Yikes! I'm deep in the usual about-to-leave-town, have-a-million-things-to-do panic. But as promised, my advice to those concerned about the recent fake-sex-ad issue on Craig's List. Dan Savage also addresses the incident in his column, and I agree with his take on it.

Bye!

I came home last night after kissing Roman goodbye for a few days – due to our jam-packed schedule for the next week, we won’t have another real date until Thursday the 28^th, so we had to get a lot of kissing (and other things) in before that separation. I mean, we’ll see each other at Folsom, but he’s there to have face time with some of his major customers, and sell rope/perform at the street fair. It’ll be a mad swirl of activity, so we’ll have some stolen smooches, but we’re not counting on a lot more than that. However, as Max and I noticed while he was away on his trip, sometimes missing the one you love can be a sweet thing, when you know it won't be for too-too long.

Since I’m on the subject of relationships, perhaps I should give you an update on the various people in my world. There’s a sweet young thing, often to be found in my house lately, who we will call Puck. (Yes, as in Shakespeare’s Puck.) She’s wearing Max’s collar. She survived what sounded like a fairly eventful road-trip with Max and she still seems to like him, so that’s good. And she’s going down to Folsom with him. Just in case you were wondering what kinky people do for fun on a chilly Tuesday night: yesterday she and Max took part in a rubber-duck race. That’s not a typo. In celebration of Puck’s birthday, a number of people went to the new flowing fountain at Cal Anderson Park with those yellow plastic rubber ducks and raced them. While I’m told competition was brutal, it’s unclear to me who won. However, when I came home from my date with Roman, I found a souvenir on my keyboard.

Looks perfectly appropriate for “Talk Like a Pirate” day.

I have been asked about Xavier. Yes, he’s a real person, and yes, he’s a lot of fun. I’m not being deliberately mysterious about him, it’s simply that unlike Max and Roman, Xavier has not expressed any interest in being written about, and he has no public persona in the BDSM community that I can reference. What I can say about him is that he played me the song “Brand New Key”, as covered by an artist named RobinElla, and now it is totally stuck in my head.

Rope. Rubber duckies. Rollerskates. So goeth the days and nights of a professional dominatrix.

Example #437 of how I have the coolest clients in the world: In response to my angsty post about buggy OS reinstalls and missing drivers, the sweet guy who actually gave me the otherwise-fabulous laptop to begin with (whom I am hereby dubbing Jet because I hate doing the one-initial thing), called me yesterday, made arrangements to meet me in a coffee shop, and spent an hour and half of his not-very-abundant time fixing my machine. I’m very happy now. Yes, I could have paid someone to do it, and given a lot of time and patience I might have been able to puzzle it out myself, but I’m extremely grateful to Jet for taking the trouble. My guys are so good to me.

Other client events: I also met with a new client yesterday, who was so extremely nervous that he was sweating and visibly trembling. I mean – this was happening while he was just sitting in the living room talking to me. I was concerned that he had some medical condition I would need to be careful of, so I asked him and he told me, no, he was just nervous. It was sort of endearing, although when someone is that nervous, it’s hard for me to tell if the scene is working for them. I have a number of ways of measuring enthusiasm and overall happiness with the scene – facial expression, body language, tone of voice, and, ahem, other physical indications… Someone who walks into the room in a highly nervous state skews all those cues. So one has to just take them on faith. Fortunately it was not a physically intense scene – mainly foot worship, which happens to be one of my favorites. He was very sweet guy and I hope we meet again.

Very Good Thing In My Life:

Max is home from his trip! Yay! My sweetheart is back! We get to spend 4 days together and then he leaves Friday for Folsom, and I leave the day afterwards.

A Not-So-Good Thing:

My laptop is acting up. Basically, I could not reliably connect to the web, and I thought it was a software conflict issue, so I re-installed the OS from the boot disk. That didn't go very smoothly, though - I got a lot of messages about how it couldn't find various files. I went on with the install anyway, and it boots up and everything, but now the ethernet light isn't showing green and I cannot get an internet connection at all. Arg.

I’m leaving town Saturday and this needs to be resolved by then. Anyone have a laptop repair place they like close to Capitol Hill?

Edited to add: The other good thing? I just realized - there's an H&M in San Francisco now! w00t! I am so there.