Having a Party

I had a lovely time hanging out with My subby girlfriend j last night at her birthday party. Her friends held a cookout in the wooded area next to her apartment, then we adjourned to the complex's pool which just happened to be holding a big event open to all, then back to the apt for the evening.

It was great to meet her circle and in the process, one of them put his subby tendencies on display for Me to notice. Soon he was addressing Me properly and discretely fetching for Me. My neck was bothering Me a little in the evening so I sat with a nice heat pack on it while we were all in the living room and we discretely petted and flirted a little bit. Seems he is a sweet man and I rewarded him with contact info and a chaste kiss on the lips as we parted.

Today I woke up in multiple different kinds of pain. I guess thrashing around in the pool activated the chronic back condition and last night's neck discomfort was just the popcorn ad for today's main feature. (Oooo, popcorn! Nah, too much trouble.) Wow, it just wouldn't let up, all day long. Now I've watched enough TV and been on the smartphone so much My eyes hurt too. I have been napping all day so I'm not really even sleepy. The prospect of sitting a desk tomorrow and ugh, going to the dentist at lunch is soooooo unattractive.  It could be a long night.

My current boy t is flying back from IT nerdvana in Vegas at this very moment. It did cross My mind earlier to summon the new boy from last night to give Me some much needed massage. I bet he would even have been happy to come, since at one point he floated the idea of coming  over after the party last night, but...

...this is a bit of a rub for Me as a Dominant. Being in pain, feeling weak and vulnerable (which tends to travel with a certain amount of cranky) is when I most need service. But it's also when I most need to trust the other person. And it's when I'm least robust to manage a boy's hopes/ expectations, etc. It's when I'm most likely to agree to something I don't really want to do and I later wish I hadn't. When I'm in enough pain, it gets hard to hear My own thoughts through the static of the pain. When it's bad enough, I need the boy to know how to take care of Me without much direction, to help the headache and fuzzy thinking turn the corner. And I don't enjoy that process, much as on one level I want it; I don't like needing it that much. Putting that level of My own inner conflict into a new dynamic is potentially not great for moving forward successfully. So I'd rather be in pain than risk short circuiting a successful prospective dynamic.  It's silly on one level, I suppose, but wise on another. Or at least that's what I like to tell Myself.

*groans miserably*

Time for the nuke-able heating pad, Tiger balm and more pain killer.  I swear I'm putting a mini microwave upstairs one of these days. The downstairs kitchen is much too far away right now.

I Enjoy Being a Girl

Pussy smells so good today

I've been getting off 1-3x daily since last Thursday when the FedX man showed up on My doorstep with a delivery. It turned out to be a very Pleasant Surprise from boy t.  The boy had noticed on his recent visit that I seemed to want a hitachi magic wand and he heard Me say that I like very low frequency vibrations.

I often task My boys to provide a Pleasant Surprise or two. This is something I have learned in the last year or so that I really enjoy. Being Dominant means I generally know everything going on that concerns Me, and this tends to minimize opportunities for Me to be pleasantly surprised. Which is a shame because I *love* pleasant surprises.  So I started commanding them.  They consistently do a great job, sometimes making Me laugh (bacon soda, anyone?), often giving Me physical pleasure in the form of tastes and beauty and this time, orgasm.

boy t has been with Me long enough that he understands the importance of service through Pleasant Surprises, and he has apparently gotten comfortable with what, in the beginning, had felt to him like too much unilateral decision making.

So he sent Me a hitachi magic wand with an extra, external rheostat controller module, and I reeeeeeeeaallly like it.  I'm not getting off with it every time (I've been warned they can be addictive so am exercising due care), but I'm using it to manage My low-grade back/ neck injury, and yes, it has contributed to several big O's too.  The boy is thrilled to have pleased Me so successfully, and I have made sure to let him know how much pleasure he is giving Me despite the distance.  I even rewarded him last night with a phone call and commanded him to have a cum for Me, for the first time in three weeks, in real time, using his own hitachi at My command.

As many Women know, once you get to a certain level, the whole system kind of wakes up and becomes alert, expectant for further erotic stimulus. Watching a few orgasm themed TED talks in bed with the vibe helped too. And of course, it's simply progesterone surge time at My house, which is always fun.

So here I sit at work, having a quiet August work day, and I can feel that Pussy is plump, still warm and sweet and a bit juicy from this morning's cum. I close My office door half way and sit with legs widely spread, and do a light cupping, patting G motion over My clothed mons.  It feels nice and cooling and the pussy fragrance wafts readily.  It's such a shame not to have a fat, skilled cock to ride right now.  I'm 47 and I know the day is coming when these peaks of horniness will no longer happen every 4 weeks. I'm going to miss them, and I hate not taking full advantage of each peak still available to Me.  I wish I worked in the mythical FemDom office park that j and I like to fantasize about... So many Other Duties As Assigned.

I happen to know that some magic wand accessories are on their way and should arrive tomorrow.  I don't know for certain but I imagine there will be a G spot attachment and I'm dying of curiosity to try it. It's been a long time since I had a successful G spot toy, and I'm far more sexual now than I was back then.  How wonderful would it be if the hitachi G spotter could make Me really cum and squirt good at the same time? Two very different sensations but closely interrelated processes that I have wanted for a while now to make happen at the same time.  The play date with A last week got closer than any one has to date. I'd rather there be a nice chubby bio-cock in Me, and a nice sexy smelling male attached to it, but I still look forward to seeing what the hitachi can do.

Until then, I'll just spread My legs again on the desk chair, rock them back and forth a bit, and enjoy the warm puffs of pussy waft as they rise up.  And it's not just Pussy. My underarms smell great too, I want them licked. All of Me is in that place where I feel like a perfectly ripe peach, that wants to be pulled from the tree and consumed in that delightfully messy juice-running-down-your-cheeks-and-chin-and-arms sweet way. Plucked and slurped and replete.

Yesssssssss...

Like the song says: I Enjoy Being A Girl.

Jesus is the Mister

It has been a year since I first had a consult with a landscape designer, and decided I wasn’t willing to pay good money for a stranger to make Me a mere *paper plan* for my 400 square foot back yard.  I measured and drew and researched and consulted and hired a friend who predictably bailed, then drew some more and thought a whole lot and you know what?  A year later, I have concluded that while I’m capable of solving one side of this 800 square foot front yard/backyard Rubik’s cube,  solving the whole thing is just beyond Me.  There’s too many constraints in my tiny 15.5’ wide lot, too many trees and utilities and setbacks and codes and tradeoffs…  It doesn’t make sense to spend any money doing anything until I have an expert Integrated Master Front Yard and Back Yard Plan to work to.  If I don't flip for the plan, I'm going make an expensive mistake. May as well pay it now and spare Myself the pain. I'll be happier in the end.  Part of being a Master is knowing when You don't know what the fuck You're doing, and being willing to ask for help.

Back to the landscape designer, let’s call him Dave.

Dave is not to My knowledge into kink.  He’ll probably get an idea though if he goes upstairs to use the loo at some point. Part of Dave’s marketing pitch is that - if you want him to - he will design a yard that’s as quirky as you are.

Yeah.

 If kinky is anything like quirky,  I’m pretty quirky.  We should get along great.

So Dave wrote me a proposal for design services. I signed it which makes it a CONTRACT (*yikes*). And then I paid the 40% deposit. Dave hooked Me up with an arborist he often works with, and Adam the sky diving arborist who also does treehouses was out here in under a week.  This is already huge progress because I worked My way through Angies’ List last fall and could *not* get a single arborist to so much as return My calls and emails.  So a la Emeril… *BOOM*!!  We have answers to all the hard questions about the trees, and he didn’t even charge Me a consult fee, cuz of course I’m hiring Adam The Wonder Arborist to do what’s needed.  And frankly, it’s way cheaper than I was braced for.

Front Yard Cherry Tree:   Bad case of fire blight and a parallel case of gumosis (process of making gum, probably not as inconsequential as it sounds given that the tree appears to be exsanguinating.  Now I get the whole amber thing.).  Nothing to be done except wait and see if the tree can hang onto the few green leaves it has left until October.  If it holds tough (“it’s basically starving”), it should survive the winter, and we treat it in spring when it buds.  But OBTW, it will probably get a blight every time we have a wet spring, so with global warming and being near a flood plain and all, you’ll probably end up treating it most years.  In My mind, the cherry is a very nice Nice-To-Have.  But I might cut it down anyway, cuz I ain’t got the budget to baby two trees constantly. Keep reading, gardeners.

Front Yard Juniper:  ROCK STAR!  Scary and possibly fatal looking split in trunk has petrified and is healing over correctly. Good strong tree, no worries, just needs some trimming to stop it rubbing on the house.

Backyard Ash Tree:    OK, yes, sure, when you’re upstairs in the bedroom you can see a few brown leaves here and there and that’s some other unpronounceable kind of blight/ fungus action going on because of the wet spring.  But it’s not serious, at least not this year. Make sure to get rid of all the dead leaves in fall, instead of being all “oooo-free-mulch” like last year.  But oh, honey… you do indeed have Emerald Ash Borer.  There was about zero chance you wouldn’t have Emerald Ash Borer in your tree, since it’s epidemic right now and has killed about every ash tree in the adjoining county.  Note the patches of blonding on the bark on the undersides of the branches. Spread like wildfire it did.  But you’re lucky.  There’s not a ton of ashes around you, and it’s early on in the infestation process.  The tree can be saved, no question.  And since it’s only 14” in diameter, it’s not even stupid expensive, doesn’t need to be tented or anything.  But yes, you’ll be doing this every year.  Good news, however, is you will continue to have a lovely ash tree that hides the 15 or 20 ugly power lines, cable lines, phone lines, and other liney-lines that run all over the back yard and the alley.  You will continue to have a wonderful, serene, tree house like green canopy view out of your upstairs windows most of the year.  And brown vertical branches masking all those horizontal lines the rest of the time, which make it really pretty when it snows.

All in all, not bad.  Thank you, Adam the Wonder Arborist, who BTW, is really hot and I would totally let him climb into My canopy.  Just saying.

So tomorrow, Dave comes for the big visit in which he will Measure Everything and Describe Site Conditions, and so on.  It’s very exciting, this beginning of the Integrated Master Front Yard/Back Yard Plan, not terrifying at all. 

Ok, just a *little* terrifying, I mean,  it’s gonna be thousands, obviously.  I just don’t know how many thousands (bigger than a breadbox?) to actually implement whatever he comes up with, and we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about how I’m not made of money and we need to prioritize and work in phases and again, not made of money (did I mention that before?).  It’s just mind blowing how fast a home owner can spend five thousand dollars… furnaces, roofs, floods, lightning strikes… But really, I knew this needed to be done when I bought the place, it was factored into the purchase price and factored into the reno budget, back before I understood the reno budget was wildly optimistic despite My attempts to be extremely not-optimistic.  It’s not like it wasn’t TOTALLY OBVIOUS that the landscaping was well, there wasn’t anything like, decorative. And there was a lot of ugly, starting with the crooked, rusted chain link fencing, which the neighbor's flipper has since painted a nice shiny silver, but only on their side, with random silver drips and bleed through onto My side.  The yards simply weren't level in any direction, by a lot.  Pretty much the yards just fall off into the street or alley. Plus it also falls off sideways in the front.  And it back it’s more like a giant swale down the middle before tumbling into the alley.  And it also manages to slope toward the foundation everywhere, that’s very bad, I think we all can agree.  So it must be done. Fundamental, even remedial, improvements must be made and must not wait any longer.  I'm OK with that.  I've had a nice breather from projects, and had a little time to refill the renovation coffers, there's nothing to be gained by waiting any longer.

And hey, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to really go whole hog in the plan so I could, like, sit outside and not be eaten alive by the zika and west nile virus transmitting invisible asian tiger mosquitoes?  That’s a goal worth pursuing.

And yeah, that cherry tree.  I think it’s coming down.  Forget that it needs to be massaged and pampered like a Kobe beef.  It’s a reservoir of fungus and blight.  And I’m a vegetable gardener, who  immediately spotted after Adam The Wonder Arborist left, that My tomato plant under the cherry tree has the worst case of tomato blight.  And the tomato on the edge of the cherry canopy has a moderate case of tomato blight.  And the tomato upwind of the cherry and not under the canopy has zero tomato blight.  This *could* be a co-inky-dink, but I don’t think so.  And if it’s the tomatoes vs the ornamental cherries, the cherry gets it.

In the meanwhile, I will be out there with a spritzer bottle of neem oil, spritzing and misting My tomatoes, and promptly removing the affected leaves, much more religiously now that I understand they are under fungal paratrooper assault from above.  Spritzing and misting the naturally occurring turpentinoid compound in the neem oil to interfere with the fungal damage.

Often as I come and go around the neighborhood, I see a the white church van of a local, Spanish speaking evangelical church.  In giant letters, the van drives around proclaiming: 

JESUS EST EL SENOR!  

I speak enough Spanish and have enough religious education to correctly translate it as “Jesus is Lord”, and I find it interesting to notice that Senor apparently means “Lord” as in Lords and Ladies, which sounds very medieval to My ears.

But the part of My brain that doesn’t speak Spanish as a first language reads the van and hears:  “Jesus is the Mister”.  And it cracks Me up every time.  You’d think it would have stopped being funny after several years, but no, every time.  So I stand in My garden, misting the cherry-fungus-bombarded tomatoes with the Indian neem oil antifungicidal product and think, yeah, Jesus is the Mister.

Leave It To Beaver

My biggest takeaway from the week of having boy t as live-in houseboy was completely unexpected. It turns out that deep down, I am Ward Cleaver.  

It's been almost 20 years since the first time I joked that "I need a wife". As a heterosexual professional woman, that makes people chuckle, but I was never entirely kidding. I work hard in an environment that is more stressful than I enjoy. And My personal history is one characterized by feeling I have to go it alone. I've made a professional virtue out of My ability to step into chaos and Fix It, to bring various forms of chaos into a state of linearity and clarity and order. But the reality is, I don't actually *enjoy* chaotic environments. I like solving a puzzle, but it's an intellectual exercise. I enjoy serenity. I grew up in a deeply rural place, I spent a summer in the Alaska bush and never got bored or cabin fever, I love serenity.

So this week of having a houseboy is enlightening a big edge I hadn't fully mapped before. I have lived with a partner in the past, for several years, but this is the first time the co-habitant is serving Me exactly as I say I want to be served. Without any below-the-surface power struggle. And it's not just that "he is like this"...  in point of fact, he is not by disposition a neatnik. That makes his effort to create neatness for Me all the more of a service. 

I told boy t to plan out our meals for the week before he arrived, and I left that pretty open ended because he needs a rather specialized diet for medical reasons. I know he can cook and I know that the way he Must eat is the way I Should eat. So this is a win-win. I told him to plan our dinners around his needs and pre-prep them as appropriate. He arrived with two coolers and fed us very nicely all week. One night was pork belly that he marinaded in spices for ten days; the boy was not phoning it in. And from these dinners, he packs Me a lunch. No one has ever actually packed a lunch for Me before. I even have him texting Me a reminder to take it out of the fridge (since I'm so unaccustomed to this treatment) and a reminder to eat it, since I often get so busy at work that I forget to eat until mid afternoon when I start to feel grumpy.

Several days into our 24/7 experiment, I walked in to the house, having pre-ordered a cocktail to be ready for Me.  boy t was cooking, the table was set, the cocktail was immediately handed over. The house smelled great. The sofas were sittable and the throw pillows fluffed, the floor had been vacuumed, and I just knew the beds had been made. Laundry was humming. I walked in and felt inspired to announce, "Hi, honey, I'm home!" The boy has heard Me commenting about this Leave It To Beaver feeling this week, so he replied, "Welcome home, Ward" and I followed with, "Where's the Beaver?". I really felt in that moment that My house is My castle, My refuge, in a way I never have before.

I swear, if it were colder, I would have him fetch My fucking slippers too.

I *like* this. 

And I'm slightly appalled to find that deep down I'm such a fucking *patriarch* given half a chance. White male privilege of the 1950s flavour? Sure, I'll take some it. Give it up? Now, why the heck would I do that?   It’s… disconcerting… to feel I can so easily become exactly what I reacted against My entire life.  Heck, what My *mother* has reacted against.  Basically, I’m My white collar, Jr.VP Grandpa.

Growing up, about the worst thing you could say about a child in My world was that they were spoiled. My dad said it once about My cousin, and although he was much given to volume when upset, this was so awful, so unspeakable, that he dropped his voice, and whispered with deep regret… that she was… *spoiled*. I only faintly knew what that meant but I knew what happened to fruits and vegetables when they spoiled, and it was fucking fatal. No way, not in My family, was I ever going to be... *spoiled*.

And I fer damned sure wasn't. Nope, it was all rugged independence in My family. You got a problem, ya better figure it the fuck out by yourself cuz there's nobody gonna help ya. Being picked on and bullied? The Bible says turn the other cheek. The end. Even the Bible wasn't much interested in your problems where I grew up.  Good Calvinists are the original masochists.

So here I am, and I have finally made My way to a dynamic in which I have some very  nice help once in a while. In which some things upon My request magically Get Done, with no further effort in My part. And what do I feel?

Spoiled.

I mentioned the spoiled/entitlement cognitive dissonance thing to a very nice male Master at last week's MAST potluck while we were eating our hot dogs and watermelon and banana pudding.  He had no idea what I was talking about.  Then some other Female Masters chimed in that they could absolutely relate to My feelings. And he was like, "what could possibly be the problem allowing yourself to be served? I don't get it."  We all just sat there looking at each other for a moment, thinking Deep Thoughts.  Because of course, it's really very easy, unless you've been taught it's impossible.

So My emotional work lately has been figuring out how to turn spoiled into something constructive. We all have an idea of what we are entitled to and I've grown to the edge of Mine, gotta find a way to expand the horizon. So I have cognitively reframed "spoiled" into "supported". And it's sad to realize, frankly, that I felt so pervasively un-supported as a kid. My physical needs were met and My parents loved Me, but My subjective experience of childhood was a lot about feeling unsupported. That fact has been a tremendous driver behind My professional success, but it also has been a factor in the depression I had to grow through at one point, and it's certainly a factor in My dominance. The Jungian drive toward wholeness requires that I find and integrate such things, heal them, and it's being an eye opening, healing kind of week.

Hi, My name is Ward Cleaver and this is My lovely wife… his name is boy t.

Notes from the Wild

All went very well on boy t's weeklong visit to TSPD's better home, garden, and dungeon. Here are a few snapshots from along the path:

1. I ate like a queen, thanks to the boy's excellent cooking, which he did at home and transported down for fast finishes. First night was crab cakes finished off with a heavy brown on the stove, and quinoa. Second night was cherry pomegranate braised spare ribs that he finished on the stove, with a sauced mix of vegetables and quinoa on the side. The boy packed lunch for Me each day, which was a most unusual experience and I really liked it. I also had him text Me to remind Me before I left the house to check the fridge, so the lunch actually made it to work.  So good and so much healthier than My norm, so many more veggies,  It was a bit of shock for the tummy to adjust, but in a good way, and very useful to have the contrasting reference point.

2. We hit a little trauma bubble from the boy's past, triggered when I made him sit still so I could slip a Qtip in his ear. The energy shift was immediate and very noticeable, so we had a good hour of processing, and now I know some additional important things about his past. he feared knowing these things would make Me like and want him less; it was challenging to grasp the fact he's wrong about that.

3. I had a nice body massage more than one night after the yummy dinner. While he was deeply massaging My ass (cuz who doesn't love a good butt rub?) I sensed his energy shift and for once, he hesitated to tell Me what was running through his mind. When the truth came out, it was that his top/sadistic vein had come to the surface when he realized he could hurt Me with this deep massage. he got confused and locked up for a minute. I invoked the transparency rule, he told Me what was in his mind, and he came away understanding he isn't required to suppress such thoughts, he's just not allowed to act on them, at least with Me.

4. Getting him to the office was initially a bit of a challenge but Uber pool in the morning worked great, the first few nights he met Me at the office to ride home. Later in the week, he ubered home and got a jump on dinner before I arrived.  I feel bad for the uber drivers, but it was great for Me.

5. I told him to think of activities as a "toggle", i.e., identify a resting state, and make sure that when he alters that state, he returns it to the resting mode. A door opened must be closed. A light turned on must be shut off. A garment dropped must be picked up and put away, etc. Having never parented in any way, or even had a housepet like a dog to train, this part of the training is proving a challenge for Me. We have also noticed that he tends to process commands on a FIFO basis, and that doesn't always mesh with what's happening big picture, so I am now flagging a command when it is "critical path," so he has a clearer sense how to prioritize. Yes, we are project management nerds.

6. The boy needs to leave for work before I do, so he is presenting to have the collar removed while I am still in bed, and of course he can't make the bed while I'm in it. This meant the collar was still in the unmade bed when we returned from work the first night. he has standing orders to make the bed any time it is unmade, as a first order of business, so this turned into a game of Me hiding the collar somewhere in/on/under/around the bed. Once found, he knelt to receive it. It proved to be a fun little thing for us.

7. The only slight negative was that I normally lead a fairly solitary home life, and after a week of 24/7, I was feeling the absence the alone time. I did send him out on Sunday to toil for about two hours in the yard, building Me shelves while I took a nap. So perhaps more soup-to-nuts projects is a partial solution. I also recognize the need to resist micromanaging. The boy astutely observed that by time we get home, he has had a hour to decompress but I don't begin until the rush hour drive is done. he can't read read the nuance of hangry vs office grumps, but by the time I get out of the car they are pretty intertwined.  That tends to be the prime point at which I most need solitude, and I figured that out pretty quickly.  I have *heard* married friends talk about this thing, of coming in the front door, and being confronted with a partner who wants to chat when all they want to do is be silent. Now I know what they are talking about, and I count Myself lucky to have heard others figure it out before Me, really speeds up the process.

8. We took a big plunge after careful prior discussion, and opened the theoretical poly door into reality. I had him quantify the risk of a flip out, and he gauged it a low risk of moderately intense flip. We both agreed that this is an important facet of the relationship and there is value in beginning as we mean to go on.  So when a play date became possible on 24 hours notice, with a playdate I like very much but seldom see,  I sent the boy to the laudromat and I played. And all was happy and compersiony until about 24 hours later. At that point a collision happened between what the boy wants to believe he’s OK with in terms of orgasm denial vs. what he actually is currently OK with. So more processing happened and it was indeed moderately bumpy for both of us for a bit, but we got it worked out, all systems go again. And it was a good learning experience for us both.

Oooop! Dinner is already served.

boy t - Inbound

Boy t arrives tomorrow for an eight day visit. he is working out of the corporate branch in My area and this will give us the opportunity to grow the dynamic from something we do for a long weekend or a conference event into something more... Regular. Regulated. Quotidian. Dare I say... Normal. Or at least normalized. It's not guaranteed to be a success. But we both look forward to having morning, evening, and arrival/ departure rituals, and then developing variants of them that work long distance when we are apart.

Remotely, I want a good morning text and a good night text that affirms for Me that daily tasks were completed, with a photo as appropriate. I need a status update on all open tasks every 3 days. Beyond that, it will have to be organic and this week will be a lot of finding out what that means for both of us, what we need. I know already he wants more of certain kinds of invasive controls, which I will tolerate at low levels but fundamentally, these are not My kink, not at the moment, not enough to work at them long distance. The rubber is going to hit the road in those areas, and I suspect we will be re-reading parts of Raven Kaldera's Building The Team book. 

But we will also have the pleasure of each other's company; he will have the joy of serving and I will have the joy of being served. We both have been through enough in kink to appreciate having our counterpart, being in the dynamic. Where it goes, what it wants to be beyond this is still terra incognita. That's ok. It's still early days.

I am working on a list of tasks and projects and implementation critical paths; a list to prompt Me about the fun things I want to do and try, with and to him; a list of the topics we need to discuss face to face; a list of the core themes I want to be sure I'm reinforcing across the big arc of all our interactions. We have a purple journal that he gifted Me. I will review the journal to see how it has grown with the additions an have commanded, and I will likely add new topic pages. We will settle on the format of how he will efficiently track tasks and give Me updates with minimal duplication in effort.  It hasn't come up yet but I fear the phrase "One Note".

We will not ride a bike.

Yet.

I'm guessing the big challenge will be shifting head space. The boy had a crazy, crazy week and I felt him slipping into a more distant orbit. It can happen to Me too. This is the hard work of M/s, continually pulling ourselves back to where we want to be, creating the tools for that to happen, dealing with the slings and arrows of life. Especially when hungry and tired.  And making time to blog, while still sleeping and self-caring and hey, I might need to be respectfully reminded to have some fun too.

This week,  we take another very big step toward finding out how much of this is real, and where we are stuck in fantasy. I think we are in good shape. I marvel often at how well this entire dynamic is working. I fully expected camp together would be a hot mess (as prior attempts with others have been) and instead it was delightful, exactly as I would have hoped, had I dared to verbalize it.  So I have to consider that this is more about My fears than about t's actual limitations. Projection is real. But I also know most people - Me included - engage in a fair amount of self-deception, and those are the hard cases.

At the end of the day though, I like boy t, there's just no getting around the fact of it. I enjoy his presence, his energy. When he is here, I grow because I have not had an /s in My home for any length of time who could keep up with Me, who needed Me to be the Master like he does. Who relies on Me as Master.  I'm finding out who I am. I'm confronting the gap between who I like to think I am as a Master (patient! organized! wise! big picture!)  and who I actually am in front of My /s (nap-ish, hangry, perfectionistic, testy).  We are right at six months since we met, the masks are starting to come off, it's starting to get real. It's exciting. It's very good.

And I fully intend to enjoy it.

Pennies from Heaven

Yesterday, I was aware of having had a grumpy bad day, much like the worst day of my post-camp event drop.  And I recognized it was probably somehow connected to a little residue of grief; I've been thinking and writing about ethan a lot the last few days. I even pulled up his memorial Facebook page and wrote a post, saying that I now feel gratitude in the places where sadness sat, and hope others who visit the page do too.  It's gotten a few hits in the last week, around the anniversary, as this stuff comes up for everyone.

At some point not long afterward, I was sitting on the commode doing my business, when the bathroom door began making a classic, cliche, horror movie kind of slow squeak noise, for no apparent reason and without seeming to even move. I've been in the house two and a half years and this hasn't happened before. After a few moments, it started to creep me out just a little, and without thinking what would come out of my mouth, I found myself half seriously saying aloud to the room: "Hey, Ethan, if you want to say hello, I'd rather you leave me some money on the ground."  Then afterward I thought, ach, I should have specified *paper* money. I left the bathroom and forgot about it.

When departed for work this morning, the car was a half block away and I walked - not down the sidewalk like usual - but for whatever reason, I walked down the middle of the street. It's a dead end, but I never walk down the center of it like I did today. I was thinking of nothing in particular, when I noticed two bright quarters shining up at me about 12" apart, sparkling as the morning sun hit them... there in the middle of the road... where I never am... where presumably there aren't normally lots of people walking and dropping things.  

I remembered the squeaking door and my request for money on the ground; noticed that the very first time I left the house after the request, I did indeed find money on the ground. And I thought, yeah I should have asked for green paper money on the ground. I even looked around to see if I might get lucky, wondering/ hoping if whoever dropped the coins had maybe also dropped a $20 or a $50. But I didn't see anything green fluttering anywhere at foot level, so I walked on. As I approached my car, I noticed something as I approached the front, driver side wheel. It was green and flat and rectangular and... papery. About the size of money.  Leaning down to pick it up, I found it was some sort of very thin fabric patch, green camo. About the size of a bill. It was worn enough that as I peeled it up off the pavement, it felt like pulling off a piece of substantial paper that had been wet and dried stuck to something. And I noticed that I'd gotten the second request, for something green and papery on the ground. But this was camo. And *that* had to be a joke. Because Ethan was huge camo kind of guy, he even had a collection of camo Army trucks. He wore camo clothes a lot too. I rode to his memorial service in a camo Army truck one of his friends drove to honor him. I've never ridden in anything else camo. Camo and Ethan have always gone together.

In that moment, my first thought was, "that little brat is actually fucking with me". It made me smile. I stopped, holding the green papery patch folded in my hand, carrying the two new quarters in my pocket, and said to the morning air, "Hi, Ethan! Thank you!" and went on my way feeling comforted, feeling that he can see me sometimes.  Feeling that he may be gone but somehow is not completely absent.

It has happened before.