My quest to get rid of the DFS stuff in my #SecondLife inventory was put on pause while I re-jiggered my parcel of virtual land. And then I thought “Hey, I could have just a *small* farm, a *cute* farm, and do it without having a store or stall or shop selling produce or meat.” HAH!

Of the stuff I put out for sale, some has sold and I’ve been trying to send sales announcements at least every other day.

I hate marketing.

The funny thing is, I keep having to replace tools and plants that I sold off the last time I had a big reduction in inventory. I’m keeping the stuff I like, I’m dumping the stuff that doesn’t fit the idea of a little old vintage farm, and I’m cooking off ingredients and filling up lunchboxes. I used to try to sell selected virtual meals that the DFS system has recipes for – trying for a balance between effort and complexity against yield and high “EP” (and sales value). I used to get decent sales 2 years ago, but that has fallen off in my absence. So I’m falling back on the high yield recipes to load up “lunchboxes,” which do command good prices.

Unfortunately, one of the “recipes” that uses up a lot of stuff efficiently requires ingredients that I can get if I have virtual animals, rather than spending $L for them. Le sigh.

But at least the animals I’ve decided to raise are realistic and there aren’t many of them. I’m selling off the “fantasy” animals that acquired a couple of years at various events. The only fantasy animals I’ve liked are these crazy purple Fantasy Faire pigs with sparkling magic wants in their mouths. Those I have a weird affection for.

I keep finding crap buried deep in my folders that will have to be packed up and set for sale, but I’ve got so much stuff rezzed out that I have to wait until more things are sold and taken away. I’ve concluded that the DFS community doesn’t like the linked Caspervend system; they like this other guy’s scripted vendor/inventory sorting system because they know exactly how many items are for sale. So today I took down the low-lag Caspervend vendors and laid out a bunch of rare things with high LI (land impact), and set them for sale individually, along with a number of other things in boxes.

Just hope somebody stops by and buys this week, I’m really short of prims.

On the other hand, my little new house is very cute and will be cuter once I have more prims to jam into it. I just wish I hadn’t boasted about it to my friend Cady, who then showed me her absolutely gorgeous home on a 1/8 sim. Ah well. I still like my little new house.

Cady’s comment was classic, after we settled on the porch, on a pretty bench made by the late Robin (Sojourner) Wood.

“So, this is the Mainland?”

Yes, yes it is.

I have a view of a weird Shinto shrine and an obelisk engraved with a tongue-in-cheek “Thou shalt not” commandment against setting out encroaching prims, but I’m on a road and badly placed prims mess with vehicle physics.

UPDATE: I’ve been cooking inventory down, have sold a bit more, bought a bit, and invested in a simple non-networked quantity vendor system. I’ve got some vendors at a rented stall that need some marketing announcements but now realize that the area I rented in isn’t getting much traffic. I rented there before when it was much busier; when the rent is up in 9 days, will try a busier location.

It gets the prims off my land, but I have a cunning plan; one of my alts will return to paid status as I have a little extra left on a prepaid gift card.

UPDATE II, 6 MONTHS LATER…

Dateline 10JUL25 – Tweddle

In an unsurprising and wholly predictable twist, Lelani  took 6 months off, but then her typist suffered a stroke and took an extra 2 months off, due to being unable to climb the stairs to her computer.

And now after a few days’ painful prim pushing, some of my collectible DFS hoard treasures have sold, and I’m gritting my teeth as I craft advertising announcements for the appropriate groups.

All the ingredients are now in vendors at a DFS-themed community market, to offload prims from my parcel, but they’re still handy for doing batch cooking (really, it’s game asset crafting).

I have 6 fields, keeping just the seeds for making booze or animal feed. Most of the tools are gone or to be boxed and sold. Any batch cooking to be done will be at the Reyes Community Kitchen and Market, this weekend.

The typist’s stroke means that  it’s painful and slow trying to do anything except using the mouse. I’d rather chat with my friends than spend hours making nonsensical virtual “food.”

A couple of weeks back, another Second Life-focused blog posted about how fun and fascinating virtual farming is. Well, it’s certainly addictive; not to mention expensive if you fall into the “special event collectibles” trap. I hope the other blogger doesn’t go that route.

This is the third time I’ve attempted to downsize – it is a fun challenge and I keep bargaining with myself that it’s okay to just keep one stove, two feed mills, 3 ovens, 4 mixing bowls, 5 mortar-and-pestles, 6 fields… all to make it easier to make virtual stuff.

It feels different this time – literally, my fingertips tingle painfully when using a keyboard, a great incentive to make it happen.

We’ll see, right?