Just a quickie, since I haven’t taken this blog out of the site links even though I haven’t been updating. We are working on new stuff!

I’m in the midst of trying to develop both a sub-site specifically geared towards adult site owners (to help manage your listing/s) AND a new (free) members site for readers, where you can do things like add your own reviews and ratings (a’la Amazon) , store bookmarks, and other things.

Elliott is in coding geek mode, and new Wordpress developments make this way easier to do myself, so I’m pretty excited. Anyhow, I’ll be inviting some of you to beta test the behind the scenes version in the coming weeks. Yay!

what else: um. We are going to Roatan (Honduras) for a dive trip in a couple of weeks, one of the main reasons that I missed the Xbiz awards. We were nominated under the best site/portal category for the first time in awhile, so I really wanted to be there tonight. Wish us luck, you never know..

k, bye for now..
~Janie

I just saw Swingsetlife tweet about a post on Huffpo, offended by a divorce lawyer’s column about her top 10 signs that a marriage is in trouble. Her number 10, and the only one with an emphasis of all caps for the ‘are’, was

If your spouse wants you to swing with your neighbors, you ARE headed for divorce.

The thing is (well, the first of many things) I don’t think most spouses bring up swinging with their actual neighbors. In fact, in my (albeit limited) experience, most people new to swinging want to keep that activity fairly separate from the rest of their lives, and might go to a neighboring city for their swing activities. Sure, some people want to do it in the same city, especially if it’s a big one, but again not usually with their friends, business acquaintances, or the neighbor they see while taking out the trash in the morning.

I’m not at all offended by the post, though, because while there are tons of happy swingers, there are also tons of marriages that are at the beginning of the end when this comes up. If you read the post, she goes on to talk about one spouse wanting to swing and the other NOT wanting to. Well duh! If you have to coerce, sweet talk, bribe, etc. your partner into something that drastic in life/lovestyle change, if it isn’t a desire for BOTH people, then yes I fully agree, it’s the beginning of the end. And if the “spice” is being introduced when the marriage is kinda sucky already, or lacking in intimacy, or respecting each others boundaries, then yes, ginormous red flag.

I don’t think it’s a knock on swingers, or consensual non-monogamy. I do think it’s a good warning that pushing your partner into a lifestyle they don’t want is often the beginning of the end. Yes, it was a short column that didn’t explore the issue in a lot of depth, but her other 9 red flags were similarly short. Pretty much all of them could be summed up by a lack of true partnership or trust. I think if I’m going to be offended about people knocking non-monogamy I’ll put that where it should lie, with the true haters.

Anyhow, in response, here are my top rules for SUCCESSFUL non-monogamy:

1. Don’t switch from monogamy to non-monogamy during a weak point in the relationship. If your communication, intimacy or sex life is already lacking, that’s not a good time to start.

2. Both partners should be, at the very least, curious if not outright enthusiastic about the possibilities. If one or the other is being dragged along for the ride, well…. bad.

3. The biggest issue ever, in my humblest of opinions, is to figure out where on your priority scale non-monogamy will lie. Is it a “we’ll go swing if we have a free weekend here and there”, or is it a “I want to be fully involved in multiple day-to-day life relationships that encompass far more than sex.”? That is kind of a big issue.

4. If you’re really new to non-monogamy, either as a couple or with one individual within the couple, have the conversation about how you’ll handle things if it IS tried and doesn’t seem to be working out. It’s a take on #3, but more along the lines of “when do things become deal breakers.” That one is also good for negotiation with potential playmates. If you are just getting involved in non-monogamy and are unsure of how things will go, you’ll be better at communicating with a potential interest what your boundaries as a couple are.

I don’t have 10 rules to counter with, but those four are a good start.

Now that I’m back from vacation and trying to settle back into a routine, I think I’ll probably finally get time for other projects. It’s always something, but the most recent ones were training for a triathlon in 2007/2008, and then opening and running a retail shop from 2008 until early this spring.

So what is my latest ridiculous thing, you might ask? Well, there are two of them.

1. jewelry. I dabbled in making jewelry a few years back, and have taken basic silversmithing classes and so on. Running my retail shop, which sold a lot of cool art jewelry, gave me the bug again. This time around I’m learning more soldering and so on, but also teaching myself PMC (precious metal clay) firing, lampworking beads, etc. Haven’t had much time to do anything, but now that sailing season is mostly over I can set aside more time.

2. primal 30 day challenge! I’ve mentioned briefly having mostly converted to eating “primal” or “paleo”. It’s basically “no grain, no sugar”, which is a bit different from other low carb things. Anyhow, I’ve been pretty good about it and I feel way better, but next week one of the sites I follow is doing a 30 day “challenge” and for the first time I’m going to include the workout part of it too. Eek! Actually NOT eek, because primal doesn’t call for tons of cardio, which is the only part of exercise that I hate. (Can you believe I trained for a tri with that attitude? heh) So starting the 12th, I’ll be doing that. Happily, I have a friend who wants to do it too. Nice to have the company and the workout partner. :)

I can’t wait to post some jewelry photos as I get some things done. Hopefully they’ll turn out pretty enough that I’ll want to post them. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll post some before/after primal photos, or recipes.

not sure how we lucked into such awesome weather when we have had very little summer this year, but Elliott and I just returned from 10 days on the sailboat, 98% of which was sunshiny wonderfulness. I have a hell of a tan, have ingested more wine than I care to admit, and am feeling so much more relaxed than when I left.

Fifi is proving to be every bit as kick-ass as we’d hoped, actually she’s even exceeded my expectations. She handled everything while we were gone, and we returned to neatly organized piles of questions, fresh flowers in the offices, and nothing terribly pressing because she has the art of customer management down to a T. Elliott and I are both committed to making sure she remains very happy here.

Now that I’m back, I’m about to get started on a small site revamp, with the wonderful woman who did the last one for me four years ago. We run a bit of the site on WP and we’re batting around the idea of switching the whole site over to a WP backend. What I like about the possibilities is that I will finally be able to customize ads to match the category someone is viewing (right now, I don’t change out ads enough and they are the same ones, category to category) and add other category-specific content in the sidebars. I think it’ll make it a lot better browsing experience to pull up a category page, and have the sidebar with related janeology terms, related categories, and so on.

While I was gone, I pretty much stayed a tiny bit connected via Twitter. I’m finding Twitter to be a love/hate relationship, but I’ll expand on that at some later date. I didn’t have email, so I’m still catching up on the last two weeks of that. At any rate, stay tuned, we’re changing and updating and getting better around here. :)

~Janie

Seen on twitter the other day: a woman who happens to be a stripper attempted to follow a woman who happens to be a food writer. The food writer blocks her, and tweets thusly:

Really why would a stripper (female) try to follow me? getting some weird ones as approach 2000 & starting to block them

It’s the worst kind of ignorance for so many reasons, but I’m going to focus on something else right now: a public service announcement for people who think like this food writer does. And that is: you don’t get to control who reads words you put out for public consumption.

Perhaps it will make her (and people like her) feel better to also know that having people they don’t like reading their words doesn’t give the some disease by association. It happens all the time. For any book or television show or website out there, there are priests and pedophiles, doctors and strippers, artists and whores, parents and arsonists and firefighters and librarians and everything in between who read/watch. Cause guess what? The world is a diverse place, and the internet (as literature and television) is open to all. You don’t get to decide.

Look at the above paragraph anyway. It’s categorizing people in a word. I’ve had clergy people email me over the years, not to condemn me (although I’ve had those as well) but to ask an earnest question, about their own sexuality. They aren’t one-dimensional, summed up in a word by their faith. Nor is a stripper summed up in a word, nor am I. I am a woman who has off and on written about sexuality and pornography. I once had a job as a phone sex operator. I also raised three amazing children, operated two other businesses as different from this one as it’s possible to be, painted, made jewelry, canned food, learned to sail, read many many books on diverse subjects, and accumulated an awesome network of friends and acquaintances who do all sorts of different things. And I might follow a foodie. I might follow a scientist. I might follow a political blogger, a mom, a jewelry artist. Because I’m not one-dimensional, and I’m smart enough to realize nobody else is either.

I’ve realized over the years being online that the above diversity is one of the best qualities. Through writing about bdsm, I met a winemaking couple who are still friends. I’ve been able to get a glimpse of wine culture and industry through knowing them. Through writing about polyamory, I met a gorgeous, hunky FBI agent who specializes in mid-East relations. And I’ve met tons of cool people who are in my “field” as it were, of sexuality, but the relationships that are the most interesting to me are the ones that are happenstance based on small commonalities. I had a woman write me once, years ago, to tell me how much she enjoyed my blog (at the time, most often it was about bdsm and poly) and she’d found me through an entry with a marionberry pie recipe. How awesome is that?

My advice to people who wish to be in the public eye, but want to make sure it’s only people you WANT to be reading you that are seeing your words: find out more before running the other way. Or, if you really can’t stand the fact that “those people” (whoever those people are to you) are reading your words, stay home and only talk to people you know. You’ll be doing the rest of us a favor.

so it’s august 23rd, and we are on day 5 of our annual 2 week cruise. I’m escaping a brutal hot sunshine that surprised us out of nowhere about 2 hours ago. I think I’ve become entirely unaccustomed to sunshine after the non-summer Washington has experienced this year.So far we have spent a couple of nights at anchor, then yesterday ended up taking shelter at a little marina because it was pouring rain so hard we were both drenched trying to get to Friday Harbor.

Now we’re at FH for a night, waiting on friends who are joining us. Tomorrow it’s Pt. Townsend, where I’ve not visited since I was a little kid, and then this year instead of going North to the Gulf Islands, we’re headed for Seattle instead. It’s weird how we never have considered doing that by boat. I think it was the right decision given what the weather is suppose to be like north of us.

Anyhow, I’m trying a couple of new things with this post. One, I am using a bluetooth keyboard with my iPad, so it’s like typing on a tiny little laptop. And two, I’m using the Blogsy app to do the post, so we’ll see how it works. I’ve had the app since I got my iPad, but I hadn’t tried it until now. If all goes well, I might try to figure out how to post pictures, because it’s soooo beautiful wandering around the PNW via boat.

FH is nice, I just stopped by the bookstore (an now reading Karen Russell’s ‘Swamplania’, so far verdict is AMAZING writer), went by the little floating seafood shop for a crab and some ahi tuna, and have a lovely chilled glass of Rosé in my hand. In short, it’s starting to feel like vacation! yay!~Janie

’cause here is my first entry after saying that, but I don’t have a camera with me. I suppose I could use my cellphone, but honestly my office is not exactly photo inspiration as of yet. I still need to paint the 3 walls that aren’t vivid red. I’m thinking of a soft golden color, because I love warmth. And I need to hang more art on the walls – lord knows I’ve collected enough these past five years, at home I have to swap things out because there isn’t room. For the other art lovers reading, here are a few of my personal favorites to check out:

Krista Huot
Audrey Kawasaki
Caia Koopman
Ken Kierns
Mark Ryden
Sarah Joncas (I lucked into one of her early paintings)
Amy Sol
and of course my dear friend Carolyn Weltman

Luckily, Elliott is fine with me doing the decorating at home. I try to incorporate both of our tastes, so I can’t say that it’s a cohesive space, but there is one common theme: lots of color! In short, I’m a realtor’s nightmare if we ever put our house on the market. heh. We actually did almost list it awhile ago, when we had a very unfortunate next door neighbor (constant law enforcement visits) and the first thing the realtor said was that we needed to repaint all of the walls cream. I’m so glad I stood my ground at the time, and said that we’d instead put in a repainting budget, in case we didn’t end up moving.

Anyhow, check out some of the above links for some gorgeous eye-candy. I wish I had one iota of that talent.

~Jane

hey. Hi.

My day today is laid back. I got into the office around 11am, which is late for me. Fifi is off this week, so I’ve had a bit more to do with Elliott’s business than I prefer, but Fifi is so awesome that she’s been coming in on lunch, and listening to voicemails/answering calls in the morning too. We’re not abusing her awesomeness, she’s not on vacation, just taking a class she signed up for before taking the job here. And she offered, so I took her up on it.

Been watching a twitterwar that I may or may not end up writing about. It’s somewhat relevant to my life experience, but it brings up quite a lot of things, so I imagine my brain is churning away in my subconscious as I type. heh.

Anyhow. Elliott is gone today at an airshow in Canada, and I am recovering from a horribly sunburned lower lip. I look like I had a double-collagen injection right now. Happens at least once per summer. Tonight I am going to an outdoor cocktail party that I can take my little pups to (I posted a twitpic of them earlier) which sounds perfect since it decided to be summer again for a day.

I need to take more pictures to post. That is my goal starting today, at least one picture per post.

I love Spotify. (If you want an invite, I have a few, just email me – I signed up for premium). It’s SO much better than Pandora, as awesome as Pandora is. Why Spotify? Because I can play any song I want, any artist I want, create specific playlists, play my own music, transport it all anywhere (I have it synced on both computers, my iPad and my iPhone).

I fully intend to torture the teenagers the next time they are in the car. The backstory is that every once in awhile they play an obnoxious rap song that I end up loving, but not wanting to buy an album. Sure, I could just buy them as singles on iTunes, but I never know how long my obsession will last. At any rate, when I ask the aforementioned teenagers to play these songs for me, they REFUSE! The nerve! They even make fun of me about it. Apparently I’m too old to like obnoxious rap music. They also somehow think I should be more offended at explicit lyrics.

Anyhow, I now have my perfect playlist of all the songs they have been refusing to share, and the next time they are stuck in a car with me, it’s on. heh

that’s all.

on my spotify right now: G Love, ‘Cold Beverage’

I haven’t written about poly issues in awhile, but with reviewing/publishing reviews on a couple of swing sites lately, it’s in the forefront of my mind again. While I wrote that I ultimately didn’t choose poly as a lifestyle, it’s not like the issue never crops up in a longterm relationship. I think any relationship that has good communication will occasionally deal with the topic, because while I don’t think I’d choose poly as my lifestyle again, I also don’t think we’re hardwired for monogamy. In the same vein, I’m not hardwired to like working out, even though I might be healthier because of it. I do seem to enjoy a bit more fermented grape than is probably good for me. I don’t think hardwired is the argument that should be had, necessarily, but rather a consideration in the overall decisions.

I was reading Swinging Advice’s recent column, what to do when one partner wants to “close” the relationship. At the end of the day, there wasn’t much advice there except the biggie: talk about it together and figure out how big a deal it is to you. And understand that where someone is one year isn’t going to be where they always are. I then read a column on ebbs and flows of poly, and what priority to give it.

I like that there is so much more conversation going on now, more than just the tired old “how to avoid jealousy” conversation. I’m still not a sexually (or emotionally) jealous person. I adore sharing Elliott with friends, I encourage him to have his own time, own interests, etc. The first article mentioned above was sort of unclear, because the advice seeker didn’t actually say whether his wife wanted to close the relationship entirely, or just stop participating in it herself. That is a huge difference. Elliott would be totally open to swinging (in fact, he’d prefer it) and I have no problem with that. My problem is that I’m not all that interested in joining in on the fun, and last I heard it’s still pretty damn difficult to show up as a single guy and get in on the action. In this instance, it’s not that I care about an absolutely “closed” relationship, it’s rather that I’m not inclined to participate myself. On the other hand, I still lean towards poly in that I’d love to have bdsm playdates again, that weren’t necessarily sexual. I would check that in the polyamory category, just ’cause doing intimate things whether tab A is inserted into slot B or not, seem to count to me.

I think the biggest hindrance to figuring out how Elliott can have his swinging, and I can have my bondage playdates, has to do with the second column I referenced above. Where do you prioritize it in your life? In our case, every time we start to seriously even have the conversation, there are a zillion other things we put first. Whether it’s going out sailboat racing on a weekend instead of attending a bondage class by Max, or making time for elderly parents or friends who are moving, there is always something we put before that. Right now I’m ok with those priorities, so long as we still make time for each other. I do think though that when our schedules and life circumstances change, we’ll have the conversation again, and maybe again after than in a few more years.

You rarely see writing on the subject of going from poly back to monogamy, only the opposite. I’d like to see the conversation open up even more, to accept that a person, or a couple, can be happy moving fluidly from one to the other, so long as their ultimate priorities are in sync.