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