Today in Second Life, Ravie + I rode on a dinosaur. He was not belligerent. I'm a longtime fan of dinos, dating back to when I was a wee tot, and I owned a book by Dougal Dixon with so many lush pages of these amazing creatures.

A lot of my past has come back to me through SL; sometimes I muse that SL's like one giant arts + crafts fair, with so much to see and do. I've been able to recover feelings I haven't felt in a long time, tied to early awakenings and other such self-discoveries.

Curiously, searching for Flickr groups and sorting by size reveals only one reasonably large dino group. Perhaps this is because it's presently difficult to take a picture of one or more in the wild.

As a child, I visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum on every trip I made to Alberta with relatives. I haven't been there in well over a decade, but I have many fond memories of looking at the meticulously-arranged exhibits, and remembering how odd the models in the Ice Age area displayed smelled. On the trip back, I once bought an ammonite for Cdn$10 and had it verified at a local museum that it was real. Sadly, due to my rough playing with it, I snapped off some pieces of it. I tucked it away in a small drawer (part of one of those carpenter's assistants with all the compartments that hold nails and screws) and nary played with it again.

In the present, I find myself joyed to spend time with my beloved. It turns out she was looking for this place too, called Dinosaur Park (Arctic Penguin's blog post), so it was likely more than a happy coincidence that I wanted to show her.

It's a veritable shame that the movie version of A Sound of Thunder turned out to be such a heinous heap of fossilized dung, because I dig good time travel movies, and it was most certainly not. Shame on those responsible for making Ray Bradbury roll in his grave as if it were being gallivanted over by a stegosaurus stampede!

Anyhoo, I digress. I enjoy the peace + serenity being on an alt account gives me because I can have the best of both worlds. As you may've noticed, I haven't done all that much inworld exploring lately, and I want to change this, but it may have to be done under quieter fare. I'm convinced a number of elements will eventually come together, the return of First Look: WindLight will motivate me to send more postcards, and there'll be many more good, better, best times ahead.

This, like the Cretaceous, is but a period in history which will give way to new life — in Second Life!