I didn’t think I was going to get to do this noob blog challenge because I’m ruthless about deleting old stuff from my inventory, but then I remembered a box I packed away months ago. The skin, hair, and eyes that vintage Brandy is wearing are the first items I bought in mid 2007.

I opened my SL account in February 2007, but I didn’t actually go in world until May or June, and between setting up my account and signing in that first, I did quite a bit of reading about SL. I got hooked on Closet Crisis, and that influence led to my very first shopping trip at Celestial Studios on my first day in world. I also bought an outfit at CS that day, but I don’t seem to have boxed that one up. Instead I’m wearing the very first shirt I ever fatpacked, a great off-the-shoulder top from Surf Couture, and my favorite jeans from Launa Fauna.

This example of my current look is courtesy of Exile, Pink Fuel, Fusemelon, Decoy, and Treads. I think the biggest change from then until now is that I change my look a lot more with different skins and hair colors even though I kept dark brown for both in this case. The shape has stayed pretty much the same except for a bit of tweaking around the mouth and the spacing between my eyes, and I became just a tiny bit shorter.

I didn’t quite finish the week of posts for the Big Bad Blogger Challenge. Last Friday was kind of crazy doing other things and finishing up a few things here and there for Hair Fair 2009. The final prompt was just to talk about our experience doing the challenge, and I have to say that at the very least, posting more frequently showed me that I do want to keep my blog and that I should make that and taking photos more of a priority. I don’t know how many times I’ve said things like “I want to blog but I don’t know what” or “I miss taking tons of photos” lately, and I’m not sure why I’ve drifted away from doing that. I’m such a sentimental person that the blog and my Flickr stream really are a scrapbook of sorts for me, and I like creating that record. I guess it’s my way of saying I’m here.

Would I participate in this kind of challenge again? Yes, I definitely would. Do I think it’s going to change my future blogging? Maybe. I’m not sure about that. I think it did remind me that a blog post can be short and written without a ton of sweating over it, and for me, that’s a positive. I’ve tried before to just give myself 15 minutes to write and then to hit publish when that time is up, and that might be something I do more often. Looking back over my posts from the beginning of this blog, I also notice that I don’t explore new places nearly as often as I once did, so maybe I’ll try to do more travel entries in the future.

All of this also reminded me that I’ve had another site design on the back burner for over a year now. There’s still some pieces of that I think I’d like to try to salvage, so maybe I’ll do some sprucing up around here and settle back in for a while. It’s just time to figure out exactly what I want to get out of this place in more ways than one. Perhaps I’ll go sit on a star and ponder my place in the universe.

Today’s Big Bad Blogger Challenge prompt is choose your own, and with Hair Fair officially opening tomorrow, the only topic I can think about is hair. I’m part of the Hair Fair committee this year and worked on the Flickr contest as well as an auction that will be happening during the fair once things get set up, and it has really kept me busy. It’s funny how Hair Fair has been such a huge deal and really kept me on my toes considering I don’t even make hair.

Today I needed a bit of a break and squeezed in some shopping and setting up a photo scene. Even with that though I couldn’t get away from the hair. It just came naturally. I’m so excited to see what all the designers have been brewing up for us. I just had to do a mad scientist theme to play with that idea a bit.

I’m going back to yesterday’s prompt from the Big Bad Blogger Challenge for today’s entry since I didn’t feel up to the prompt yesterday.

You’ve been given a sim of your very own to use for free for one year. However, there are 3 rules. It cannot be residential, it cannot be commercial, and it has to be open to the public. What do you do with it?

As some of you know, I had a openspace sim for a few months at the end of last year, and I’d developed a certain story that I wanted visitors to the sim to be able to piece together from various notebooks and items scattered throughout the sim. I never really had the chance to bring that to life the way I wanted, so if I had a free sim for a year, I’d finally bring those ideas together. The sim would be almost entirely underwater with lots of nooks and crannies where curious visitors would find submerged wrecks, lost journals, and bits of buildings and sculptures that seem almost from another world with their twisted, elongated spirals faintly glowing in shades of blue and purple.

Discovering the secrets of the sim would not be a linear journey with a defined start and end. People could pick up the story wherever they first find a clue, and while the complete story would be the same for everyone, each person would have a different viewpoint until they had all the pieces. I kind of think of it like that story of the blind men describing the elephant based on what part they were touching.

And what’s the story? The short version is that certain people over hundreds of years have been drawn to this part of the sea. They have dreams they can only remember parts of, and they find themselves doing insane things like stealing submarines and hiring planes to get to this secluded area. Their tales differ slightly but they hear voices crying out for them to come to this space to discover a hidden part of their heritage. Long ago, a society of shapeshifters living as merfolk decided to go out and explore the world. Over the years, their true heritage was diluted and lost until suddenly the original society is facing its potential end. Some of the shapeshifters have psychic gifts, and with those, they’re bringing back the descendants to strengthen their home.

I’m going to take another go at a Big Bad Blogger Challenge prompt.

Describe what your perfect Second Life day would be like.

I thought for a bit about the “not in the realm of possibility” things that might make for a truly perfect day like an automatically organized inventory with stray items deleted and never missed or learning that the tier on Covet was being waived for the rest of time because all of us who live on Covet are just too cool to have to pay. Then I decided to talk instead about what a regular “perfect” day would be like. It’s a day that actually happens every once in a while.

I sign in to SL and there are no urgent notecards waiting to greet me. No one pounces me in IMs while I still have group notices and other inventory pop-ups on my screen. Kavar stands across from me working on a project that makes me all grabby hands for it. Kere is working in the Covet sandbox below the workshop on some grand creation for Covet or Ivy Falls. A project of my own waits by my pose stand, and I know just how I want to finish it, and when I’m done, I feel happy and proud in my accomplishment.

I decide to treat myself to a bit of shopping, and I run across someone or something that makes me right-click and inspect, and then off I go on a little adventure from shop to shop, finding new places and having fun exploring. While I’m out and about, I take some photos to add to Flickr later and maybe even blog about them here. I send landmarks to my friends when I find places that make me think of them, and I happily chat away with them as we each do our own thing. We send snapshots back and forth from time to time as we keep each other up to date with whatever we’re doing. Maybe some of us will meet up to try out poses together at a new-to-us pose shop or to take photos together.

I end the day in SL feeling blessed to know such talented and kind people. No negative voices bounce around in my head. The last stop of the day is back in the workshop where I spend a few minutes telling everyone good night, and then I go off to my RL bed with a smile on my face.

And here I am on one of the sky islands enjoying a cup of coffee and a good book while wearing some of my purchases from Mischief’s 50% off sale, my new favorite heels from Periquita, and a brand new hairstyle from Exile. That looks like a pretty perfect day too.

I’ve decided to participate in the Big Bad Blogger Challenge this week to try to bring some life back to this blog. I want to blog, but I seem to keep putting it on the back burner or thinking too much about whether or not something is worth sharing. It’s my blog, so I should just write what I want. You’d think that would be an easy thing to do, but I’m the girl that can make anything harder than it needs to be. It’s my special talent.

This challenge of posting at least once a day every day this week also comes with optional daily prompts. I might not use all of those, but I thought today’s prompt was interesting.

How long have you been a blogger? How has it enriched your life?

In 1996, it wasn’t called blogging, but I did have an online journal that I updated 3-4 times a week. I’d just gotten married and moved across the country, and it was my way to document my life and share it with my friends and family. At first, I did it all manually by writing and formatting all my entries in notepad and then uploading to my own domain. The most tedious part was updating the previous entry each time I wrote a new entry to add the next button for the newest entry. After a while of that, I moved to a more automated system called Grey Matter, and from there I moved to the first version of Movable Type in late 2001. I loved Movable Type and became a much more active blogger at that point and made so many new friends, and that eventually led to a brief job as community support for another Six Apart product. Somewhere along the way though I fell into using WordPress, and that’s still my favorite one to use.

To bring this back to SL, I began this blog on August 8, 2007, which was about 6 months after first creating my SL account and about 2.5 months after my first time actually signing in to SL. For a lot of reasons, there was this gap of about 3 months between finally getting an SL account and then going in world, and since I tend to research the heck out of things, I spent a lot of that time finding SL blogs. I signed up for the education and networking aspects and then ended up staying for the fashion, socialization, and general exploring. When I created this blog, I thought it would be a hodgepodge of whatever was on my mind related to SL with a slant toward discovering new places and documenting them. I was right about the hodgepodge at least.

Even though this blog gets less use than it once did, I’ve met some people through this medium that I probably would have never met otherwise. Or if I had met them in another way, the interaction wouldn’t have been as deep without the meeting through our blogs first. Blogging gives me a place to talk about the places I see or the things on my mind, and I’ve spent some great moments in SL planning a post or setting up photographs to go with a post.

And just because I have a rule for myself that I like to include an image with every post, I thought I’d share a look at me around the time I wrote my first post here and what I look like today.

This photo made me think about some things in my SL a little bit, and suddenly I realized I might actually have something I felt like blogging again. It’s nothing earth-shattering to be sure, but it’s a little lesson I keep having to learn again and again. First, let me give you a little background.

When I was a little girl, I loved dancing. I’d make up routines to music all the time and begged my mom for dance lessons. I finally got to go to a clogging class, and I was just head over heels from the very first moment, but I never went back for a second class. There were lots of reasons for that but one of them was the teacher commenting to my mom that maybe I wasn’t cut out for dancing. Mom didn’t tell me that then of course because why would you ever say that to a 4-year-old?

So I had no more official dance classes for a long time, but I still loved dance. The dance style didn’t even really matter to me. I fell in love with ballet the first time I saw Swan Lake on a school trip. Musicals made my feet move all on their own even if I was just watching them on TV while sitting on the couch. I danced my heart out every chance I had but it was kind of my secret thing most of the time. Then in college, I ended up with a group of people who did competitive western dancing from two-stepping to line dancing, and one guy needed a partner, and then suddenly there I was dancing and even winning small prizes sometimes. That’s when mom told me why I never had another dance class, and we both laughed at how wrong that teacher had been. Of course I was cut out for dancing. It was in my heart even if I’d never be the best in the room.

And there you have part of the lesson I keep having to learn. Do what you love and enjoy it and be the best you can be at it, and don’t worry that you’re not the best. It doesn’t matter. Does it make your heart happy? Does it give you a reason to get up in the morning? Then that’s more than enough. Let yourself enjoy it. Stop worrying about how you look to other people or being scared you’re not good enough. Enjoy being happy.

And now I guess I should try to tie that back to the photo that I claimed started this whole thought process, huh? I worry a lot. Anyone who’s close to me knows that. I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to shutting myself down before I ever even really get going on something. I have a knack for making the most enjoyable activity into arduous work because I get these perfectionist blockades built up in my mind very easily and quickly. It’s hard to knock those down and to just enjoy something for what it is.

Shine started with one series of 10 eyes a year ago, and now I’ve done so many series of eyes that I’ve actually retired my oldest ones. My two latest series – Covet and Lustrous – are popular enough that I sell multiple pairs of them daily. Then the jewelry came, and I loved learning to make my own sculpts and seeing myself improve, and the jewelry also sells well, and I get great constructive feedback about it. And most importantly, I enjoy doing all of that and seeing my little shop grow. One would think it’s a win-win situation, but I keep falling into this trap of negating every positive thing that happens. I became that critical teacher telling myself now “You might not be cut out for this” for no other reason than I’m a perfectionist, but the truth is still there that if you’re having fun, then keep doing it. Stop thinking so much!

Why make life so hard when it doesn’t have to be? I was in a bit of a funk when I saw that lovely freebie skirt set from idk by Chav Paderborn, and for once, when I got that urge to just find the fun in SL again, I did it, and that photo up there was the result. And I look at it, and I think about how dancing has been that thing I get to do without worrying about the need to be perfect or more than who I am. I need to find more of that spirit in SL, and I’m working on it. I want to dance through life and not worry my way through it, and while I won’t change overnight and will need to keep reminding myself of the lesson, SL seems like one of the perfect places to begin the change.

I’ve been a bit out of it with a RL cold that has really kicked the stuffing out of me, so that’s why I might have seem even more quiet than usual lately. It’s also why I’m just now getting around to talking about my second rezday almost 2 weeks after the fact. The day itself was really nice. There just happened to be a Keiko concert that I could attend, so I did that and then went from there straight to a geek rock night at Pin Ups with DJ Davey Swindlehurst that was absolutely perfect and filled with some of my newest friends. I even won a bit of cash for my nerd girl look thanks to my lovely “kick me” sign on my back. While all that was going on, I was also having great IM chats with some of my favorite people, and really it was the kind of day I hope I’ll see more of during this next year in SL.

The other thing I did to celebrate was the Poppins Challenge as you can see below. I guess I kind of have a naked in public story finally even though I was on a private parcel and the sim was completely empty and I was really only naked for about 5 seconds.

I guess my biggest personal accomplishment during my second year in SL was starting Shine. I started making stuff, and I’m still making stuff, and people seem to like it because they keep buying it. It’s all pretty wild to me still even after 9 months or so. There are some really exciting things going on for Shine actually, but I can’t really talk about it all yet. I promise it will be worth the wait, and it will definitely involve that expansion to other items instead of just eyes that I’ve been talking about for months now.

Within the last year, I’ve gone from saying that I’d never make anything in SL to being really excited at all the things I can do and all the things I want to learn. That’s a pretty major brain shift, and while I’ll take some of the credit for making that leap, I also know that so much of that is thanks to my friends. I have a core group of friends that I truly do consider family in every sense of the word in both lives, and seeing that develop over the last year or so has been such a blessing. Plus, I’ve been meeting new friends and trying to be better about keeping in touch with people. I actually sometimes IM people out of the blue just to say hello. That’s something pretty new for me, but I should also say it’s still somewhat rare behavior, so please don’t feel slighted if I haven’t done that to you lately. Your time to be annoyed by me is coming!

While catching up on Chestnut’s blog, I found out about a blogger challenge to post a photo from a year ago and reflect on the changes since then. I knew just the photo I wanted to use. Here I am relaxing in my new home in Winterfell Ebonshire back in late December 2007.

As I’ve written here this year, where I call home has changed a bit since the above photo. When I took this photo last year, I’d sold my first plot of land in Apparition Wood and made the move to Winterfell Ebonshire thinking that I’d be there for quite some time, and then came the addition of my castle in Ivy Falls and my brief time in Winterfell Sonnet before eventually deciding to live full-time in Ivy Falls. The castle has also seen some cosmetic changes this year as I decided to redecorate completely just a few weeks ago.

And my home isn’t the only thing to have changed this year. My appearance has also evolved a bit. Last year at this time I was still wearing a lot of ETD hair and Tete a Pied skin (now Fleur of course), but then in January 2008, I began wearing more LF CHAI skins, eventually wearing the Cream Siyu most of the time throughout 2008. That’s also around the same time that I began to wear more and more Exile hair until some point where I realized I just wasn’t wearing any hair that wasn’t made by Kavar and just deleted all the other hair from my inventory.

I guess the biggest change has been a mental one as I decided to push myself to play with creating things in SL. I had no idea a year ago that I’d start my own little shop Shine, and now here I am having so much fun creating eyes and even thinking about expanding the shop to include some of the accessories I’ve been working on this year. I’ve enjoyed learning more about Photoshop and about the building tools in SL, and it’s still a bit of a rush to have someone buy something I’ve made.

And of course there’s no way I could talk about 2008 without mentioning Kavar and Kere. They’ve impacted my life in such amazing ways, and it’s hard to believe I’ve only known them a year. As I look back at some of the highlights of 2008, I’m reminded of how many of my greatest moments this year have been thanks to them and/or shared with them.

That girl sitting in her new home last year had no idea how much things would change in a year, but I think she’d be thrilled with the outcome. I know I am! Looking ahead, I hope that 2009 will just continue on with more positive changes, a lot of learning, and good times spent with my favorite people.

I’m having a hard time getting into SL lately. I guess we all go through cycles with it just like everything else. A friend of mine commented that he wasn’t really bored with SL but he wasn’t motivated by it either, and that seems like a great way to sum up my current feelings too. The only things that seem to be keeping my attention more than 5 seconds are making gifts for people, decorating the castle, and hanging out in Kavar‘s workshop.

Even with that general sort of blahness about SL though, I find myself spending a chunk of my free time chatting on Plurk and keeping in touch with people. And it’s the people who will keep me coming back to SL. I have to poke all of you to come see my Christmas decorations after all!