Tag: photography

While We Wait

While we await our own end, we spend our time as though we were in a never-ending holiday. We do our daily walk, drinking in the impossible beauty of the pre-dawn city, breathing the crisp morning air to the bottom of our lungs… yes, we can still do that! The human did 15 years of formal karate training; karate teaches you how to breathe properly, and years of practise teach you how to use your whole lung capacity. We are certain that this is why, despite our lungs slowly filling with repulsive tumours, we are still able to breathe properly, and enjoy the smell of winter dawn to its utmost…

… we walk through areas that are almost totally different to how they were when we were young, which reminds us that we have at least lived long enough to appreciate these changes. Of course, it’s sad we will never see the changes that will occur, even in the next few years, but even thinking that re-doubles our delight at, currently, being alive…

… we spend about an hour a day, often more, in our garden. We are sure this, too, is good for us. If you are a gardener, you will know that a garden is a lot of work, there’s a lot of forward planning involved, not to mention all the digging/planting/feeding/watering, and weeding. We love seeing our plant babies grow, and bare fruit, whether it’s flowers or Brussels sprouts. We can’t help it, but we are even thinking of putting in another crop of potatoes, even though were aren’t supposed to be going to live long enough to harvest them… it’s just the joy of working the soil, planting the plants, it makes us happy, and we are pleased we have always been into gardening, we’ve gotten pretty good at it in the last 50 years, or so.

We spend hours a day reading, another of our life-long interests. We are working on a large painting. We spend the evenings, if not reading, watching movies, documentaries, and tv series. We recently discovered the entire 12 seasons of ‘Stargate’ were on Netflix… so we watched it from start to finish, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s wonderful to be able to just kick back and wait to die, confident we have taken care of all the important things, and now we can just relax, and enjoy being alive… and we certainly do enjoy it (:

Still Alive

We are still alive!

We have spent the last few months getting ready to die. This has meant, among many other things, totally abandoning our whole SL world. It literally took us a couple of years to do that, it was such a big part of our lives… now it’s gone.

We gave up our addiction to AI-generated art about a year ago. For the last year, it has been almost impossible for us to sit comfortably, long enough, to blog, and that got doubly hard a few months ago, so we just have not been doing so. However…

In the last few months, things have stabilised dramatically for us, that too-good-to-be-true kind of dramatic improvement in living quality. We have spent it frantically setting our affairs in order, re-writing our will, and sending most of our treasures to our sons, who live in the South Island, which, due to government monopolies, is a very expensive place to be sending large paintings and a chainsaw, not to mention boxes and boxes of books… it is usually cheaper to fly, or post things, to Australia than it is to send them from the North Island, to the South. We have largely accomplished all those goals, have got on board with all the organisations available to support the terminally ill… in New Zealand, if you are terminally ill, you hook up with the ‘Hospice’ organisation, and all your medication/doctor visits/general nursing help, with them, is free, which is very nice, because when you are dying of cancer, you can spend a shit-ton of money on those things.

The thing is, all the crappy things that have happened to our body have all been either directly caused by chemo/radiation treatment, or are side-effects of those nasty things. They are all the things that have, miraculously, settled down, recently, and become manageable horrors, lurking in the wings. The thing that is supposed to kill us within the next 3 months, bowel cancer metastasised in our lungs, is barely even noticeable, yet. We bought a cheap ‘kneeling chair’, which has made it possible for us to sit at the computer for far longer than we’ve been able to, in the last few years. So, here we are, blogging again, literally waiting to die.

Every day, since our recently improved life condition, we go for a fifty minute, pre-dawn walk, which is very good for our soul. Above is a picture from this morning’s walk (:

Hanging in Obsidia

Here we are, visiting Obsidia…

… there are cute little critter details all through the build…

… the place is quite minimalistically set out, but has nice elements…

… our favourite was this seat. We have one at home that we must have had for a decade, now, and it’s one of our most loved items of out-door seating…

… you don’t see them a lot, any more, so finding this one just triggered the ‘ahhhh… home’ reflex, and we just had to blob for a while…

… it was very nice (:

Taking Flight

Using the ‘blend’ function in Mj, we combined some of our gorgeous girls with a photo-collage we made 7 years ago, where we had blended, in PhotoshopCS5.1, trees in front of a sunset, clouds, and a seagull…

… we’d already made some Mj images of pretty babes and curtains and mist…

… we are blown away with the results…

…really beautiful…

… we’ve hung these, and four others, in our Littlepaws gallery (:

Drone Haven

We visited Drone Haven, the other day. There are a lot of cats in this post-apocalyptic reality…

… the windlight, here, and the pallet, is/are richly dark (darkly rich?)…

… this is a kind of ‘gentle’ apocalyptic future…

… dark, and devoid of humanity, but in no way sinister, or threatening. We saw a few other avi’s, while we were there. A few years ago, we would have said ‘hi’, but we’ve been snubbed so often, recently, we actually can’t work up the enthusiasm, any more, which is very sad…

… the cats are all very well fed, and not in the least timid…

… it’s nice, here. We prefer these kinds of sims, that show someones imagination, rather than just formulaically ‘safe’ ‘destinations’ that, while bright and sometimes pretty, are usually extremely bland…

… we got some different perspectives from some of the roof-tops (they don’t all have physics, though)…

… and from this tower. It’s actually a fairly large sim.

Hanging in Hangars

Equipped with our latest-version Firestorm viewer (it’s been several since we updated), Flutters and I went for a walk through our hood…

… could be our imagination, but everything looked a lot lusher…

… of course, we love it here, we’re sure we’ve told you that…

… this is one of our very favourite places in SL…

… we were joined by our friend, Fau… three exotic creatures, hanging in Hangars Liquides (:

Resident Artist

We have a new gallery. We’ve actually had it for over 6 months, now, but the human’s life got in the way of us posting about it…

… it’s at Littlepaws Art & Photography, courtesy of our lovely friend Leni Littlepaws…

… we are currently showing some of our early Midjourney work, which we still really like…

… please come and visit. There are other artists here, too, including Leni, who does really beautiful AI work (:

We’re Still Here (:

Happy New Year, everyone! We just wanted to let you know we are still here. Life has been serious for the human these last six months, with huge new realities to confront and work through. This hasn’t left much time for us, here in SL. Art, and Second Life, have been forced well down the priorities list… not because they aren’t priorities, not that at all, but that they just haven’t been possible.

Things are returning to a new ‘normal’, now, however, and we hope to be spending more time active, here, in SL, again. If you know us, you know we have been constantly ‘playing’ here the last 15 years, and these past 6 months have been quite traumatic for us/the human, not being able to be here. We are hoping that will change for the better (: