Nov 27, 2013 | Chatter, Images, Monday Memes
I’d love to be a science nerd, I was thinking about that last night as I wandered around the solar system. I’ve never given a lot of thought to where I fall in the whole geeks vs nerds debate, but I always felt nerdy in school. I was a bookworm, and socially awkward doesn’t begin to describe me… socially backward, maybe? Does that incorporate elements of dorkiness? Ah, who knows. I’m just content to follow my interests without worrying too much about the labels.
I may not know quite what to call myself but I’ll give the Geeky Meme a shot. The instructions from Strawberry Singh: (more…)
Nov 27, 2013 | Images, Sightseeing
I just absolutely love astronomy. As a kid I was sure I wanted to be an astronomer, at least until I realized that it required rather a lot of math. You know what they say about the best laid plans and all… Oh well. Even though I reluctantly abandoned the idea of a science career I never lost my love of reading about the planets and stars and I still find it fascinating. When I saw pics from the Oceania Planetary Park I was excited to visit and wander around.
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Nov 19, 2013 | Chatter, Images, Monday Memes
I’ve actually been doing a lot of self-reflection lately. Part of it comes from a strong need to write my way through this month and vent every feeling I’ve had so far as I try to come to grips with losing a spouse. Part of it is a tendency to ask myself these sorts of questions from time to time anyway.
One of the things I’ve thought about is the relationship between myself and my avatars. I’ve only logged Ravensong into SL once since my husband passed, and it was extremely difficult for me to be in world. I hadn’t realized just how closely we had associated ourselves with our avatars, we always joked that they were us as we’d like to be, but I think the identification was much deeper. Raven is Melony, Natureszen was Jeff, there was never a division where we’d see them as characters and ourselves as the typists controlling them. SL was our shared experience, it was ours in much the same way a favorite restaurant was ours, the park we went to most was ours, and even watching certain TV shows or listening to a particular band was our thing. I’m finding that with all of these activities, even if it is something I’ve enjoyed on my own from time to time, I am having a hard time imagining it will be possible to enjoy it without him. I am so closely tied to Raven that logging her in to explore is almost the same in my mind as considering going to a favorite RL place by myself. It just feels wrong, and lonely. (more…)
Nov 11, 2013 | Chatter, Monday Memes
I still had a number of photos hanging around that I was going to blog around Halloween, or throughout November. A lot of them had a dark, foggy theme, with attempts at dramatic clouds, moody windlights, and a haunted feel. Too many had my av standing alone in a misty, faded landscape, looking sort of lost. That is far too close to how I feel now: alone in the fog, completely lost. There is an emptiness when I look at them, knowing I can’t turn to my hub and say “Look! What do you think of these?” and he’d give me feedback, or tell me to post it on Flickr. Sometimes he’d tell me that he showed my Flickr to people when he wanted to introduce them to Second Life, and he’d talk about how creative SL was, and how much we both enjoyed it, and how he thought I was such a good photographer, and to keep taking pictures. (more…)
Nov 9, 2013 | Chatter
I logged in tonight, the first time since last Wednesday or Thursday. I wanted to say hello and get hugs from friends, and pick up some notes that people had left for me. I thought maybe it would be good practice, to be around a few people, because I’m going to be faced with a crowded memorial on Sunday. But I never realized how hard it would be to stand there, on our little island in the sky, and look at the things my husband had made. It’s just a little virtual house, but we’d taken so much time to set everything just so, and he was so proud of how he’d landscaped it, and arranged everything. We couldn’t afford our dream house in real life, so we were building our little dream in SL and making it our perfect oasis.
And it is just little, silly things that made me cry buckets… the new benches that I’d bought because they had cute couples poses that I couldn’t wait to get him in world to try out with me… the little hat he’d put on my flamingo that was a mini version of the one he was wearing around…
Then I went down to the sim to sit by the campfire and express my thanks to my friends for being there for me, and of course I’m surrounded by more of his things. His hand was everywhere, and I wanted to turn to him and say how nice something looked, or show him an avatar or just ask him to log in for a little while and listen to the music and sit next to me, but of course I can’t do that.
One of our good friends, Kannonji’s founder, put my hub’s photo on the altar in remembrance. If my response to this is anything like how I’ll respond to the memorial on Sunday I hate to think what a mess I’ll be. RL has been almost impossible to face for the past week. I realized tonight I don’t know if I can face SL without him.