Whew, finally completed some projects, yay me ^^

Well, I managed to get a few things done recently that have been on my plate for some time, so I thought I'd reflect on them.

Clean shed: When I first moved into my current house, back in 2000, I realized the garage would be a bit cramped for two cars and storage, so I purchased a little 10x15 metal shed for the backyard. I promptly filled it with stuff and basically forgot about it all. Occasionally, over the next few years, I would duck in for a shovel or something, and notice a few wasps nests had moved in. Of course, this made me a little wary about entering in there again, and until 2007, I basically didn't. I finally filled up the garage to the point where I really wanted to be using the space again, and when I opened it and avoided the wasps, I discovered that quite a bit of the stuff in there was water damaged and would have to be thrown out... Oy... Well, I decided after Rosa's visit, I'd finally tackle the thing, and I did, over the last two weekends! Threw out most everything in there, and swept it out, and bought a good tarp to throw over it to keep out the rain. It's in pretty good shape now, and I just have a bunch of paint to get rid of at the hazardous waste facility tomorrow on the way in to work.

Group photo of Hawthouse crew: As some of you know, I'm part of a fairly large community in SL at the Lingmell sim called the Hawthouse. It's been in existance for roughly two years, and is a nice conglomeration of builds by a group of about 10-13 of us. Well, late last year, Rosa suggested that it would be pretty cool to have a group photo taken for posterity. Originally, we thought to get everyone together at once, and find enough interesting pose balls to take a picture. Trying to schedule that was sort of a nightmare, and trying to find a selection of poses everyone liked was proving to be similar, so I suggested taking individual shots of each person, to be cut-and-pasted together later over a nice background image. I got a nice whitescreen, and his-and-her poses, and started scheduling photo ops to collect the shots. Scheduling this, however, was also not so easy, but about three months later I managed to get approximately half the photos taken. Well, then my laptop motherboard decided to give up the ghost, and I felt I had lost what I had originally taken. Ugh... Fortunately, I discovered I could still use the hard drives from the old laptop, and removed them and salvaged the photos. Anyway, I did finally manage to complete the rest of the photos earlier this week, and yesterday I used Photoshop to cut and paste the whole thing together! Below, you see the "casual" and "formal" pictures. Woo hoo!


SL tier reduction: Ever since I bought the land for Amphibicatt Gardens, I have been up at a full tier land fee of $195/month. Now that Hunter is here, I just don't find myself in SL as much, and wanted to try and use some of that money for other things. Lowering yourself to a smaller tier is not easy, as it turns out. :) A full sim tier allows you around 64K of square meters of land. The next step down is half that. I had almost completely filled my 64K allotment, so I started selling off land as best I could, without impacting too much of the surroundings at the Hawthouse and Amphibicatt stage. Today I finally got it down to an amount that allows me to choose the lower tier, which puts me at $125/month instead. Woo hoo! And two days before I would have had to pay for the next month, good timing! :)

That's all I have for now, take care everyone!