I’m in a mood to add to the landscaping of my land on Tuscana before tackling rebuilding the house. There are some things I want to do differently in layout of the house and I don’t have it all figured out just yet, so as a result creating the formal gardens jumped to the top of my to-do list.

First of all I wanted a road, so I researched how roads were constructed in various sims like Caledon and Straylight. One Zen-like sim with paths in the woods put their road texture on a flattened cylinder, giving it a rounded shape that I thought was interesting (so it was higher in the middle than on the sides), but the majority of places just used flat box prims, about half as wide as they were long.

Not a problem. I chose to use the flat box shape and I found a nice cobblestone texture in my inventory and applied it. Using the very clever Copy Selection and Center Copy commands, I had in short order a road running north/south through my half of Tuscana. I really wanted a road that had gentle curves rather than the right angle turns I settled for, but trying to figure that out how to accomplish that was going to take far more time than just employing the simple Copy Selection, which creates a copy and aligns it perfectly up with the original so you don’t have to think about it (though only at right angles). Thank you, Diva, for showing me this!

Through some trial-and-error I discovered a way to create an uneven edge along the road, giving it a more natural and organic look. I buried the road about 4 meters down and then dug it out using the terraform Lower Land command with the area affected option set to “Small.” Some building back up was required because I dug down too far, and then I also copiously used the “Smooth Land” command to even it all out. I like the result:

I added some cypress trees along the edge and Saffia gave me a lovely fountain (thanks, Saffia!) created by Dellybean North to put in the middle of the crossroads and I had a decent road.

Much later in the evening I was showing my husband the results of my work and noticed that someone had come by and rezzed a bunch of stuff on my land and then just left it. (I think this is very rude, BTW, but perhaps the person in question is a newb, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.) Valence (my husband’s inworld name) wondered how I would get rid of the objects, since I didn’t have permission to modify them. Feeling very clever, I clicked on About Land/Objects. “Here, look, I can just click this button and all the objects will be returned to that person’s inventory.”

Only I clicked on About Land/Objects/Primitives on Parcel Owned by Parcel Owner/Return instead of About Land/Objects/Primitives on Parcel Owned by Others/Return.

With one mouse click all of the work I’d done that day was gone, taken back into my inventory.

Oops.

Saffia owns all of Oliveto. She approached me soon after the move with this great idea to build a hilltop village on a ridge in Oliveto and give everyone something pretty and Tuscany-like to look at. It’s an illusion, really—I created houses that are only two prims each and smaller than life-size, but the illusion is effective. Add a few cypress trees and a fountain and the place really starts to look like Tuscany.

Here’s a pic of Saffia in the middle of the village to give you a sense of scale. Her house is in the background.

And here I am, once again, staring at my empty plot of land. Hopefully this time it won’t take me as long to get my butt into gear and start building.

At least I don’t have to go to the library anymore…

I am a posting fool tonight. Time now for a brief interlude—shots of me in a photo booth I found I-don’t-remember-where. Once I sat down I could cycle through the various poses. Very fun. Very silly.

Well…

I did make progress after the last post I wrote about this. Here are some pics:

Front door. I created the stained glass panel, but I purchased the door.

Front entryway with open balcony on second story. I created the wrought iron rail pattern to go with the pattern on the back door (which I also purchased). Also created the stained glass panel over the back door.

Looking into the library. Tiled design on floor courtesy of Google Images. Lovely fireplace courtesy of The Lair. (Not enough hours in the day to make everything myself!)

Living room. I created the beamed ceiling and the windows.

I love that I can build in a slinky dress. It makes my day.

So there are the highlights. I was well on my way to completing the house when Regency Estates announced that they were moving Tuscany Island to three Open Sims: Oliveto, Tuscany, and Tuscana. I would retain the same prim allocation and tier but double my land…and I had just a few days to pack up.

As for my house, what took the better part of a week to make (off and on) I dismantled in about ten minutes. (sigh)

We have a DSL connection to the internet through our long-distance provider, AT&T. They provided a router/modem for us and life was good.

Then came Second Life.

I found I could log in and function just fine as long as I did not 1. try to teleport to a different sim (within the same sim worked) or 2. tried to cross a sim line—I would crash. I also could not upload files, nor save notecards. All in all, HIGHLY ANNOYING, especially when I wanted to create. I went through all the knowledge base articles and even paid for a premium account for a month so I could get tech support but Linden Labs couldn’t figure out what was wrong (and they tried—to their credit they were very responsive).

I took my laptop with me when I traveled over Christmas and discovered, lo and behold, while using a different network I could do all of the aforementioned FORBIDDEN TABOO things above with no problem—and here I’d thought all along it was a software issue on my part.

So…next I tackled AT&T tech support. They were not as helpful and denied that there was any problem with the router/modem they’d provided for us, even when I presented them with the irrefutable evidence that I had no problems when I used a different network.

Having nothing else to try, and getting extremely tired of running to the library to use their open network when I wanted to upload files, my husband took pity on me. We purchased a new modem, he hooked a previously-owned router up to it (neither piece of hardware having any connection whatsoever to AT&T) and set it all up tonight.

I logged in and walked up to the sim line separating my home on Tuscana (yes, not Tuscany Island—I’ll explain that in a moment) with Oliveto to the north…paused…my husband sat down to watch over my shoulder…and walked over the line. AND DIDN’T CRASH! YAY! I then teleported to half a dozen places just to make sure. It all works fine, and I think it’s even faster than before.

Life is better.

Wow, has it been a month-and-a-half since my last post? Where did all that time go? Well, another fabulous—if I may say so :-)—issue of Prim Perfect magazine came out, so that was part of it. And I’m also gearing up to design a new magazine under the Prim Perfect Publications umbrella—it will focus on Caledon and similar time-period sims (roughly 1700s to 1920s), with the first issue out in May. Zoe Connelly (of the Connelly Telegraph) will be the editor.

I’ve also been in a sort of funk, wanting to start building my house but rather scared to start. I’ve built some furniture and odd-and-ends, but nothing on this scale before. What if I fail? What if people think it’s ugly? How much do I need planned beforehand? So I’ve sat on my hands for the last month, content to do social things in SL.

Then fate kicked my butt and forced the issue.

One of my neighbors, who owned three plots on Tuscany Island, decided to move. Long story short—and it’s an interesting tale of struggling to communicate with someone who speaks only a little English and a lot of Italian when I speak a lot of English and only a little Italian (some of it hand gestures)—I bought his two plots in the southeast corner of the sim and Saffia (editor of Prim Perfect magazine and my neighbor) acquired his third plot and my old plot, which are adjacent.

[As a small aside, here's an example of trying to communicate with my Italian neighbor through Babbler:

Me: May I go inside? (DaVinci was showing me his new house)
DaVinci Leonard: tutti collegati e sui 2 fronti avrei anche il mare
Babbler3.17: all it connects to you and on the 2 foreheads I would have also the
sea

Granted, I think he was replying to something I'd said earlier, and it wasn't always that confusing, but it was a challenge. :-)]

So I took all of my stuff back into my inventory, returned the house I’d borrowed from Saffia, and stared at my new empty double plot, homeless. I really had no excuse not to start building now.

Heh. I found I could still procrastinate this indefinitely.

About a week later Roberto, a friend from Caledon, IM’d me to see how I was doing. I’d expressed interest in seeing a house he’d built himself and he was calling to find out if I’d like to come see it. It was a simple, nicely-built Victorian abode. I asked about textures and scripts for doors and windows, and he said a majority of that stuff he’d picked up for free—googling images for textures and trolling through the free items available on SLExchange.

See, a voice said in the back of my head, this doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t have to have all original textures and you don’t have to build everything from scratch.

But I don’t have everything planned out! I whined back. I don’t know exactly what the front porch is going to look like and exactly how the tower is going to attach to the main part of the house and what dimensions everything is going to be and…and…

Building is a creative process, the voice replied patiently. Like a river, it flows, and trying to have everything set in stone before you actually start dams the flow (and damns the flow). Go build. Enjoy the process. Don’t worry about what the neighbors think.

So I did. I plunged into the tumbling waters of creativity (okay, that was a florid metaphor, but it fits the water theme of the previous paragraph) and laid the foundation. A day later I had a few walls, and a couple of days after that I had floors for the ground floor, ceilings, and a front and back door (purchased). A query to the Caledon list about where to find a pair of nice french doors resulted in followmeimthe Piedpiper just up and giving me the doors from her inventory (Wow! I should ask about things more often!).

So here are the beginnings. I want to put stained glass panels over both the front and back doors but I need to create the panels first, so that’s why the middle of the house doesn’t have walls yet. The texture for the exterior walls I scanned from a book about Tuscany and I’m very happy with it.

Here’s a look of the back at the lovely free! french doors. Saffia suggested yesterday that I raise the ceilings on the first floor (I agreed with her), so I not only raised them, but converted the ceiling in the living room to a cathedral. I like the new height a lot better. The big drawback? Now the exterior walls are too short and the second story windows too low.

Ah well. Building is a creative process and it flows and changes. The important thing is that I’ve started. And I’m enjoying it.

My dragon hatchling avatar can hold a margarita. That is all.

Nothing like exploring somewhere new to take your mind off your problems, so that’s what I did. And believe me, there are a lot of places to explore at the International Spaceflight Museum, located at Spaceport Alpha.

Sponsored by NASA and JPL, The International Spaceflight Museum reminds me greatly of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Unlike KSC though, which has a more-or-less clear route to follow through the exhibits, ISM goes off in several directions. I picked one at random and started to meander.

ISM has wonderful exhibits, like the solar system simulator (you can see Neptune and Uranus off to the far left—Pluto was off doing its own thing and had a pointer) and a map of Cape Canaveral.

Other interesting exhibits include a planetarium, a model of the shuttle robot arm (which you can maneuver yourself), and a rocket ride which will take you into low earth orbit where you can see models of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Telescope. (Warning on the rocket ride: Passengers will experience launch forces in excess of 7 Gs and reach an altitude of 400 km. Do not board this rocket if you have a fear of 1. Small spaces 2. Vacuums 3. Exploding. Heh. Particularly amused at the exploding part.)

You can teleport from the low earth orbit platform out to explore the planets in our solar system. Very, very shiny. If you do or see nothing else at ISM, see the planet exhibit.

At one point I’d found that I’d accidentally left ISM and meandered into Exploration Island to the south. Hey, but there are some cool things there, too! In the Mars Mountain area I rode on the Mars Explorer Rover Sojourner as it poked around, flew with the glider, and rode the airbag display as it bounced down the mountain (you have to be quick to sit on it!)

Watch out for dust devils here—they’re three times more powerful than tornadoes on Earth. According to the provided information, you and two friends can ride a dust devil around Mars Mountain.

After the dust devil passed I felt the need to rest a bit in the sitting area off to the right. Too bad I couldn’t pick up the coffee there—I really wanted a cuppa about then. (Below, Perry looks longingly at the steaming coffee in the very fashionable NASA mug.)

Then it was back to Spaceport Alpha and the ISM. One of the very cool things about ISM is that it offers a live feed from NASA. There are several areas where you can just sit and watch, for instance, a shuttle launch.

Rockets from missions past and various countries are on display here in the Rocket Ring. Built to scale, they make a striking silhouette against the sky. Information placards are located at the base of each rocket.

What visit wouldn’t be complete without visiting the gift shop? (I wanted some freeze-dried ice cream.) I did, and I found a WORKING TELESCOPE!

Okay, so it cost me about as much as I would spend on a good skin… But it works! It’s scripted, and not only do you appear to look through the telescope, you can also see actual NASA photos. Very shiny. I immediately went home and tried it for myself.

So if you’ve ever wanted to be an astronaut, or just have an interest in things spacey, Spaceport Alpha is a great place to visit. If you have more time on your hands, consider checking out some of the adjacent sims: Science School, Spaceport Bravo, Explorer Island, and NASA CoLab.

The International Spaceflight Museum can be found at Spaceport Alpha 49/79/24
Telescope created by Jenika Connelly of Jenika’s Eyes and Optics (Neon 23/75/22)

I want to build a house. A Tuscan house (I thought that appropriate since I live on Tuscany Island). To this regard I’ve checked out books from the library on Tuscany, I’m researching how to create seamless textures, I’m scanning in textures from aforementioned books, I’m working on simple blueprints, I’m trying to track down where to get scripts for such basic things as opening doors, I’ve read one great book on building in SL and I’m in the midst of another, I’m collecting examples of furniture I’d like to build, and now I just have to figure out how to do it all.

I’m utterly overwhelmed. Yet people build houses all the time in SL. Am I making this too hard on myself? Am I overthinking things? Do I need to find a mentor? Or do I need to just throw caution to the wind and start building?

As the name implies, this store in Second Life sells items with an Arabian theme. The store set-up is pretty typical—walk up one aisle and down another with items for sale on both sides—but that’s where the commonplace ends.

The first things that caught my eye were the decanter and glass sets. The textures were resplendent, the attention to detail meticulous. I was entranced, and I’d only barely come through the front door.

And the amazement certainly didn’t end there.

Lush, rich, exquisite—these were all adjectives that applied to the wares I saw for sale: beds (some with interesting animations), furniture sets, hookas, wall hangings, mirrors, tents, rugs, cabinets…even a flying carpet!

Just look at the detail in the image below—not only on the cabinet, but also on the vase of flowers, the rugs, and the lace table covering.

A good selection of furniture sets were available to choose from that featured not just sofas and chairs, but also end tables, coffee tables, and lamps, all coordinated. M and F poses were included, along with some non-gender-specific ones. You can pick individual pieces, or buy entire sets.

There were also some nontraditional furniture choices (and animations) for the more exotic-minded. The item below is not your grandmother’s sofa.

A doorway on the right-hand wall toward the back of the store took me outside where a variety of tents were for sale, and taking the stairs in the center of the store led me to their Aladdin fantasy items, including pavilions and a flying carpet.

Items tended to be prim-heavy, but some of that is understandable given the attention to detail. Prices were reasonable. (I would’ve like to have seen an option to turn on and off the bling, though.)

Overall, this is a wonderfully thematic store with gorgeous wares. Even if your own home is not decorated with a Middle Eastern flair, adding a choice piece or two from this store will enliven any decor.

Sahara Design and Furniture
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koala/127/173/52