Well HOWDY!

Holy cow, it's been almost a year!

A YEEEEEEEAAAAAAR!

Let's see if I can even remember how to write a blog post.

We'll start with an ode to Callie Cline. (I'm not being an ass; I'm being serious.)

I always have to log in for the SLB celebrations. HAVE TO. I love them passionately. Unfortunately I missed the whole damn thing this year but managed to scoot in on July 4, the last day the sims were open for people to check them out. I logged in at 8 p.m. SLT. I thought maybe they would cut the slackers some slack and hopefully let us stay there until the wee hours of the next morning, but NO. At exactly midnight I got unceremoniously booted out of the sims and landed on my ass on a Visitor's Island somewhere, which always scares the hell out of me. People in dark, unrezzed clusters, playing all their gestures at one time and usually talking about sex and porn. *shudder* And of course, you always land on about 50 other people when that happens, so on top of everything else (no pun intended), it feels like a seedy orgy.

Anyway.

I did managed to see a few things first. Like the aforementioned Callie Cline exhibit. I love Callie's annual exhibits because – speaking as a RL person in the PR industry – she gets a BIG DAMN GOLD STAR for building a brand and marketing the hell out of it. This year she built a Tower of Flower Power. (I named it that. It seemed appropriate.) It was fab. The music mashup in there though, WOOOOO! Callie, I love you but it felt like a mushroom trip after a few minutes. Maybe that was the goal.

YOU GO, GIRL!

Now let's move on to my bad clothes, bad shape, bad everything and the shame I feel when looking at the post before this one. I can't keep up with the SL trends. I try and try, but when you only log in about once a year, you're bound to make a fool out of yourself regardless. Not only that, I see that I've been kicked out of 19 blogger groups. Whoops. (What? TRUTH? NOOOOO! ... wait, is he gone? His blog is kind of outdated like mine, though not as much.)

Anyway, kidding. I don't blame those groups. Bad graphics + once-a-year blog posts = Blogger fail.

So it looks like it's just mesh-the-hell everything now, huh? So much so that my vintage MacBook Pro screams in agony whenever I log in. You can't really tell in that pic up there because I'm so small next to the Tower of Flower Power, but I'm wearing vintage League jeans with (gasp!) prim attachments. And weirdly, SL kept replacing them with "New [system] Pants," so most of the time I looked like a chick wearing white stretch pants in Wal-Mart.

Changes aside, I see many people are still going for that "grumpy face and five-inch thigh gap" look. Sigh.

So I fixed some things. I grabbed an old gift skin from Belleza (because I'm broke, FLAT broke; shocker) and sexied-up and standardized Emerald Wynn's shape a little. I passed on the thigh gap though. Curves are sexy, kids. No one wants to bang a bag of antlers.

"Hey, baby."

Looks JUST LIKE ME in real life! (No it doesn't.)

I went over to the SOU by Creation.jp 1st Anniversary Event (runs through July 25) and picked up some relatively inexpensive mesh duds by COCO (suede fringe vest in Brown, 150L; wide-leg jeans in Dark, 190L; flower bustier is a free gift at that booth). Then I grabbed some Mykonos Beach platform sandals by Your Skin Your Shape for 70L at The Dressing Room Fusion. (Hat tip to the Seraphim SL blog for the heads up on all this stuff – I wouldn't know where the hell to go without that blog).

Then I checked in with The Bunny in our shared trailer. Because, you know, we need an annual pic with The Bunny, just to mark the passing years.

"Hi. Uh, remember me?"

He is raggedy and so NOT mesh, but I will always love him passionately. If I could suck him into the Real World, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

OK, so meanwhile, all this time I kept getting these in-world messages: "Your SLink hands need to be updated!" "Your SLink feet need to be updated!" over and over until I finally yelled, "OKAAAAAAAAY! SHEEEEESH!"

The hands were no problem because I bought those myself. The feet were a little trickier because I got those as a generous gift from Whispers Magic. I sent SLink Resident a notecard asking her (him?) what to do. She (let's assume it's a she) told me to go leave my feet in a little sandbox by the store so she could update them. This disturbed me a little.

LEAVING MY FEET ALONE, ABANDONED AND DISMEMBERED, SO FAR AWAY FROM HOME!

It was unsettling.

"I'M SO UNCOMFORTABLE!" *sniff*

So yeah, my feet are over there behind the store if you want to swing by and say hello. Fortunately, they're not alone. There were several other body parts lying around. In fact, there was a whole body just standing there, which was freaky as sh*t. And hands. Soooooo many hands.

I like that one dark tattoo though!

That's really all I've got right now. Sorry this post is so short.

I'd like to spend more time inworld because I'm working from home as a freelance writer and it's a nice escape. Unfortunately, it's kind of like playing "Minute to Win It" whenever I log in. I have to hurry like hell to teleport, shop, chat, anything, because I crash every few seconds. I've tried playing around with Avatar Skinning and some other complicated preferences to take some weight off my ancient graphics card but nothing helps.

And for those of you wearing mesh (which is, like, all of you), on my viewer it looks like you have pants sticking out of your chest and hair sticking out of your butt and random arms and boobs jetting out all over the place. It looks like a house of horrors, actually. If anyone can suggest a decent viewer for an ancient (we're talking 2009) MacBook Pro, please let me know. I'm trying to save up to buy a more modern refurbished Mac.

Oh, and so yeah, if you're chatting with me and I suddenly vanish, I'm not being rude. It just means I've crashed and given up all hope for the night.

Love to anyone who's still reading this thing! ♥ I'm bracing myself for crickets. :) :)