Lounging About

After the recent weeks, which have been intense and filled with chores, duties, running round in shops and overseeing an erratic - yet always brilliant and sublime - builder/interior designer there was finally a moment of peace and quiet.

The builder was away resting in first life so there was no one around barking orders and telling me to "Now unlock that part of the building, no not that part, that part!"

I enjoyed the stillness and calm that had temporarily settled over my home-sim. The work in the house was almost finished but for a few finishing touches and then there would be that much smaller project of rebuilding the welcome-area if we decided to go ahead with it. After that finally my kind hearted, generous and humoristic friend Butch Diavolo would once again emerge in place of the cantankerous "artiste" (French pronunciation please!). Ahhh happy days to come...! 

Sunrise Over Southern Charm

As the entire building team, the brilliant and sublime Butch Diavolo, builder/interior decorator extraordinaire, my stepson Guyke and myself, assembled this morning the sun was just rising over Southern Charm.

Although we were in a hurry to get on with the finishing touches of the remodelling of the main mansion and its interior, we simply had to stop working to take in the breathtakingly beautiful sunrise.

Sneak Peek - The New Kitchen

My brilliant and sublime builder/interior decorator  Butch Diavolo has - grudgingly, but still - agreed to allow me to post this detail of his ongoing work on my new kitchen at the build site on Southern.Charm.

Doesn't it look awesome?

The Flags Are Raised

Little by little and with surprisingly few differences of opinion my buddy Butch Diavolo, brilliant builder and sublime interior decorator, and I are getting things in order at my new mansion.

Today there was a special moment when we raised the three flags again that have always blown over Southern Charm since Ars and I moved in on the sim.

Shopping For Bathroomware

When I came in-world today my decoration consultant Butch Diavolo told me I was late and why was not looking at furniture where he had told me to look. The fact that he had told me so 15 seconds earlier, was not considered an acceptable excuse.

So I got out of my bandages from last night party and into my building clothes and mindset (which took me close to 30 seconds) and hurried out to the store while profusely asking him to forgive me for my tardiness and promising that it would never happen again. Certain gay interior decorators, and mine is one of them,  are extremely touchy and you need to know when to shut up and just accept the abuse they are hurling at you!

We looked at and bought - among other things - bathroomware. Of course we had to try the animations out first, so I forced an unwilling Butch to join me whenever it was necessary.

We did not find an acceptable commode yet, so I must ask Ziggy to secretly check-up and report to me who made the one that Guykechen has in his home.

Iris Maskelyne

The awesome creators name is Iris Maskelyne and her store is DIGS - Furniture & Prefabs and is located in Terra Felix (SLurl).

I also bought a wonderful creative kitchen table, a day bead, five kitchen chairs, a lovers rug, two other chairs and some lighting appliances from DIGS. Iris also, at my request, supplied me with new versions of the bathtub and a bathroom cabinet with ash bases.

I completely love Iris, for being so wonderfully creative and giving me speedy and kind customer service!

A Day in the Life of an Overseer

Exhibit A. No harness or safety line used while working on a unprotected place.

 As you all may know, I am at the moment highly involved in the project of getting my new home at Southern Charm built and decorated.

For the menial and the creative work I have enlisted the services of a friend of mine, Butch Diavolo, who is a builder/interior decorator all rolled up into one hot and hunky avatar. The man is actually brilliant at everything he does, but being brilliant does not mean he is an infallible god, no way! As every man he sometimes makes mistakes - huge boo boos in fact!

Exhibit B. Working in an unsafe position

Exhibit C. No shoes worn on building site

Being overseer of the work force at the building site, my most important duty is to see to it that the regulations surrounding workers safety are adhered to and that the builder/interior decorator gets through this project alive and without permanent mutilation or severe injuries. It is by no means an easy thing to try to steer a renegade Dutch "artiste" (which is how he - for some reason beyond me - prefers to refer to himself, with the French pronunciation no less) to a safe and steady working schedule without unnecessary risks involved.

"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do", so I try to manage the rebellious Butch, with some small success so far. I cannot even get him to wear shoes at the building site, in spite of the fact that he has already stepped on several nails and almost had to have his right foot amputated yesterday.

Keeping the work force happy

But I will persevere and hopefully we will soon see the end of this project with Butch still alive. Meanwhile I will do my best to keep the laborers safe and happy.

Men At Work

I am ordering my contractor about what to do, I should just have shut up
because he knew better than I what needed to be done and how to go about it.
Butch is an amazing man with excellent taste -  and BRILLIANT in everything he does.

How a builder can turn up to work without shoes is beyond me...
but the man was working brilliantly so I said nothing about it!

After having gotten the house in place, we decided to rest a little

..and then a little more.... Well we would have been ready
an hour or so earlier if I had not screwed a few things up.

Two Hot Blonds and Hundreds of Birds

I had never been to my buddy Ziggy´s new home since he moved recently, so I decided to crash him today. Due to past unfortunate and rather embarrassing experiences, I first checked the World Map to make certain that he wasn't "entertaining".

Ziggy shares the sim with two buddies, the partners Larz Kaz and Aeschylus Shepherd, but has his own parcel. The parcel is a beautiful tropical paradise with about 496 colorful birds all over the place and some huge turtles too and a lot of other creatures too I suspect although I did not spot them. It is a truly amazing place and very different from Ziggy's previous home in Second Norway. 

After Ziggy had shown me around his new house and the parcel we sat down by the fire for a nice chat. I was too lazy to plug in the voice so we talked in local chat for awhile before the lateness of the hour caught up with me and I had to log off to prepare for bed. 

One of the wonderful things Ziggy had laying on the beach was a huge tree trunk which was stacked with many great poses that I tried out and a lot that I did not even dare to try. The  tree was made by the famous and imaginative creator Regi Yifu of Regimade. The trunk was a complete beach home in itself and - as those who know Regi's work must already suspect - a sex-gen plaything also. We did not try any of those poses though, knowing Regi's work I am however certain that they are both sublime and thrilling.

The Secret Trekkie

I have a close friend in SecondLife who has a deeply buried secret, which he confided to me not long ago. He is a Star Trek fan but is afraid to go public with this secret because he does not wish to be stamped as a "geek" by those who are so quick to judge others.

Ever since my dear friend joined SecondLife about five years ago he has combined the two passions. Over time he has learnt how to build, script and texturize. What at first must have looked as a weird desk has now turned into the most astonishing, accomplished and thrilling piece of work I have seen in SecondLife.

When you come into the room where he keeps his secret building project you see only a modest desk and a chair in front of it. If you sit in the chair and start pushing a few buttons the desk quickly changes to a Starship console. Pieces fold out everywhere, on top and  to the sides, and screens get turned on showing the most complicated moving digits, warnings on screen and with sounds, flickering images with instructions and astronomical charts and more, much more. In fact everything one has ever seen in the movies and more and better. It is a quite a unique and overwhelming experience.

I have taken a few pictures, but must tell you that I would have needed to film it to do it justice. The pictures do not show the changing screens or the sounds. (In the pictures below I have taken care to protect my friends anonymity by covering him with a hexagon, so that's why you see an ugly blob in the pictures.)

Thank you so much, my dearest friend, for sharing this secret with me!

Warning to Friends

Calm, cool and collected - or just a very poor self image?

The Much Honored Bock McMillan, laird of Southern Charm and prince of Cascade Falls, has - finally - started building again.

His head is buzzing with exceptional ideas on fashion accessories, candle sticks, lounge chairs and many other essentials for a good life in SecondLife. Frequent visits have already been made to the Textures R´Us store in search of good fabrics and other textures.

As the laird came late to building and has been preoccupied  with other matters lately his building skills are rusty - to say the least. If you are online when he hits a tight spot you can almost be certain to get a call.

Yesterday he managed to disrupt the lives of Adrina Welders, cobbler extraordinaire with the shop AW Designs, and Chade Dagger, well known studly club owner of Erotes, when he got stuck and remembered there was a way to do things but could not recall how. Adrina was hastily transported from whatever she was busy with to come and inspect and aid the laird.

The laird also made a call to SecondLife live chat for support when he for twenty desperate minutes thought he had blown away half of his humble living accommodations. Luckily he stayed calm, cool and collected and was experienced in all things SecondLife enough to do a relogg before calling up a rollback of the sim by Linden Lab. When he returned after the relogg everything seemed to be back in place (it must have been a camera thingy).

All the members of the McMillan-clan are up on their toes and ready to start the production-lines again. They are all certain that this surge will establish the BMcM Corporation as one of the leading enterprises in SecondLife.

Please be patient, he is crazy but he means well most of the time!

In Linden Lab I Trust

Well it seems I wrote my earlier post about being able to build again much too soon, because I wasn't able to build using the Phoenix or the Firestorm viewers this evening. I have uninstalled them both, I do not want viewers that I cannot work with and rely on.

I am now back to the Linden Lab viewers Snowglobe and Snowstorm. I did a quick test after downloading both and it seems they work for me!

Linden Lab has always been good to me, in every way possible, and now they came to my rescue again. I love you all, the people at Linden Lab, from Philip, Belinda (yes I know she is no longer at the lab, but to me she still represents the best spirit of the lab), Keira and to those I haven't met yet, with the possible exception of Rodvik. But thats only because Rodvik didn't answer my message to him on Facebook and I am sure he is a really nice guy too!