Kink of the Week – It’s A Look in Her Eyes that’ll Scare You To Death

So I’m trying this Kink of the Week thing, and playing catch-up for the moment, since I’ve started it rather late. Today, we’re talking about The Look.
 

It’s not the mascara
It’s not the tight dress
It’s a look in her eyes that’ll scare you to death
Vampire girl
Vampire gi-i-irl…

 
My property/wife talks about “Ms Syren’s Monster”, a look I get that’s all hunger. I have one photo of me, with a friend sitting in my lap. It’s from years ago, when I was worryingly underweight, but I looked at the camera with eyes that were all pupil, all wildness, and every time I look at that photo of me with this much-smaller-than-me person wrapped up in my arms, all I can think is “Crap… You can see what I actually am…” I look like the kind of creature who lives among the river reeds, the kind with webbed toes and inhumanly long fingers, who hides her sharp teeth behind shy smiles and huge, dark eyes. Rusalka. Huldra. Glaistig.
 
My wife loves that look. It means I’ve pushed through all the filters and my sadistic self is out and getting fed, taking what it wants.
I love that she loves it. It’s nice to be able to come all the way out. 🙂
 

 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.

C is for Collars and Contracts – Greater Granola Blog Project 2014

So February 10th marked four years in Dynamic for me and my wife/property.
We win! 😀
 
Given the title of this post, maybe I should point out that this doesn’t mark four years in collar (that’ll be May 7th, 2015), and we don’t actually have a contract, per se. The gyst of it is: “Ghost takes care of Ms Syren. And Vice Versa.” And we just sort of take it from there.
Regardless, she signed on for another 40 years, which sounds pretty good to me. 😀
 
So… other than going “Squee!” about the whole situation, why am I bringing this up? (Okay, I admit it, it was mostly about the Squee). My question is: what do you do with a dynamic like this? How do you deepen it? It still feels… weird? Presumptuous? To be thinking “How do I want to focus my property’s development this year?” but I’m still doing it. It’s still my responsibility to do it.
I look at people who’ve been in dynamic for twenty and thirty years, and I have no idea what that looks like from the inside. Do you just keep claiming more and more of your territory? I keep reaching for the metaphor of cultivation – rather than that of, say, teaching someone new tricks. Where do we go from here?
 
It would be so easy to finish right here, to say “I guess we’ll find out” as if that were some kind of a Really Profound Statement. And it’s not like we won’t find out, over time, as our dynamic continues to develop. But I’d like to have some kind of a concrete plan for what direction to take.
As it stands, I find myself casting around for a focus-point. Like, “This is the direction we’re going to work on this year”. Given how things are going already, I’m guessing that this is going to be a year of “spiritual stuff” (for lack of a more appropriate catch-all). And part of that’s me, because that’s where I want to focus my energies so, hey, why not focus hers there, too? But that’s not all of it. Where do we go from here? I guess we’ll find out. 😉

Z is for Zig-Zag (on polyamoury, roadmaps and making your own way) – Greater Granola Blog Project 2013

At my Poly and Power salons, we’ve sometimes talked about roadmaps or the lack thereof. I find, these days, that I am standing on my carefully hewn path, staring at a Point B in the unbroken distance, and going “How the heck are we gonna get there from here??”
 
My wife says: “You know it’s Poly 201 when you’ve got multiple supportive, accepting families… and you need to negotiate how to manage all the Holiday Stuff without disapointing anyone”.
 
It’s funny, though, because there are roadmaps.
If Ghost and I were, say, a monogamous couple who had open-adopted a queer teenager who still had a good relationship with the parents-of-origin who weren’t well-equipt to take care of her… or if an older relative of mine (or hers) had moved into our (curently non-existant) secondary suite… there would be a road map for “How to NAvigate Christmas” (or Pass-Over, or whatever your High Holy Day of choice is). Maybe not a perfectly fitting one, but it’s there.
 
And so it’s still there when the New Family Member is somebody’s sweetheart.
 
My wife and I had a talk the other night, and I told her that, while I was worrying about things that probably wouldn’t be a problem, I was still worrying about things like “How are Kitty’s parents going to react to me (if they ever happen to meet me, that is)?” and “How are my relatives going to handle either the presence of one or more of your other partners – and the added “strain” of having extra gifts to find for extra people who they don’t really know – at their xmas festivities OR my absense from said festivities if we all go up to someone’s family cottage two years from now?”
 
And, of course, kids grow up. I know I’m carrying a lot of assumed/presumed responsibilities here for managing other people’s emotions and/or expectations, partly because I’m “The Stay-At-Home-Wife” in my poly family, and partly because I’m both the oldest and the geographically-closest-to-the-parent(s) child in my family-of-origin. I know that it wouldn’t really be the end of the world – I wouldn’t really be being a Bad Daughter – if I spent This or That holiday with family members who weren’t also blood-relatives. No-more than it was when my parents stopped “going home for Christmas” and started building their own traditions with the family they were building together.
 
But that baggage is hard to put down, and it makes those zig-zagging trails-in-potentia from Point A to Point B harder to find, the obstacles harder to field and ford.
 
I’m probably not the only person trying to navigate/integrate Poly Phamily with various other family events/obligations at this time of year, so I’m throwing this out there:
 
We can listen to the stories in our heads – the ones that say “So-and-so expects me to handle everybody’s social calendars” or “So-and-so assumes that Everyone’s Plans will revolve around what she wants to do” or “So-and-so is going to pitch a fit if he’s not included in All The Things” or “So-and-so doesn’t get how important X is to me, because zie doesn’t understand its/their place in my life or doesn’t want that for zirself”… or whatever – without recognizing that the tapes are playing…
Or we can recognize that those stories are there (over and over again, as may be the case – it’s rare than anyone figures this stuff out over night), acknowledge what they’re saying, and bring them out into the open: Not as outburst of “You don’t understand me!” or “What makes you think you’re so special?” or “Why doesn’t anybody care about what I need??” but as a gentle, honest voicing of the fears we hold and the vulnerabilities we often hide while we work through this stuff together.
 
It’s scary. But I think it will prove worth it, as well. 🙂

Polynormativity, Attachment Bonds, and What We Fear Most in Relationships

Okay.
The title’s a bit of a mouthful, but let’s see where this goes.
 
Quite a while ago, Andrea Zanin wrote a piece called “The Problem with Polynormativity” (link is further down this post, just wait). Since reading it back in, what, last January(?), I’ve tried half a dozen times to come up with a response because she said some really smart stuff in it and her writing also made me defensive-angry at the same time.
And I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.
 
As things do, stuff got put on the back-burner, and then taken entirely off the stove. And then, a little while back, I had a long chat with a friend who was dealing with some Relationship Stuff, and I started thinking about it again – not Andrea’s post, but the whole mess of how relationships work, and how there are so many different ways of doing “open relationship” that people can stumbled and get tangled no matter how much they want to make things work.
 
And then, last night, someone linked me to a rant (I will link to it further on in this post, but it’s called “The Problem with ‘the problem with polynormativity'”) written in response to some of the stuff that was brought up in Andrea’s post, but that is apparently making The Rounds through the “greater poly community” (for a given value of “greater”. Sometimes it feels a bit like a lot of this discussion happens in the U.S. pansexual community, and there are definitely some Cultural Differences going on between them and the Canadian Dykes).
 
Anyway. Moving right along. I decided that I could write this now, so I did.
 
To begin: Andrea’s post, which I haven’t read in a while. The following is what stuck with me when she first posted it, along with whatever a quick skim brings to mind.
Right. So:
In it she talks about how the model of polyamoury that most often (in the rare cases when this happens at all) gets acknowledged or discussed by those officially living within what Gayle Rubin calles The Charmed Circle of socially acceptable sexuality… is one that involve a pre-existing (monogamous) couple opening up their relationship to a third person whom they both want to date and whom (one can only hope) wants to date both of them. She talks about why this sucks and, while my quick skim has reminded me that some of the suckitude she’s talking about has to do with how having The Media only acknowledge one option in the poly-verse means that people looking at maybe trying consensually non-monogamous relationships wind up having only one version of non-monogamy easily available as an example, what I best remember from my original reading of her post is that the suck followed two intertwined Possible Results:
 
(A) The Third Romantic Partner having her[1] romantic and emotional needs (and investment!) totally thrown under the bus within a given 3+ relationship, but also
 
(B) Those Third Romantic Partners being viewed (by The Charmed Circle) as the weird ones (those freaks, those insatiable bisexuals, those home-wrecking sluts), should their dating-a-pre-existing-couple adventure not work out, while Bill and Joan are just a nice married couple who tried to spice things up and it was that home-wrecking slut who ruined everything, put their marriage in jeopardy, was too demanding, etc. etc.
 
I think we can all agree that Possible Result “A” is a horrible thing to do to anybody (at all, but particularly those you profess to care about), regardless of whether they’re your primary, your secondary, your Servant, your Boss, your spouse, your partner, your girlfriend, your friend-with-benefits, or your one-off play-partner at a party. I know we’re human and we all slip up occasionally or need to triage things in a crisis, but building that kind of behaviour into your relationship structure, before the relationship(s) itself even exists, really is a pretty awful thing to do to somebody[2].
 
Possible Result “B”, on the other hand, is significant more for reasons around social privilege. Who gets to have their relationship, their sexuality treated as Normal. I married my partner. Which means that she didn’t and can’t marry her other partners. And there’s social power in that wedding ring, in that certificate, and I know it. It means that I’m more likely to be the assumed “and guest” (singular) on any invitation she receives. It means that, if Ghost and Kitty and I sign up to play Ultimate Frisby with a group of largely monogamous, coupled-off people, it would most likely be assumed that Kitty was “our buddy” rather than being “my buddy” and “Ghost’s girlfriend”. In situations like that where the married-to-each-other people are also in the closet about dating outside of their diad[3] and so don’t correct those assumption when they crop up, this can leave the third party feeling like a second-class citizen or a dirty little secret rather than a beloved member of a triad. Which both (i) feeds back into Possible Result “A” and its related suckitude, but also (ii) means there’s a non-consensual power-imbalance at work that is going to heap additional social pressure on the Dirty Little Secret to suck it up and accept whatever crumbs she’s thrown because she’s not supposed to be there, anyway.
 
Are you with me so far?
 
So. Andrea’s article said a lot of good, sensible stuff.
And it also made me twitch in that defensive-angry kind of way.
And it wasn’t until last night (thence making this post today) that I really understood the why of that.
 
See, in my little corner of the polyverse, I’m a bit weird. I’m in an open relationship, and *want* to be in an open relationship… and I’m only dating one person. To-whom I’m married. I joke about being the most monogamous poly person I know.
And this thing – this “being the most monogamous poly person I know” thing – has had me feeling like I’m “not poly enough” on numerous occasions.
 
But I’ve also felt “not poly enough” because of my insecurities around abandonment and “being replaced” and my subsequent recurring (although getting less so) bouts of argy-bargy and angst around my partner’s many partners. My lovely wife/property has done me a tonne of good on that front because she always comes back and makes a point of checking in and being reassuring (in actions as well as in words). But the feeling persists (sometimes), and it bubbles up when I read articles that talk about hierarchical poly as being totally horrible and having zero redeeming qualities.
And last night I got linked to a post – a rant, which makes no bones about being what it is – about attachment-bonds, both secure and tenuous; about how the idea that “non-hierarchical poly is *easy* if you’re really poly and not just a monogamous person in disguise” (totally something my ex-gf did with me, fyi) is a pernicious nasty attitude that is showing up a lot these days[4]; and about how there are a lot of people who are trying poly, and who are marching through their worst, most end-of-the-world-is-nigh fears, in order to get this thing that they know in their guts is what they need, even though it’s terrifying… and that, because they’re installing safety nets and training wheels as they’re doing this, they’re being kind of spat upon by people whose bodies, for whatever reason, aren’t telling them that they are in immediate and life-threatening danger[5] every time their partner goes on a date or flirts with someone else or whatever.
 
… And this rant really cleared up a few things for me about why I get defensive when I read stuff that says “safety nets make you bad”. So I recommend that you read it, too.
 
Mildly tangential but related sidenote: So, I don’t know if any of you listen to Polyamory Weekly, but honest-to-gods, Minx irritates the hell out of me. Going by what she says in her podcasts, she’s a “solo-poly” type, someone who doesn’t want to be a live-in partner to anyone, that she has a lot to do, and appreciates the freedom of having her own space. All of which is totally fine and wonderful, and I can relate to a lot of it. But I find that, as someone who deliberately seeks out people to date who already have one or more significant peer-to-peer attachment bonds going on in their lives, her totally reasonable expectation that the other partners of her sweeties will treat her with respect and compassion… they turn sour in my mouth when she talks about people like me – anxious pre-existing partners who are struggling with this open-relationship stuff – with neither respect nor compassion. (Maybe she’s stopped doing that? It’s been a while since I listened to her show, for just that reason).
Maybe she does that because she been on the flip-side of that – the whole business of being thrown under the bus without a thought – too many times and she doesn’t have a lot of patience left for new people who are exhibiting the same behaviours that got her hurt before.
Fair enough. But you don’t put out a fire by throwing matches at it.
 
Anyway. I’m wondering if that’s the attitude that Much-Ado is referencing zir rant, more than the specifics of Andrea’s post or the “How Not To Ruin Polyamoury for Everybody” post that zi links to, later on (and that zir rant seems to be primarily about).
 
Right. Back on track.
Much-Ado’s post also brought up some questions for me because, honestly, a lot of poly people – and a lot of goths, pagans, queers, and other folks who also find Home within the context of open relationships and consensual non-monogamy – are *not* attachment-secure. But I’m wondering how many of us are attachment-avoidant (fear of being subsumed or devoured by our attach-ee).
 
I mean, me? I’m attachment-insecure. Through and through. Fear of abandonment all the way. It’s part of why I’m only dating one person – because I don’t want to screw up one or more relationships and lose everybody I care about as a result[6]. Being in an open relationship, for me, means that I have that “allowing” thing going on – I don’t have to police my own desires or my own sexuality the way I felt I had to in my monogamous relationship(s)[7] – but I’m (so far) largely uninterested in doing more, outside of my primary (only) romantic/power-exchange relationship than having occasional play dates with my friends. That could change. It could change drastically. I don’t know. But for now, that’s where things are at. 🙂
 
I had a girlfriend, once, who was attachment-avoidant through and through. I’m sure you can imagine just how well that one went. :-\
 
I’m wondering if the “poly is easy” (for a given value of “easy” – poly/non-monogamy/openness often get referred to as “graduate level” relationship styles for a reason) folks, the ones who have an easier (easier, not easy) time navigating the jealousy fears, or plugging into frubbly compersion, I wonder if they are as much “attachment-avoidant” and “attachment-secure”, or – maybe more accurately? – if they get to “attachment-secure” but started out as “attachment-avoidant”, which maybe made the possibility of both (a) multiple sweeties, but also (b) sweeties with multiple sweeties (aka: they won’t be around 100% of the time, so you won’t feel trapped or stuck) really appealing before they did the buckets of Self Work that are typically required if any of us want to make this consensual non-monogamy stuff work long-term and in healthy ways.
 
I have to admit that I’m just theorizing here. I can think of a couple of people off the top of my head who don’t (I don’t think) fit that particular mould, but who have an easier time with polyamoury than I do. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all theory by any stretch of the imagination.
 
None the less, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something (maybe) to this.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] It’s very, very frequently a her – see “hot bi babe”, but also see “one penis rule” and the way pansexual sometimes gets described as “pansexual” (with air-quotes) because it frequently means “heterosexual cis men and bisexual or bi-curious cis women in heterosexual relationships” and sexual interactions that are reminiscent of traditional Swinger culture.
 
[2] Although it too reading a different article, by a different author (So Somebody Called You a Unicorn Hunter), for me to really wrap my head around the how and why of that. The article takes the “couple + 1” relationship model apart a bit and explains why stuff that looks really good – and *is* really good, and even comes (at least some of the time) from a place of compassion – on paper… pretty much goes to hell in a hand-cart once actual real Additional Romantic Partners are involved. It was a big help for me, so I encourage you to read that one, as well. 🙂
 
[3] Because of the above-mentioned social privilege that comes with monogamy.
 
[4] For a given value of “a lot”.
 
[5] Uh. This all has to do with attachment bonding. Which, until relatively recently, was understood as something that happened (or failed to happen) between parents and children. More recently, it’s starting to be used as a model for understanding how adult peer-to-peer relationships (like romantic relationships) work, as well. Emily Nagoski did a great quartet of videos – here, here, here, and here – talking about this far better than I can. 🙂 Go watch them, they are awesome. 🙂 Part One is the one that explains about the whole “feeling like you’re going to die” thing, fyi. 🙂
 
[6] Having never dated more than one person at a time, I can pretty-much guarantee that I will screw it up somewhere. I’m human. It’s what we do.
 
[7] My big, married, hetro-monogamous relationship, by the way, was a pretty wretched, controlling relationship. Not all monogamy (or herterosexuality) is like this, fyi.

Bootblacking 101 in Ottawa

Bootblacking 101 Workshop
Wednesday, October 9th, 2013
7pm – 8:30pm
Swizzles (246 Queen Street in Ottawa)
Come and join us!

 
 
The poster pretty-much says it all.
 
My lovely wife, as she’s wrapping up her title year as Bootblack Ottawa 2013, is giving a bootblacking 101 workshop this Wednesday (that’s tomorrow) at Swizzles Bar, which is on the lower level of 246 Queen Street in Ottawa.
So. If you love leather and want to know how to take care of it, or if you want to know how to protect your boots against the salt roads of the coming winter, you might want to check this one out. 🙂
 
I’m pretty sure the workshop is free, although do bring a donation just in case (if it turns out to be free then, hey, bonus).
 
Hoping to see lots of people there.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.

Three Years – Happy Serviceversary (Some Thoughts)

Today marks three years of the service-arrangement that I share with Ghost.
Along the way, she has become my friend, my lover, my sweetheart, my partner, my property, and (most recently) my wife.
Tonight, my altars are (finally) burning, we have an out-of-town friend staying an unexpected extra day, I’ve smoked the house with myrrh (purification and blessings), and I have a duck roasting in the oven. The three of us are drinking red wine (yet another bottle from the wedding, as it happens).
 
A year ago, I posted about what I had learned about myself as a dominant, among other things. This year has been one of learning how to… not “share” power, but learning how to hold power and share my submissive – both with her vanilla partner and with someone over-whom she holds power.
 
The whole year hasn’t been taken up with this, I realize, but it’s been something that, one way or another, has been on my mind.
 
A while ago, I wrote a post called “H is for Honour“. Learning how to share, without dropping my submissive’s reins and without “losing” my Place in her life (or letting resentment develope due to feeling like that’s what’s happening) is a way of living with honour, I think. Certainly, it’s one more way in-which I strive to live with grace as a dominant.
 
Happy Anniversary to us. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.

M is for Marriage – Greater Granola Blog Project

So my Ghost and I got married. Just over a week ago today. 🙂
 
I am, duh, rather chuffed about this. I grin to myself every time I wind up mentioning my WIFE to somebody (I’m trying not to be obnoxious about this, but you never know).
 
A friend of mine was teasing me at a party last night – a married, poly, left-wing bi-guy, just to give some context – about the Bourgois Institution of-which I was now complicit. And, while I was well-aware that he was teasing me, it does fall into the Ambiguous Feelings About Marriage that turn up in my head sometimes.
 
I know it’s an institution that privileges monogamy and (in many, many places – including my own province, up until about 10 years ago) heterosexuality over, well, pretty much everything else. I know it’s history is deeply rooted in sexism. I know that it plays a huge roll in the continued existence of proprietary beliefs around and behaviours in romantic relationships.
And I still believe in it.
 
I am a newlywed. Before that, though, I was a divorcee. I have experienced marriage as a sexist, proprietary institution, and I’ve experienced “wife” as a state heaped with social obligations and expectations – about taking on household chores, maintaining familial traditions and correspondences (for two families), wanting and conceiving (biologically-related) children, wanting and purusing a particular kind of middle-class, suburban life[1] – all of which came with a denial of (and occasional shaming about) my bisexuality, my queerness, my dominance (and sadism – which I was only just discovering), my budding sex-positivity, even my religiosity[2] and environmentalism[3].
 
I have been a wife – with all its attendent social assumptions – before. And before, when I was a wife with a husband, the assumptions that people make about “wife” (and about “married” and how those things fit into the charmed circle of socially acceptable behaviour) chafed at my a lot because those assumptions didn’t actually fit who and what I was/am.
 
Now, I’m a wife who has a wife, and I find that the social assumptions that get made are rather different. Part of that, of course, is that “wife” can’t hide all the things that we are. We are openly poly – one of my wife’s other partners spent xmas with us chez my sister’s cottage with my extended family; we are obviously dykes; we are members of our leather community and our O/p dynamic isn’t something we keep in our bedroom[4]. We walk in the pride parade with the queer sexworkers and I’ve been on the news (recently, and seen by my landlord – we talked about it the next day) speaking on the importance of decriminalization. “Wife” doesn’t render those things invisible because I’m actively living all of them now.
When I introduce Ghost as “[…] and this is my wife,” people don’t mistake either of us for a man, and they don’t mistake either of us for het.
Instead of implying a lot of social conformity, “wife” tells people that my relationship with Ghost is one to be taken seriously, one that’s based on love and trust and mutual care, and one that comes with the expectation of those things will last a lifetime. And it does it with a single word.
 
I love my partner, my servant, my lover, my beloved. And I am damn pleased to be able to call her my wife.
 
 

 
 
TTFN,
Ms (Mrs) Syren.
 
 
[1] Said life appears to be a set of certain socially-conservative-but-officially-Liberal attitudes that my Maid of Honour (who lives in the suburbs and is het, vanilla, married, and a mom, – fyi) collectively refers to as “Barhaven” in tones of particular disgust.
 
[2] Both in that my religion is not Abrahamic and that it’s an active practice that involves actual faith and contact with the holy, rather than a sort of socio-secular worldview with no sense of the numinous involved in it at all.
 
[3] I don’t even know. 😛
 
[4] I may explain it “gently”, but nothing changes the bit where my wife calls me “my Lady” and gets down on her knees – in front of my mother – to help me on and off with my boots.

K is for Keep – Greater Granola Blog Project

The day after tomorrow I am marrying my servant.
To me, this is a way to let the not-so-kinky world (members of our families, for example) understand the depth of the relationship we share.
When I was trying to sort out what it would mean to me to put a collar on my Ghost, what it boiled down to was: I want to keep her for ever.
And, frequently, that’s also what putting a wedding ring on someone boils down to – with or without the desperately sexist property rights business in its origins: The desire to spend the rest of one’s life with a particular person.

So here I am, a kinky, polyamourous dyke set to walk down the aisle holding the hand of my Servant. One of her other girlfriends is going to be her maid of honour. My big gay aunties are coming into town for the ceremony.

And what kind of promise can I make to a wife who has already vowed to honour and obey me?
To treasure and guide her. To lift her up and help her be her best self. To celebrate her achievements and help her through her rough times. To take care of her. To trust her. To love her with an open heart and to cherish her all the days of my life.

When Your Servant Has a Servant

My servant, once again, has a servant of her own.
This is actually working out to be pretty awesome. I like her, we get along, she’s a big help around the house, from my perspective, this is going rather well.
 
However.
 
What’s on my mind these days is this: I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to put my own servant, Ghost, to good use now that her servant is taking on a lot of the basic household maintenance stuff (sweeping up, doing the dishes, making coffee in the morning when she’s over for the night, that kind of thing). Of late, this hasn’t been a problem. We’ve just moved, so my girl has been working her ass off to get the old apartment cleared out and cleaned up (finished last night!) and to get the new apartment at least functional (there’s still a lot of unpacking to do, but we can move freely, and that’s a good thing).
 
But come January, after our wedding and the madness that is Secular Xmas, I’m going to need A Plan[1] for out how to direct and focus her energies. Some of it, of course, is going to be directed towards building custom shelving for our Work Room but, beyond that… May be if I think of her as a Luxury Commodity and set her to providing pedicures and massages? (I know, I know. My life is soooooooooo hard…)
 
Anyway. That’s what’s on my mind right now.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms. S.
 
 
[1] PLN:

Rob Anybody Feegle has a PLN.
I could do with one of those…

Bootblack Ottawa 2012 – In Which I Am Chuffed By Association. :-D

So I went to (some of) MLO over the weekend. I was there supporting my girlfriend while she competed in the first ever Bootblack Ottawa competition. She and the other competitors were working their stands for a good four hours on Friday night, and then again on Saturday for another eight. This was to give the three judges a chance to check out their technique, their skill levels, and their various approaches to working on other people’s boots.
 

My Ghost’s bootblacking stand, as seen in our tiny, crowded living room.

 
 
I turned up while Ghost was still doing her Official Interview – where the BBO Judges ask her a bunch of questions about leather-care, community history, and how to act as a title-holder – so I got to watch her work for most of the day.
A fellow named JJ was live-blogging for Leatherati, and he brought Ghost a challenge: Neon orange patent leather shoes. (Check out the “before vs after” pic by following the link).
Apparently word gets around, because she – a definite new face among the MLO crowd, most-of-whom are Ottawa Knights – was booked pretty solid all day, Saturday. Granted, so was everyone else. 😉
 
I was really proud to see her working, and to see how people were commenting on how much knowledge she had.
She had her own submissive, Kitty[1], on hand to do things like coffee-runs and such.
I confess that I felt rather useless. Being there for morale support is important[2], but it doesn’t get sandwiches into her when they’re sitting, uneaten, on the supply table and she hasn’t had a bite in six hours. 😦
She did, eventually, get some food into her. Thank goodness.
 
She attened the formal dinner, which sounded phenomenal – squash, parsnips, lamb shank, and mashed potatoes (I only went to the free part of the day, plus the awards show – I’m thinking that, next year, I’m going to need to come out to All Of The Above) – and then prepped for the awards show kicked off at 9pm.
 
She won.
 
My Ghost is the first ever title-holder of Ottawa Bootblack.
I’m really proud of her. I’m looking forward to seeing what she makes of this role over the course of the next year.
 
 

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! 😀

 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] I like her. She’s thoughtful in a lot of different ways, and she’s good at anticipating what my girl needs in order to make her life easier.
 
[2] More important than I knew. She told me, this morning, that my believing in her makes it easier for her to believe in herself. I just about cried, but that’s me.