I had an amazingly nice weekend. I love my whirlwind social life, but it’s very nice to get to spend relaxed time alone with Monk. Sunday I slept late  – yay – and then Monk and I went to Banya 5. This is so the weather for hot tubs and steam rooms. I swear I could feel all the molecules in my body, which had sort of shrunk down lately with dry cold, get all warm and lubricated and say, “Ahhh….”

And I booked both of us a salt scrub. Now, a salt scrub, if you haven’t had one, is one of life’s great pleasure/pain experiences. It is just what it sounds like: they put you on something like a massage table, take handfuls of coarse sea salt, and scrub your body with it. It exfoliates all the dead skin off you. My general experience with spa scrubs is that the first so-many strokes feel good, and then it starts to be a little intense, and then right before you’re about to say, “Whoa, ease up a little,” the scrubber moves to a different part of your body. Sort of like being taken right up to your safeword, over and over.

At most spas it’s done like this: you lay under a drape, they scrub one small area at a time, wipe all the salt off, and then cover it up again. Very chaste and discreet.

This one was different because of the setup: the whole room is a wet room, all tile and concrete, with a drain in the floor, and lots of hoses and buckets around. The girl giving me the scrub offered me the option of drape or no drape, and I chose none, of course. I took off my swimsuit and lay down naked on the black vinyl-covered table. (It looks a lot like the table I have in my dungeon, actually.)

She tied on a black rubber apron and started off by pouring buckets of warm water all over me. Big buckets. It’s interesting to lie on a table and get totally drenched like that, and just see and hear the water going everywhere.

Then she rubbed me down with some honey-something-or-other mixture, just kinda slopping it anywhere in a charming fashion, and then poured more water over me to rinse me. And then she scrubbed me - very thoroughly. I think I’m now an eighth of an inch smaller in circumference, she scrubbed me so hard. Yow. But my skin is all soft and gleam-y, like a pearl.

So while there was nothing whatsoever sexual about this treatment, I did look around the room – and around the whole spa in general – and think about what kind of wet room I’d like to build into my house. I don’t do scat scenes, so I don’t need such a room for that. But I do other wet, messy things, and plus, tiles and hoses can just be very sexy all by themselves. I want to do some remodeling on the house this year, and while I don’t know for sure if a big bathroom redesign is in the cards, it’s definitely something I want to get some bids on. I’m a big fan of warm and lubricated.