Bambi in Halogen

There I was at my annual physical the other day… 

          chat-chat;  *poke!*; “AAAaaahh!”; chat;  *poke!*; "breeEEeaaathe!”;  *tap, tap, prod!*…

                   “So... how did you get that bruise on your breast?”

*freeze*

Are you flipping kidding me?

Eight intense years of happy painslutitude with nary a question but now… 

          …a few meager days into what is a very slow, very tentative, still-not-entirely-convinced exploration of the maybe possibility of resuming play… 

          …after what was really nothing more than a low-key make-out session…

                    NOW I get bruise-busted?!? 

Pointless to deny reality though, so I went with "disarming with the truth" (and a grin.)

          “He squeezed hard.”

She laughed, thank god.

I did more deep breathing (for myself this time,) then went home and grumble-texted at him.

“Did she at least ask if you enjoyed it?”

“No, that’s your question, not hers.”

The Christmas Miracle

(Besides the part where I made it all the way up the icy mountain, that is…)

I heard from BG.

         Yeah.

I had the first...
No bets being taken on the second.

Happy New Year, All!

In Which I Add to My Shopping List

An email arrived: “I've sent two packages to you, one will arrive on in a couple of days, the other is due next week. These are your Christmas presents - - No Peeking!!”

Teasingly, I replied, “How about shaking, then?”

“The one that arrives next week, sure. Go to town shaking that one - but not so much the first.”

A couple of days later, I arrived home in the gloom of a unlit December evening. I stepped up onto the porch riser… and promptly tripped over an unexpected foreign object, falling headfirst through the screen door onto the porch -- while said foreign object clattered from between my feet to bounce off the step and roll down onto the sidewalk.

“Ah… That would be the present I’m not supposed to shake.”

I’ll be stocking up on glue between now and Christmas, I think…

In Which Siri Is Not My Friend

Tiny Woman and I had arranged an outing and I’d been meaning to confirm with her all day - but I am swamped in the summers and had no time. So, I took a chance while driving home and tried using Siri to email her. I pressed the home button, settled my very new phone on my lap, and proceeded to address my thigh:

          “Siri, email Fiji”  (Tiny Woman’s nickname)

                  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

          “Siri, email Fiji”  

                  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

          “Email Fiji” 

             Mail opened, at least. (yay!)

               But then…

                  “I’m sorry, I cannot find that name.”

Hmmm.... OK, I haven’t proofed all my contacts yet.

Well, Mail is open anyhow... maybe her recipient name…?

(enunciating carefully:)

          “Fiji... Hall” 

                  “Got it!  Calling BG…”

NOOOOOOOO!!!

I pretty much drove off the side of the road as I fumbled to "Cancel-Cancel-CAAANCELLLL!"

And then sat there for a few minutes, panting, while the adrenaline rush subsided.

My first thought was, “Yikes! That was close!”

But then, right on its heels, came, “Maybe he’ll see that I called, and ….”

*sigh*

There is no idiot like a congenital one...

This, on a T-shirt, please.
Actually, six -- size large.
Thank you.

Circles Of Grammatical Hell, #4

I was instructing someone on how to use a particular website.

I said, “Now click on the ellipsis in the upper right corner.”

The person -- with the PhD -- replied, 

       “Huh? Speak English, I don’t know these fancy computer terms!”

***************************************************************

       ellipsis : a sign (such as …) used in printed text to show that words have been left out

Latin, from Greek elleipsis

First Known Use: 1540

(emphasis mine)

***************************************************************

Sometimes I despair...

In Which I Kill A Conversation

I was bent over a finicky installation, chatting with my coworkers but focused on my task.

One of them complained that they'd stayed up longer than they'd meant to the night before, watching the game. The other one had gotten caught up in Real Housewives.

Absently, I pitched in, "Yeah, I got hooked into a show last night, too -- a documentary about these paleo-archaeologists who were spelunking this deep cave in order to dig up the bones of what might be a new species of hominid... I couldn't go to bed until I knew the outcome!"

And the room fell into complete silence...

*dammit!*

I hate when I do that.

I Make Myself Dizzy

So there I am, drafting out a heart-felt post about how we really need to let go of these stupid body-image-induced fears:

***************************

Sure, different guys like different body types. Maybe he will think you are too heavy/thin/lopsided/proportional for him.

But here's a clue:

Clothes really don't hide that much.

They provide the illusion of disguise, of course, but remember, guys have that "X-ray Imagination" gene. If he's seen you, he's already formed a pretty decent idea about what you look like naked. Spent a lot of time on it, even.

So if he's pursuing you, drop the fear, cuz he's interested. 

He's not going to react to you taking off your clothes as though you've suddenly been revealed as one of those hairless farting aliens from Dr. Who.

Instead, the hands are going to come out and the groping will commence -- with fervor...

Because sex is not about your body, it's about what you do with your body. Or even better, what you let him do with your body.

***************************

And while I'm composing that draft?

I'm surfing tumblr and catch myself thinking, "shit, I really want to apologize to BG for not looking like these women…"

WHERE IS MY BRAIN??????

(if seen, please send it home. I have a hard enough time with it -- without it, there's practically no hope at all…)

I Wanna Complain...

Dear Victoria's Secret,

We go back a long way, you and I -- which means you already know quite a lot about me...
That I am 53 years old, fairly tall, excessively fleshed, and with boobs that are sufficiently ample that even you don't offer a lot of bras that will contain them.

Now, you have earned my undying gratitude for carrying pants with 36" inseams.
Much, much love to you for that.
However, could you please stop with the swimsuit spam?!?

Alluringly presented or not, I'm NOT going to be buying one of these puppies. Women of my age and build have no business wearing bikinis. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's expressly forbidden in my beach's Rules of Membership.

You have 20 years of purchasing history on me -- NONE of which contains swimwear.
May I please request that you reevaluate the algorithms for analyzing your market demographics?

Thank you.
An Otherwise Satisfied and Loyal Customer

p.s. The UPS guy thanks you, too.  :-)

face_palm

Since I completely dropped the ball for SP's birthday this year (I usually try to write him a story) his belated present was an audio clip of me reading this, instead.

His response made me smile -- until the closing sentence....
"Incredibly perfect. Worlds of erotica open on that simple "yes" the way she says it several times. ... Would you do the soliloquy of Molly Bloom for me?"

Now, I have managed to dodge the literary bullet of James Joyce thus far and I am frankly not in any hurry to correct that omission. (Yes, yes, I know... he's brilliant, I'm a cretin -- none the less, the fact remains...)

So, I had to google it.
In case you're as unfamiliar as I was, Molly's soliloquy (per Wikipedia,) "consists of eight enormous "sentences." The concluding period following the final words of her reverie is one of only two punctuation marks in the chapter, the periods at the end of the fourth and eighth "sentences." [At the time it was] written this episode contained the longest "sentence" in English literature, 4,391 words."

Say What?????

So, I looked it up. 
It's stunning, it's beautiful, it's erotic, ... it's twenty-four thousand, two hundred and thirteen frickin' words long -- with only two punctuation marks and seven line breaks to aid the reader!
Can you say, "mind-numbingly daunting"?
I'm not sure how you successfully read it, much less orate it...

So of course, at this point I laughed and shot SP an email. "I thought you were serious but you are yanking my chain, rotten man!"

He's not.
At all.
In fact, I think he's already counting the days until his next birthday.

Note to self:  Sometimes, it's really better to just remain ignorant...

In Which I Demoralize The UPS Man

In my defense, it was purely unintentional.

Victoria's Secret happens to be one of the very few places that sells slacks with 36" inseams. And they were having a sale. So, naturally, I struck while the iron was hot -- then promptly forgot all about it.

Days later, I was working outside, looking just about as dreadful as it's possible for me to look. As I rarely bathe *before* doing heavy yard work, I was unwashed, lank-haired, wearing ancient, oversized men's clothing and smeared with mud, grass, and mulch.
But, you know, you tend to forget about details like that when you're losing yourself in satisfying labor. So I greeted the approaching UPS man with an unselfconsciously cheery, "Ooo! Something for ME?!?"

We both looked down at the package in his hand.
I knew it was a pair of slacks.
He just saw a Victoria's Secret envelope...

He looked at me. He looked at the package.
Me. The package.
Me....

His cheeks flushed, his jaw worked, his lips struggled to form words.
I heard the distant shattering of a hundred thousand fantasies as they crashed about his youthful head.

Finally, he found his voice.
"Here."

He stuck out his arm and waited for me to take my package.
He turned and trudged back to his truck, morose and looking, well, smaller, somehow.

He's going to be a mess by the time I finish my Christmas shopping...

ISO Slutwear

True Confessions Time.
I used to be a lingerie slut. I had the figure, I had the money, Victoria's Secret was my best friend. It was a golden time of fun, frolic, and frilly things.

Then I dated a guy who could not care less about lingerie. Although when the kink was on him, he did like pantyhose. Not stockings, nothing pretty or lacy or sexy. Just garden-variety L'eggs. I'm not even entirely convinced I needed to be in them. I think I could probably just have handed him a wadded-up handful of nylon and gone off to clean the refrigerator and both of us would have been just as satisfied. (Or possibly more so.)

As a result, lingeretic apathy set in.
Then economic straits were encountered.
Between the two, I drifted waaaay off the frippery highway.

The good news is that I have been edging my way into traffic again since dating BG - but I'm still not quite back in the swing of things. The intervening years wrought changes and I haven't yet regained the keen sense of what flatters that I once had. Victoria's Secret is no longer a sure thing for me, nor is it quite the right price point anymore, either.

But that's OK. I have located other resources and my Sexy Undies drawer is filling a-pace. My troubles come with the, um, less elegant requirements, shall we say?

"Think fetish wear," he grins.
"OK. Type? Kind? Fabric? Pictures of examples...?"
"I like it all. Surprise me. Just wear it with heels."

Now, the shoe shopping, I'm all over.
Really. Trust me on that.

But I'm really having trouble locating Budget Fetishwear For The Tall, Zaftig-But-Not-Womens-Sized, No-Longer-20-Years-Old Gal Who Doesn't Know What She Wants Except That She Isn't Keen On Polyester Or Any Fabric That Melts In Heat.

Even cutting and pasting that into Google didn't help.

So I turn to you, dear readers. Any good pointers to be had out there?