It was a very long and busy day. I worked on the store all morning. Magi was working nearby and we chatted about the mall a couple times during the day. She is planning a grand opening Event, and I’ll coordinate my grand opening with her plan. Anyway, sometime during the afternoon, I realized that the store was in business. It happened when Mathew Deerhunter wandered in and purchase one of my sample pictures. I told him, his purchase was the first L$1 the gallery has earned and I’ll save it as a momento. Hehe. How do you save a linden, btw? I mean, what does a Linden look like, even? Oh my!

A short while later I placed a classified ad (check it out by querying Shopping with “asian style”). I learned a great deal about advertising from my ex, Morton. He’s an ad exec in RL and has done a lot of experimenting with ads here in SL. Once, we spent an afternoon brainstorming keywords for his race car ad. The experience paid off in conceptualizing keywords that would get my ad onto search pages where my L$68 ad can compete against the big ad spenders.

In the evening I had a brief chat with WT, although his RL household was in a state of high alert because a funnel cloud had set down only 1.5 mile away from his home only a short while earlier. Tornados are scarey as hell and I can imagine how he must have been feeling. I wished him well, but there is nothing you can do but hunker down when tornado conditions are overhead.

Then Sheri came over to see what I’ve done with the store and we had one of our lengthy conversations about life here in SL. We talked about role play and compared our experiences. I mean, she is clearly involved in role play as an officer in Starfleet, but I contend that I’m role playing as the proprietor of a store, and as an explorer, photographer, hostess. The idea is that when you start creating a life here in SL, regardless of how closely your real life personality matches that of your avie, this is all role play, and that is a revelation to me, sort of.

While hanging out at the store, Bronia tp’d in to take a look at what I had done. Her photo is one of the featured profile photos in the studio, and she got a kick out of that. After checking everything out, she advised that I should raise the prices I charge for photo shoots. The truth is I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an idea that has merit now that I renting and advertising.

Anwway, Bronie was very sleepy and poofed, then Sheri started showing me her vast new collection of skins. Wow, the skins have fantastic costume makeup and she showed me maybe ten skins. I was very tired and didn’t have the presence of mind to snap a photo of her, but I’ll testitfy that they were really charming. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get her to tell me where I could buy some. Sheri is also a very good photographer and is doing cool things with these lovely skins and her editing techniques. (I’ll see I she’ll let me post a photo here in the blog tommorrow.) We talked girl talk until it was very late and I was kaput and had to poof my way home and into my cozy RL bed.

P.S.: I don’t want to jinx it but the stock markets are doing much better this morning, so at least there is substantially less nervousness at this tradestation than there was on Friday.