It's Been a Long Damned Time! (A Bit of An Explanation For Our Absence)

Our House in the Jersey Highlands

Written January 5, 2018

Sweetie and I have been away from Second Life for a long time.

Three years ago this month I sold my little lake cottage in Metropolitan Atlanta and moved to the highlands of New Jersey to be with my Second Life love. I left home On January 21st with the top down on my Miata, wearing sandals, and arrived the next day in the frozen north with the top up and wearing closed-toed shoes and my heaviest coat. We moved into the house we were finally able eto afford and were married in April.

Ours is a 1940 vacation cabin on a lake that had been expanded several times over the years.

It's a fairly large house now, with a full basement, three bedrooms, two baths, a mud room, a living room with a massive fireplace and vaulted ceiling, and a huge kitchen and dining area;

To get the house to our liking, we had to make some modifications. First was moving the washer and dryer upstairs from the basement to the kitchen.

It is of course inconvenient to have to run up and down stairs every time you want to load or unload clothes, but our stairs were a real problem. First, they were more ladder than stairs, and rickety to boot. I mean, just look at them!

Original Basement Stairs-- More Like a Ladder

Our first project was replacing the shaky ladder stairs. We were able to lessen the pitch and it's easy to negotiate them.

New Stairs-- Sturdy, and Better Angle...

... But Not Wide Enough For a Laundry Basket

They are, however, still narrow. They're framed by huge logs from 1940, and there's no easy way to widen them. We couldn't imagine going up and down those stairs with a laundry basket!

It was some months before a new washer and dryer were install and functioning and we were ready to move on to the next project-- a dishwasher. It took forever to find a new carpenter (the one who built the stairs kept promising to come but never did).

Meanwhile, we were out of Second Life. I had my Sony VAIO laptop, but while it chewed Second Life up when I bought it new in 2009, by 2015 had grown slow and did not give me a workable Second Life experience. Xubi's MacBook had aged out. We had no SL-capable laptops, we were busy with the house, and one thing led to another and we played hooky from Second Life for nearly three years!

It all hinged upon the second floor. Our house has one upstairs room  at 17' x 24' and a second at 14' x 17'. The 14' x 17' is to be my office. But there's a hitch.

Huge 17' x 24' Upstairs Room. Notice Subfloor

The Smaller 14' x 17' Upstairs Room. Again, Notice Subfloor.
This Will Eventually Be My Office

You see, the previous owners never laid down flooring. I think they meant to, but just didn't get around to it.

There's subflooring up there, of course, in fact, two subfloors, we discovered, but no actual floor. We had to make decisions about money, and the washer and dryer and dishwasher took precedence. So to date, no floors upstairs, and for several years my powerful desktop computer sat unused in boxes scattered here and there in the big empty rooms.

Despite our absence, neither of us could bear to see our sims go away, and so we paid tier every month. We were anxious to get back to them, but without means.

For my birthday my honey gave me a pretty good Lenovo laptop that works well in SL if I don't turn on shadows, and Sweetie, after long proscrastination, bought a kickass Alienware that lets her run with graphic sliders all maxed-- and so here we are! I've been so stoked I even managed to find an exact match for the antique mission style library table the movers smashed to kindling and round up most of the parts for my i7 desktop and assemble it in the middle of the large room upstairs. We're saving our pennies so we can get the floor in upstairs.

My Desktop, Stated and Ready to Go On My Library Table
I'm Still Looking for the Speakers and Second Monitor

I can't speak for how often Sweetie will be in world,  but I will be regularly-- and I will be blogging.

I have missed this blog.