Made a big pot of chili today, and have spent the evening (I’m not done yet) spring-cleaning my fish tank. I’m doing a really thorough job too, scrubbing every piece of gravel with a little tiny brush.

Just kidding. *grin* It is heavily infested with hairlike green algae though, and since my fish won’t eat the stuff I must make some effort to control it myself or else it’ll choke out everything else in the tank. It’s a 55gal freshwater tank, with a bunch of plants I can’t at this moment remember the names of, half a dozen pristella tetras, four neon tetras, four khuli loaches and one big lonely angelfish.

I love animals; and not in a big-eyed puppy calendar kind of way. I feel closer to the divine when observing the animals around me, both wild and domestic, than at any other time. I could not imagine living without companions of other species, nor would I dream of raising my children without them. I wish I could have many more beasties in my menagerie and I sincerely hope that when the kids are old enough to help take care of them I will - but don’t tell my husband this, hehehe! He thinks we permanently downsized my menagerie when we had kids.

I’m half-watching this “Life of Birds” documentary, and they’re talking about a bird that wears makeup, lol! This bird paints it’s white feathers & beak with stuff that makes them look yellow.

So far it seems to me that the only thing that really sets us apart from the other animals is fashion. Other animals do everything we do, they just don’t insist on having a new version of whatever it is every season. :-p

I love the holidays, really I do. But this is my first year as mother to a school-age child and I now understand to the depths of my soul why parents can’t wait for xmas vacation to be over. School starts again Monday, not a moment too soon.
The need for constant vigilance over the nefarious schemes of my offspring has kept me from doing much this month. Most disappointingly, I didn’t get to work on my new panty mistress site at all. I did finally decide on a domain name at least (dress-me-up.com).
The good news is that I have *finally* scrounged together the $750 for my Visa registration fee.

A lot of people are obsessed with the notion that working in porn, prostitution, or anywhere else in the sex industry “degrades” women. Mostly, I think, this is because they deeply believe that women oughtn’t to be slutty, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to look at the flip side - how sex work empowers women.

Most folks (like here at the WebWhore Manifesto) who would dare to suggest that working in the sex industry can be empowering for women look at it in an economic sense - sex work is one of the few fields where a woman can really be in control of her work, and make decent money, doing something that isn’t exactly a chore for those who choose it.

(Please note that I said for those who CHOOSE it - women who are forced into sex work deserve the same protections and right to redress that ANYONE forced into ANY kind of slavery deserve.)

The economic argument is a good one, but I want to make a more personal one. I am coming to this field as a 35 year old mother of two - that’s a pretty long way from our society’s stereotype of a sex goddess, and when you add the fact that I weigh close to 250lbs, don’t exactly have perfect skin or features, and have more than my share of scars and wonky bits, the distance between me and desirable, in mainstream terms, widens to something like the Grand Canyon.

I could (and have) fall into the trap of thinking of myself as unsexy, as ugly even. I still get nervous about every little flaw before I go on cam, and I consider the touch-up tool to be the most vital element of my photo-editing program, but once I get in front of an audience of a hundred…two hundred…even three or four hundred men (and women!) who are continuously telling me how hot I am, how excited watching me makes them, all that falls away. I feel powerful, exalted, filled with a confidence that carries over into everything I do. Now that’s empowerment.

Even if my endeavor never turns a profit I will consider it to have been valuable for that reason. Becoming comfortable with and confident in one’s own body is a treasure not to be lightly dismissed, and I can think of few better ways to accomplish that feat than to masturbate for an audience. Beats the pants off joining a health club.

One final thought:
In every show there’s always one dipshit who thinks it’s funny to make the same lame-ass fat jokes, and to that person I always have the same thing to say:

I’m turning a lot more people on here than you are.

I’m working on a redesign of my free area, putting in a proper tour, and for this I’m making a montage of video clips with a specific theme - me just about to cum. I do that a lot in my shows, so I have TONS of orgasms to sort through, and naturally, it gets me to ruminating on the subject of orgasms.

I wonder if I could learn to squirt? I think maybe I could, since I’ve done it before (see my Orgasm entry for more) I think it would take lots of leisurely masturbation though, which is something I don’t have much time for lately. It’d make a good new years resolution though. *giggle*

In fact, my very best masturbating sessions are always during my live member shows. The delicious ritual of shaving, dressing, putting on my makeup and setting the stage, stretching out and a little pre-play, followed by one full hour of banging away at whatever orifice I feel like filling, with whichever toy(s) takes my fancy, while an audience of hundreds of men (and women, yum!) watches and masturbates with me. I’m old enough to know that whatever kink currently holds my interest is likely to change, but for now I can imagine nothing hotter.

Poor Sgt Knickers is not so lucky, he’s a voyeur at heart not an exhibitionist and being in front of all those eyes gives him the willies. Nothing worse for the stiffness of a willy than a case of the willies :-p Thankfully he’s getting more comfortable on camera when it’s just us two, as I really enjoy doing more hardcore stuff sometimes and I’m not *quite* ready to go fucking other men. Or perhaps I should say we haven’t met the right man yet - I get plenty of offers from guys that claim to be dying to get a piece of my sweet ass, but none yet has struck me with the right combination of respect and slut-appreciation.

(Slut-appreciation - that’s one of those technical terms, describing the guy who knows some girls are sluts-at-heart, and LOVES them for it. You know, the one who’s thinking “I would give my left nut to meet a girl like that!”)

Anyhow, back to orgasms. I’ve decided, after much reflection, that the kind of orgasms I frequently have during my shows - which I’ve called “type 2″ or “type 3″ orgasms - must be g-spot orgasms. It feels good all over, having something inside me, but there’s one particular spot that almost like a push-button to set me cumming. Gotta be the g-spot, eh? Many women who have squirting orgasms say they are g-spot orgasms, so that bodes well for my new year’s resolution. The difference between the one time I squirted and the ones I have all the time is that the squirting orgasm was a combination g-spot AND clitoral orgasm. Now if I can just figure out how I got my body to do that…

I have been tinkering with the look of my diary, as you may have noticed. *eyeroll* It looks ever so pretty in the “preview” window, but when published my pretty graphics & colors inexplicably disappear. Why is it that web programming sometimes seems so much like voodoo?

Ah, well, I’m sure to figure it out eventually. As for ya’ll, lovely readers, be sure to check out the new links I’ve added to your right. Especially Adorable Audrey. She’s such a sweet tart, my mouth waters just looking at her!

I didn’t realize how serious things had gotten until my last working vibrator gave up the hum. Things have been tight financially for a long time, not leaving much extra for “frivolities” like sex toys, and way back when I promised myself that I would replace my then recently-deceased rabbit vibe with a superior silicone model I never dreamed that I would be embarking on a new career that would really require the maintenance of a decent collection of toys. Things have changed however, and even though there’s not any more money in the bank (the website still takes more $ to run than it makes), I couldn’t go any longer without restocking my toy box. Trying to be a web-whore without toys is like trying to be a chef without spices.
So I put in a few bids on eBay, and have just received a box full of cheap but serviceable goodies, including a new rabbit vibe (not, alas, the silicone model I long for) and a dual-bullet number that has two speeds - off and too damn fast. Also included in the box was one of the cheesiest pairs of handcuffs I’ve ever seen, only distinguishable from a child’s toy because they’re made of “real die-cast metal!” Still, they ought to look good in pictures. ;-p

I’m still goofing off (which means I’m only minding the munchkins and not trying to work on the website too :-p ), and I can’t help but be riveted to The Weather Channel. One of the fiercest hurricanes ever recorded is blasting through New Orleans today. Here in Tampa Bay we watch these things go past us time and again, always knowing that it’s not a matter of if one will hit us, it’s a matter of when. The legendary (at least to us weather junkies) Jim Cantore has, as usual, been reporting from “ground zero,” which in this case is a concrete building sitting 27′ above sea level, and 1/2 mile north of the shore. He’s been telling us about the water filling the lowest level of the building, and the cars floating by - and how the surge of water came in in about 20 minutes. It’s the kind of thing you hear people say “I can’t imagine” about, but I think everybody who lives here can imagine. The clouds that are dumping rain onto Mississipi, Alabama, and Louisiana today have been pouring a little on us too, the winds that are tearing apart buildings and trees have knocked down a few branches here as well.
Last year, when folks were excaiming over the extraordinarily severe hurricane season, the weather dudes were quick to remind us that such severity was the average, that in fact we’ve just been going through a bit of a lull the past few decades. Add the effects of global warming to that, and I’m seriously concerned that the land my house sits on - about two miles from the ocean - will be waterfront property by the time I leave it to my kids. Or worse, underwater property. After all, waterfront property might actually be worth something if sold to one of the damn fools who apparantly think rebuilding their palatial homes every decade or so is a sort of status symbol. *eyeroll*
Hurricane Katrina will, I expect, claim a couple hundred lives when all is said and done between the floods, tornadoes, and falling trees. (six fatalities in Florida already, five due to falling trees - must be some kind of record) It’ll be listed as one of the most dangerous storms ever. What’s astonishing really, is how a storm that’s if anything fiercer than, say, the Indian super cylone of 1999, will take a few hundred souls here where the Indian storm killed 138,000 people.
Why? Well, we have better warning systems. But mostly, I think, it’s that a lot of folks over here have the means to get away. They’ve got cars, and money for hotel rooms (or relatives on higher ground). Some folks didn’t have the means to get away from this one either. Many of them are huddled inside the Louisiana Superdome while the wind tears pieces off the roof, the levees fail, and Lake Pontchartrian fills the basin the city sits in with water.
I wonder if someday my family will be one of those who haven’t the means to get away.

I’m all the time talking about how I enjoy doing this for a living, but I have to tell you, some of the things I like about it are (I think) pretty damn funny. Like, when I realized that all my lingerie purchases would be tax deductible, I got physically aroused!

How peculiar is that? *giggle*

As expected, CCBill have once again told me that “courtesan” is unacceptable, so off it goes. :’-( I can’t hold it too much against them since, as I discovered in my attempts to find a decent substitute, “courtesan” is still pretty commonly used in some other parts of the world to mean naught but a woman who has sex for money.

I can’t think of an adequate replacement - “online companion” seems so lame! - and besides, I’m in a total snit today, not interested in playing with the guys unless they’re expecting to get their asses whupped, so I’m just going to remove that section entirely. Dammit.