Our Own Island

A few months ago, Tech and Island Girl had their privacy invaded. They had just arrived at her house after an evening out, and a very strange character sit-teleported himself into the house, jumped into IG’s bed, and ignored all chat and IM messages. After they got him to leave, he hovered on the adjacent parcel, camming into the house (they had Show Look At turned on and could see his crosshairs).

Not long after that, Tech revealed to me that he thought we should buy our own sim, probably with a couple of other people to help cover the tier. While there’s no such thing as *true* privacy in SL, being on an island in the middle of the ocean is more private than being on the mainland, if only because folks are less likely to wander over from adjacent sims. I loved the idea, but we didn’t immediately have other partners who could jump on board, so owning our own sim went on the back burner.

A couple of months later, a friend of mine showed me the open space sim he had just moved to, telling me that he and his RL wife were leasing half of it. One day in late July, I was looking at more property on the mainland, hoping for something with a better sunset view. Tech logged in and we started talking about the property I was looking at and about the open space sim idea. We realized we could afford an open space sim by ourselves. Of course, it isn’t *true* ownership because we can’t own an open space sim without also owning a full sim, but if we found a reputable estate owner from whom to lease, we thought we’d feel relatively secure that our sim wouldn’t be pulled out from under us.

While we were chatting in IM, each in a different location on the grid, we were each looking at the classified ads for open space sims. I decided to teleport to one that looked appealing….. and landed right in front of Tech! He had, unbeknownst to me, chosen the same ad to check out. We experience that kind of synchronicity a lot—“jinx” is a regular part of our lexicon—and we both doubled over laughing.

Once we’d recovered, we tossed the idea around a bit more, and it occurred to me that we already knew someone who owned a full sim who might be willing to add an open space sim to his holdings as long as we paid for it. I approached him, he was amenable to the idea, and we worked up a good faith agreement. Before our island could be ordered, our friend’s father passed away and he was a bit less available for a week or so. That gave us time to talk about what we would name our sim and to work on terrain files.

Finally, one balmy Tuesday evening, we ordered our new island. By the next day it had splashed down on the grid. We got the terrain file applied, and I immediately set up a cabana and hammocks to serve as a temporary hangout while we fine-tuned the landscape and began moving our homes to the new site.

We haven’t been there long, but it’s home now… Tech, IG, and I each have our own homes, with an extinct volcano in the middle of the larger island and an area for guests and dancing on the smaller island. While my mainland property is a nice parcel, KN is a true tropical paradise.