Raglan Mardi Gras

one day lucy sez to osprey  "there should be fortune cookies in Second Life" and osprey grabs it and ran wid it!  

she made fortune cookies dat breaks open and gives you a fortune when you click's dem (fortunes made up by lucy and enjah and maybe more peeps ... dey so funny!) 

somma da fortunes only makes sense if you hangs out in second life.

den she went charging on an made fortune cookie avatars we wears so we is fortune cookies in ossem red sneakers, and we was in da Raglan Mardi Gras parade yestiddy - best second life parade i ever seen! 

it wuz Mysteries of da Orient so we fit right in behind a chinese takeout float! 
here some pics.  hunnerts of peeps wuz dere!

~ mudpie

dere we is lining up at start

 

dual alarm cats

one cat misty predawn grey
striped with wet deep brown bare trees
the beech still with their tan leaves
that hang on all winter to guide the deer
pats my face before cold sunrise
crawls in as i lift the blanket
to a warm ball against my tummy.

sunlight filtering thru blinds
the tiger cat comes stiped like
sunbeams thru dissolving mist
orange shadows cross white snow
a fire beneath glows brighteyed
pounce! on the purring lump
beneath the blanket
morning is here!

Mars - another excuse for human curiosity

why does the japanese astronaut selection process involve origami?

who ate the onions experiment?

what happens if you don't bathe or change clothes for 2 weeks?

how much will NASA pay you to stay in bed for 3 months? 

what happens to your bones then?

so how do old ladies benefit from space research? (get it?)

how do dolphins have sex under water?

is that why they don't let male dolphins in the swim-with-the-dolphins pool?

what is astronaut chow?

what concoction best simulates human shit for test purposes?

what tests are those??

what percent of people can light their farts?

why is drinking Orange County's water kind of like being an astronaut?

did you ever think that sustainability engineering and human spaceflight engineering are just different sides of the same technology?

PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach - a book by a science writer who walks the fine line between making fun of and seeing what is funny about space exploration and the research that is part of it!

i loved this book, and had a new view of the value of it all... all the research spills out into everyday life. her last paragraph is surely thought provoking - to summarize, any money saved from not funding space exploration would not go to any of the things you feel it should be used for anyway!  you know that!  so why not play and learn.

oh just read it, you'll laugh out loud at sentences like "The zero gravity fart has been a popular orbital pursuit, especially on all male flights."

some bad guy has a car like mine

a DRUG dealer! or maybe a TERRORIST!  -- somewhere around here i am SURE there is one with a car JUST LIKE MINE.
  you would NOT THINK they would drive a BORING looking vehicle like a blue subaru IMPREZA station wagon.
(granted it does GO like ANYTHING!)
why else would the cops KEEP STOPPING ME? 
ok i WAS speeding, but not enough to be given a TICKET apparently.
i just got a WARNING. and then--
ok i went through -- i DID go through a red light when that cop was BEHIND me,
but i had never BEEN in that town before, and i DIDN'T EVEN SEE IT! 
and HE didn't give me a ticket EITHER, so it must happen ALL THE TIME THERE.
and then YESTERDAY i was stopped because my INSPECTION STICKER is over a MONTH out of date.
i forgot! and i can't SEE it because of the rear-view mirror HIDES it.
and yet...who NOTICES things like that UNLESS --
they are already checking out your car looking for an excuse to STOP you?
no ticket again.
you SEE?
they just want to look in the BACK...
see if i have bombs or bodies.

we were meant to fly!!

should second life be a copy of a first life? for most, it is.
most choose to be humans, have houses, cars, horses, dogs, even kitchens and bathrooms! crazy!
why walk when you could fly?
live in a house when you can live in a bubble, a mushroom, underwater, or on mars?
look human when you could invent a life form for yourself?
or - ah - live in the sky!  YES!  people DO like this.
we happily take naturally to flying and off-the-ground life.
here's a snapshot of the sky high above Dunvegan, a sim where i hang out sometimes, with all the hang-outs and homes people have put high above their land.

(people's sky places! click to enlarge)

Blue Lagoon

yesterday i installed phoenix standard on my old laptop. 

right away mudpie went to raglan to test it out, and ended up at a kind of charades game.

the contestant had to create clues from prims (simple 3D shapes) --

clues to the words or phrase the rest had to guess.

mudpie didn't know how the game worked exactly,

but got all caught up and correctly guessed one!

wow she won 25 lindens!

but then - uhoh - turns out she had to be the next one up!

how the heck do you create prims using phoenix? omg.

i did figure that out, and her words were "blue lagoon."

after a few false starts i managed to make a flat oval

and fill it with BLUE. 

then i decided to add water texture.

then i found a fish in mudpie's inventory and added that.

the fish swam round and round - and someone guessed "blue lagoon"!!

what i hadn't noticed was that the moderator, awenbunny, had

been hollering at mudpie in chat "you can't use textures!"

and then with the fish, she completely lost it!

that was totally against the rules!

luckily it was raglan, home of the fun-loving tinies,

so everyone laughed and laughed.

awenbunny said she laughed so hard her dimples hurt!

snow body

knock knock!

who's there?

Snow Body

Snow Body who?

's nobody gettin' to YOUR front door!

my front door -- good thing we haz back doors too!

after i opened the windows and shoveled awhile to keep them from breaking, i went off on my snowshoes.  wheeeee!

i was the first one out after the 15 or so inches of snow....ugh it was hard going!

painting the magic

"i hate to tell you this...but..."
this is what carpenters say to you when you get home from work.
that is, they do if your house is a little cape built in the 1800s.
i've been hearing it for years.
pull off a wall, some clapboard, some flooring, and it's -- uh-oh!!
one of our first carpenters was a young guy i'll call bob, mostly because that's his name.
carpenters here are like new york waitresses ...they are really something else.
bob was an artist.
we named our bathroom after him. 
i wish we had gotten him to sign it!
not long ago i went to his house on an open studio tour, and -- whoa!  $1000 and up?
wonder what our bathroom is worth now!
i love his paintings.  take a look!
i love them because he paints the things i love; 

and he knows how to capture the radiant magical energy of the world's display.

phoenix creates butterfly cat-woman

the viewer phoenix has been good on my w7 64 bit lappy, so based on new info, i decided to get all my old viewers off, and then download the phoenix 818 SSE2 viewer.
it worked beautifully! looks so good, and so far not crashy and stuff rezzes!  here's a picture...(it dint make me a better photographer)

HOWEVER i must have deleted a cache or failed to create a separate cache or SOMETHING!  because....
when i logged into my old 32 bit lappy on SL, i got a little of my current fairy look, plus a little of my new year's eve tiny tiger look all jumbled together!  what a hoot!