeing my linden balance actually grow a little so I am self sustaining once more. That means when I get my Internet speed fixed at my new home, I might be able to enjoy SL again.

Meanwhile I am amassing a collection for my new RL. I have been on-line shopping. I have been ebaying and researching. Not all things end up being an EBay purchase but I usually begin there to get an idea of the going rates for things. I pick on a subject then chase it to a conclusion. I have bought two beds and mattresses, 6 chairs, a desk, two sofas, a fridge, a washing machine, a house worth of door handles, kitchen containers, a Christmas tree, doonas, pillows, kitchen utensils, bed linen, a vacuum.........

My current projects are 800mm square tiles for a kitchen splashback and bathroom vanities. The builder's allowance for these is pitiful and unless I shop elsewhere I am going to have less than I want ;)

The result of all this squirreling is that my dining room is now all but inaccessible and my lounge room has two sofa pillars at one end wrapped and ready for the move.

It is fun and it is also a distraction from the more distressful side of my divorce. This is frivolous but there is the underlying sadness and worry. But there is also the core of hope and dreams of what comes next. I am building a nest of dreams.

No Blogging.. No 2nd Life

A whole month and more and no posts!
My SL has crawled to a halt. The lag is now so bad I can barely move. Building is an exercise in frustration. Now and then I open up to check that things are where I left them, but that's about it. I open Caledon chat and watch but even he names there have changed so that an entire conversation can be carried out by people i have never heard of and who don't respond to anything I have to add.
So times have indeed changed.

I don't lament too much as I am so focused on RL now that I don't haven any time for SL angst.
So don't worry about me :)

What is Blog

How long have I been blogging?
I think this one began in 2007.
Yesterday a work colleague gave me some lip as she was to prepare a blog item for the enterprise. She insisted a blog entry has to be 250 words and include a photo.
That's what a blog "is"
Well epic fail to me!

(I am amused that Blogspot's spell check doesn't recognize any word that includes the base "blog" or even the word blog itself!)

Pippa Moppet

Each week I put up a Moppet item for the Swagtastic weekends in Raglan. This week it is Pippa Moppet.

I have lately been astounded at the way time has been passing by.. The Swagtastic weekends have been going on for months and I haven't had to repeat anything yet (Though there have been some weeks I simply didnt get in world on time and long enough to put up a new one)
Anyway, if you are wandering around Raglan, drop into my store as there will usually be a new 50L offering available each week

pfffft

I am incorrigible
My state of homelessness lasted a fortnight!
I asked Des... and he happened to have a tiny little block to spare. The rent is only 475L$.. so I have paid up 13 weeks of rent!
I think with that much time up my sleeves, I should easily have more tier earned before my next payment is due
Not many prims to use... but somewhere to get changed. Rez a box. Make a skirt.
It's in Caledon. In fact it is in the first sim I ever watched being born. I am sure I blogged about it way back when
Huzzah!

Where am I?

I am homeless in SL!
Finally I did it! I stopped the hand wringing, the moaning and procrastinating and gave up my last bit of Caledon. I miss having a home... but not so much as I would have. I open SL, check my Linden balance look around for three minutes and leave.
I may find a quiet, small block somewhere. Since abandoning bunnies, cats and tier for my big block, my funds have actually been increasing.. so perhaps once i have a good number of weeks saved, I will hunt down a small block with enough prims for me to rez a tiny skirt, or build another house.....

and two days later

they are growing so fast
2 weeks and two days old

and the most recent addition to the family...

I find RL pets more satisfying than the SL ones
More and more RL seduces me away :)

Birds

Dad's mother and father lived at the bottom of our street, his mother's parents lived on the same street until they retired and my great grandmother lived down the back lane. It was a small country town and we all grew up wandering between houses.
When Dad was little, his mother would pin a label to him advising which ever house he turned up in, where he was supposed to be.

My earliest memories was wandering down the road to my grandfathers house to visit him and help him feed the birds. He had three aviaries. One had a flight passage that he could drive his car under. We are talking about serious bird keeping here :)
Before he retired to the coast, he began to build an aviary in our yard so that we could take over his many parrots. He was taking the finches and Cocky with him.

Each afternoon for some months in 1977, I would come home from my new high school to see what progress he had made. We were very close and I would sit with him on the grass as he tied wire, cemented the bottoms of the long sheets of wire into the ground, installed the concrete bath and so on.

Finally the cage was built, the parrots installed and he and Nanny moved to the coast. There he built another aviary for the finches and installed Cocky in his own cage.

Every holiday he and I would spend hours sitting in his aviary feeding the finches, following their lives and I have no idea what else we talked about but we spent hours together. It was only a matter of time before he offered me a couple of his canaries, and built me a small cage to keep them inside.

Mum got quiet tired of the mess so for my 17 birthday dad built me a cage...
well blah blah blah...
what I am saying is that from as long as I can remember, keeping pets, particularly birds, was intricately entwined with my sense of family and home.
(At this point the tally was something like one dog, two cats a tank of fish, 18 parrots + budgies+60 finches and a dozen canaries)

My grandfather passed away in 1986 and my grandmother gave his birds away.

On and off through my adult life I dabbled with birds but when my children were born and we moved a few times, it was too hard to keep them.

Last September we were at the coast and I happened to drop into a pet shop, saw canaries and a longing to tie myself back into those memories tugged at me hard!
I didn't resist!

I never imagined how much the kids would enjoy them.

For me it is the memory of my grandfather that is so strong. It's in the smells, the sounds... its very comforting. I wish I could share it with him.

2010/2011

Otenth mentioned in Plurk-land that he had taken time to look at his year and his outlook for the next (Otenth's Blog) so maybe I should give something similar as shot?
2010 RL: A balancing act has been played between the happiness of my children, my (estranged) husband, my partner, Taz, my work and colleagues and myself.
Over and again I put other's happiness before my own and then found that life was not going to be survivable if I didn't insert my happiness somewhere into the equation. Then when I asserted my own happiness I felt so selfish I could barely move.
So I thrashed around in indecision.

My parents reached out to me with an offer I was too proud to accept. Finally though, I confided in a good friend of mine who put a simple notion to me: If my children were ever to find themselves in my situation and I had the capacity to help them, wouldn't I want, and insist on giving them that help?

There was only one answer to that and I asked my parents for their help which they have readily done and their generosity makes me proud to be their daughter.

And so my marriage is over.
First time I have ever typed that. It's not easy but it is a relief. I regret for my husbands sake that it has come to this. I think I expected too much and he too little. And neither compromising.

There will be definitely some who will see the causes as SL and my partner. I get a feeling people think I should not want to admit the truth "yes" which in part it was. But it certainly is not that simple.

Before SL I felt emotionally dead and essentially worthless. There I found out that I had value somewhere and that there was a chance to aim for happiness. SL didn't break my marriage, but it did give me confidence and reason to leave the broken marriage behind.

So 2010 has been a year where my past has been in my head constantly as I have tried to be objective; when I have had the care of many people in my hands; where I have had the plans for my future and my kids and my work and my husband and my partner Taz; concerns for parents who are making a sacrifice for me. No wonder my brain gave up dealing with it and wrote those tragic blogs a couple of months ago.

So!
2011?
Well if I can get this arranged, the plan is to build a new house near this one so that my kids can move freely between homes.
The plan is to go to full time work
The plan is to see how many Tiny dresses I can sell and each time I get a little more money, I pay a little more tier, and when the money runs out, then I will become a homeless SL vagrant :) But this doesn't worry me like it once would have.

My SL was because my RL wasn't.

I am frightened and excited. I will be poor but I will explore who I am. I look forward to being a better mother to my kids as I embrace my life again.
I hope I am on the right path