My Icelandic Goddess

Soldis, photo by  Näsets Islandshästar 

Historically I believe it would be safe to say that my relationships with Icelandic goddesses have been at best described as strained. In my humble and of course completely subjective opinion, this has mostly been due to their belligerent attitudes and their failure to comprehend what they read without loading it with perceived malice even when no such intentions were present.

Well during the last week I have finally met an Icelandic goddess with whom I was able to establish a trusting and mutually accepting relationship with. In short, Soldis (Sun Goddess) loved me and I loved her for the two hours our affair lasted.

Soldis is a full-figured mare with a strong and firm will, a beautiful reddish coat and a blond mane . Her tolt may be a bit bumpy at times and still need some work but we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly nonetheless.

Second Pride Inaugural Ball

Second Pride is having a Inaugural Ball on Sunday September 16, 2012, at 04:00 PM SLT.

This is a Second Pride fundraiser so bring your wealthy friends along! Here is your chance to meet the newly elected Second Pride board members and the newly elected Second Pride Foundation board members.

I am sure it will be a wonderful evening - for those on the American continents!

I was planning to go with my friend Carson Darkstone but when I realized that it starts at 1 AM on Monday morning (my time) I am afraid I will not be able to make it.

Your limousine to the ball!

In The Winery

As I told you all yesterday, I forced myself on to my son and son in-law yesterday and demanded a grand tour of their new sim (which I hadn't visited before).

The two young men were very pleasant as always - although Guyke got a bit flustered and tensed when I blurted out - with my usual tact, "I hate the drapes! Did they come with the building?"

Janttu had probably previously indicated to Guyke in his usual shy way that the drapes perhaps were not the best choice. Janttu really should have learned by now that subtlety doesn´t always work on my son. You need to drop an anvil on his head and scream, shout and kick for him to notice any objections when he is that mood.

However, Guyke is not the one to sulk - not always - and this was a happy occasion. When they led me to the winery I was expecting to be served a glass - or two or three - of their own home-brew. Little did I know that they had a policy of "you get as much as you give" and made me work for the wine by pulling me into an open barrel to crush the grapes by stomping on them to produce more wine. (If you click the pictures above and then use the left and right arrow keys to move from one to the other you can watch me work myself into a very thirsty state.)

I go my wine and was then showed around the rest of the seem where they had done tremendous work in a very short time. Everything was either lovely and beautiful or darned scary (they have a weakness for Halloween and celebrate it all year long).

9/11 Again

Honor the dead by caring for the living!

I took these pictures on this day last year at the 9/11 Memorial site (SLurl) in SecondLife.

The effect of the two transparent and ghostly towers looming over the surrounding buildings is a powerful and beautiful reminder of the horrible day when the towers disappeared from the skyline and all our lives were changed for the foreseeable future.

I remember that awful day well. It feels like a lifetime ago but is only eleven years. The day before I had come home from a five day stay at the hospital where I had been urgently admitted when my blood count (Hb) was found to be only 59 g/l (In a healthy man it should be around 130-170 g/l).

They never found out where I had been bleeding slowly over a very long period despite probing my body through every open orifice with a variety of instruments. However, I was sent home after having received a few blood transfusions and been instructed on how to recognize the warning signs. (As long as the palms of your hands are reddish your blood count is over 120 g/l, below that they turn grayish/white.)

The day after I got a telephone call from my father telling me to turn on the television set because something terrible was happening in New York. I turned on the TV and sat in front of it the rest of the day and long into the night. I watched and cried while the second plane flew into the second tower and then again when the first tower collapsed and then the second and then listening to the guesses all night long about who and what had planned and executed these atrocities.

The Dreamboat

"The coolness that is Janttu"™

A man cannot turn his back to the world for a few weeks without finding that his son in-law has turned into a perfect dreamboat when he returns. Is that really fair?

Well, the picture shows you my son in-law Janttu Winkler in his latest hair. My son Guyke tells me he had to drag Janttu to the store and force him to buy the hair, because the man claimed "his old hair was only two years old". 

Janttu should know by now that it is not easy to refuse Guyke and that Guyke has impeccable taste in everything - well,  except possibly drapes.

More about my visit with Guyke and his husband tomorrow, I am off to bed now.

---
American Heritage Dictionary 4: (drēmˈbōt) noun; A person considered exceptionally good-looking and sexually attractive.

The Lairds Return

So - finally - after many promises and lots of strange excuses the Much Honored Bock McMillan, laird of Southern Charm and prince of Cascade Falls, at long last returned to his beloved home sim yesterday.

Well, to be quite honest, I was not at home very long because I had a Second Pride membership meeting to attend. The meeting went on for more than two and a half hours, which is an unusual long time and rather unexpected if you read the agenda.

I must admit that I may in some small way have contributed to part of the tardiness but otherwise I believe it may have been that many of us were in a slightly cantankerous mood and ended up splitting hairs for no real reason at all. When a whole lot of people get together in this state of mind the outcome is inevitably a very long meeting.

The meeting was not a total waste of time because the board was eventually able to decide to
- adopt new rules of conduct for the membership meetings,
- elect a board for the newly created Second Pride Foundation,
- create a new headquarter for Second Pride,
- create a Second Pride Build avatar and
- buy a special building for certain future events.

A strange thing happened during the meeting when our usually very efficient chairman Doc Spad - or "Sir Doc, Sir" as I call him in my mind - suddenly asked:, "Did you have a question Ars?".

I immediately became alert and started caming around in the conference room to see who this second Ars could be. Then he said "Sorry, I mean Forever did you have a question?". And it dawned on me that he must be reading my group tag and meaning me. We both laughed at the strange incident because he realized his mistake at the same time as I did.

I was happy I have come this far, because six or eight months ago I would not have been able to laugh at it and would have filled it with strange meanings.

However, I did manage to get in a few words with some of my friends and family during the meeting. And at the very end - before I had to leave for lovely and welcoming bed - I squeezed in a hug from my brother-in-law- D R E Y Porchers, nee Messmer, It was good seeing him again because I don´t think we have been in touch since before the summer.

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!