Two weeks ago, I was checking my email when suddenly there was a flood of messages from Second Life coming in:

Your object “……’ has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Kip Yellowjacket …

Normally, I would have been alarmed and thought something must have happened but I only felt a strange kind of sadness because I knew what was happening. I was surprised by this feeling…

Like many other teachers, I was lucky to have met Kip Yellowjacket, the owner of Virtlantis, early in my Second Life. He not only gave me my first Linden dollars but also a place I could call home. Well, he called these plots “launchrooms”, which teachers could use as a meeting point with their students and “launch” from their to other destinations in SL.

I was so happy to have a place that I could decorate like I wanted and invite friends, colleagues and students to, that I spent long hours to make it look nice. At that time, I didn’t know about prims and that there is a limit of how many one could use on an island … 🙂

But that was not the end of Kip’s generosity. Some time later, he started building houses on Virtlantis and he gave these away for free, too. I was lucky enough to get one. It was called Casablanca and I loved it from the first moment. It was huge, had two large rooms and in the middle a garden. It also had two porches. Once again, I started decorating and Kip helped me with positioning the furniture.

One day, I was preparing for a lesson which would partly take place in my home. When I logged in half an hour before the lesson, I was in for a shock. My house had been vandalized!

It was the first time that I had experienced something negative in Second Life and strangely enough it felt real to some degree. Unfortunately, it happened two more times and I decided to move to another house on Virtlantis.

This one was smaller but cozy and to make up for all the annoyance I had a sea view now 🙂

This time, I hung up some pictures from my real life home, which I uploaded and even had a copy of my real life praying rug. In the front garden, I had planted daffodils, which Dennis, a dear friend, had given me as a gift.

I’m really sorry now that I didn’t take more pictures of it but I had been very busy. So much so, that I even didn’t log into SL for days and if I did I mostly teleported to some other place for a lesson or meeting.

At the end of last year, I rented a plot on EduNation for a teacher training course I would be giving. So, this became my temporary second home for some weeks.

Then, I had to make a decision. I was busy with my Master’s, which I had recently started. Then, several SL projects were coming up, which would all take place in different locations. I knew I wouldn’t have time to be in my home … Funny enough, this wasn’t an easy decision but I made up my mind and wrote to Kip telling him I would give up my home. I took my personal belongings back into my inventory, had a last look and teleported away. I also gave up my home on EduNation.

Sometime later, these messages started coming in…

Your object “……’ has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Kip Yellowjacket …

Your object “……’ has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Kip Yellowjacket …

…

Kip was sending me the furniture (one more act of generosity) … he was finally taking apart my home… I was staring at my computer screen and thinking:

“You are homeless in SL now.”

I didn’t think it would make me feel sad. It’s just a computer server somewhere and some pixels, right? Well, obviously it wasn’t. Second Life is a place. It’s a place where I work, meet friends and go to places. So, having a home is an important part of (second) life.

Many thanks to Pamela Arraras, whose blog post about “The importance of having a home” inspired me to finish mine.