First off, some history: Fatima and I met when I was new to SL and we pretty much hit it off straight from the start. It took us a while to get together, but once we had we bought a fair sized waterside plot on the mainland and Fatima started on building our new home. That became known as Spirals Castle and was, I think, a labour of love on her part - it's a bit of a leap from pools and small waterfalls to a whole castle, but Fatima did an amazing job. I of course had almost no building skills whatsoever - and certainly hadn't discovered the joys of texture buying....

Experienced SLers know that there is a continuing and often acrimonious debate about the merits of holding land in SL - mainland vs. private estates. On the one hand, owning a piece of mainland is pretty secure - you're paying tier to Linden Lab (as do we all), but you're subject to the whims, banlines and texture overload of your neighbours; estates tend to be themed and if responsibly run can be a great place to live, if a little more expensive than mainland. A problem sometimes arises when a tenant either gets into a dispute with the estate owner, or is just banned outright with no recompense; sadly this does happen; but Fatima and I are determined no-one will ever have to lay that charge at our door!

Anyway.... after a month or so in our mainland plot, we noticed that it had pretty much filled up and we were suffering from the dreaded lag ... too many art galleries and the texture overload that brings. And one resident decided to position his tree house right outside our window! So I determined it was time to move on yet again - although I kept it a secret from Fatima hehehe - I did tease her unmercifully about a 'present' that was on its way and drove her into a mini-frenzy lol!

That 'present' was our very first island, Fatima's Love - and I took an enormous amount of pleasure in tp'ing Fatima over to the new island when it had been delivered - I even wiped the destination in the Teleport Offer box so she wouldn't know where she was going... and of course, the moment she arrived I crashed, so I never did get to hear her "OMG!!!!!" - I think to be honest it was her screams that crashed me.....