I was looking out my window, to where the Circuit La Corse runs past my home, and I saw one of those ubiquitous SL tour pods go past. It got me thinking about the traffic that used to be on the Circuit La Corse, back in the day when I looked as I do in the image above… 8 years ago. When I first bought land in Jormundgandr, and built my first little gallery, there was far more random traffic, of all kinds. I went through my enormous pictorial library (I’ve been taking pictures ever since my first day in SL) and found some images I had of some of that traffic…

… like the tanks. You would hear them coming, the roar of their big diesel engines, always in a cloud of exhaust, they’d roar past my front door on their mysterious missions…

… there were these school buses, which you could take tours from depot to depot in…

… there were steam engines…

… there were these much bigger buses, which you could also ride in…

… and there were these ice cream trucks, with their familiar, tinny music. These vehicles were everywhere you went, you had to be careful not to get run over. You may have noticed the vehicles in the last two images are a bit wonky on the road, that’s because there’s a sim crossing, just before my gallery. The vehicles would go wonky, going through it, but usually come right again, and continue on, but you would often see one’s that had obviously come to grief going through a sim crossing, they would be on their side beside the road, or just stuck somewhere…

… the best one I saw was this bus, literally stuck up a tree. They would remain in these predicaments, engines running, exhaust billowing, sometimes forever, it seemed…

… no idea what was happening here, but I’m glad I photographed it. All these images are from before I learned to take decent photos in SL, they are actually all screenshots, hence the crap quality, but I think it is the digital version of sepia on an RL photo (:

I discovered Le jardín sur le toit, today, I saw it in the SL ‘Destination Guide’. I’ve never been here before, but the way it was written up made it sound like this winter version had a previous, non-winter iteration…

… I have to say, it is the tiniest ‘Destination’ I can recall ever visiting… what you see here is literally all there is to it…

… it’s a winter rooftop, with a frozen swimming pool with two resident penguins…

… and that’s pretty much it! It was almost a zen exercise getting six images that didn’t all have the same background…

… but, I also have to say, I spent a long time here, trying to find those six interesting shots, and no-one else showed up…

… and it was actually kind of restful and relaxing. I love that someone has gone to the effort to create this little scene, and put it in the ‘Destination Guide’, so others can enjoy it’s tranquility.

Back in February, Veyot asked me if I wanted to decorate one of the ‘Last Drop Cafe’ buildings she had set up as a project. I was delighted, and really enjoyed doing so. Veyot’s projects tend to be short-lived, pop-up kinds of things, so I never expected to still be curating the Wyrd Last Drop Cafe decor nine months later. She recently asked me if I wanted to decorate it for Christmas, and, of course, I did want to. I’ve been doing that over the last few days, but that involved a good few weeks of going to Christmas shopping events, looking for cute stuff…

… I say ‘cute’ stuff, because, somehow, the decor in the Wyrd cafe has just gotten cuter and cuter. I like ‘cute’, and there’s plenty of it in my own home, but I’ve just kinda let go here. This kitten on a sled will play xmas music, if you click her…

… there are gorgeous little snow Fae having a snowball fight…

… inside it’s all xmas colours and critters…

… if you click the chocolate log, you can eat some of it…

… there’s plenty of xmas-themed seating…

… the people over the road have gotten into the spirit, too, so xmas has definitely come to Wyrd.

Veyot told me there was going to be a light show at Sun Dream, today, the place I blogged about in my last post. Veyot is very social, I am not, and seldom go to such occasions, but I’d been so impressed by what I saw there, the other day, I decided to give it a shot. I got myself a good, front-row seat…

… this being my first light show, I wasn’t expecting physical structures…

… but was soon immersed in the stunning display of light…

… it was really gorgeous, and truely impressive to think someone had choreographed something so complex…

… and huge…

… like, staggeringly huge…

… and really pretty…

… one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in SL…

… I think it lasted an hour…

… and I didn’t regret my front-row seat…

… I really enjoyed it…

… but I had to leave, here, about 45 minutes in, because my human had RL commitments. I will certainly try to see more light shows.

I went to the M2D Light Week installation, last night, it was very pretty. I am like a moth when it comes to gorgeous neon and light. This one is kind of divided into mostly warm oranges/yellows/golds…

… and cool blues/purples/mauves…

… counterpointed with plenty of black…

… the display was around a crowded nightclub, full of happy dancers. I spent my time clambering all over the structures that support the light show, looking for interesting angles…

… and was rewarded by discovering that what looked like big areas of open, plunge-to-your-death space, were actually solid, walkable surfaces…

… from which to get more lovely angles.

I love this suburban corner of my yard…

… it’s right on the Circuit La Corse, as it runs through Jormundgandr, an area that suddenly became repopulated, a few years ago and has, pleasantly, stayed that way, with relative constancy, the last year…

… what I like most about this delightful suburban corner scene, is that when I look over the fence, I’m in the suburbs…

… but when I look back at my place, I’m not.

As often happens when I get on a roll with these iterative works, I am producing a lot of new stuff, and I’ve run out of room in my new, tiny gallery, so I’ve put some new stuff on the wall out the back, I’m calling this my ‘Outer Space‘…

… security is very heavy, out the back, here…

… with a seasoned group of hardened characters…

… steely-eyed and alert to any hint of malfeasance…

… (:

I’ve put some new work in my new gallery. If you wanted to see the Hangars Liquides work, they are on the second floor in my little space at Adelina’s place…

… I’ve been thinking a lot about life and death, lately…

… how thin the veil is…

… between being in either state. We are a long time dead, it takes major life changes to seriously appreciate being alive, most of us just waste it, sleepwalking through it. My human once read a zen saying that went something like ‘Live every day as though your hair was on fire’, the human was about 24, and just didn’t really get it. The human gets it, now.

I visited Dimrill Dale, today. I’ve never been here, before, and discovered it quite serendipitously…

… I was pottering in my bedroom, at home, when my ERD ‘FraymWerk’ glasses, which are invisible glasses I’ve worn for years, now, that have a radar that gives me a heads-up of nearby avatars, more consistently than the ‘nearby people’ function of Firefox does, informed me there was an avatar 30 meters away from me, which is pretty close, and I generally have a look at who is in the hood, as there’s usually no-one. I was intrigued to see a cute little, foxlike avi just over my fence, on some empty land behind my neighbours land. Just as I clicked on her, to read her profile, she vanished, but I’d seen her name, so, my interest piqued, I searched her, and read her profile. Her ‘picks’ had Dimrill Dale in them, so I went and had a look…

… this place is, as far as I could gather from the fox’s ‘picks’, part of a large, long-running sim called Calas Galadhon Park…

… it’s very pretty, very lush and green…

… I found several lovely meadows with great views…

… I’m surprised I’ve never wound up here, if it’s been running for years, but, that’s the nature of SL, isn’t it? There’s so much you never get to see, unless you keep looking, everywhere, even in the profiles of little, wandering foxes.

I felt like being slightly dramatic…

… in one of the many amazing ‘backdrop’ builds I have collected in recent years…

… wearing some stunningly dramatic gear I’ve recently, like, yesterday, acquired…

… I seldom dress this provocatively…

… or dramatically…

… but it was fun (: