About a month ago I picked up an injured stray cat. Tonight I’m very happy to say she’s finally gone to her new loving home! :)

She was adopted by one of my co workers, seen here picking her up from my place. She was super adorable sitting in the carrier.

He sent me this photo shortly after he got home. She’s obviously settling in nicely! (note: that big pink splotch is the area where she was injured when I found her. It’s perfectly healed now, just waiting for the fur to grow back)

Yaaaaaaaay! :D

She’s a total sweetheart, and I was just a little sad to see her go. My cats, on the other hand, are extremely happy to have her gone! She was getting increasingly violent towards them. :\ Now we can all get back to our normal lives of cuddling while watching Project Runway together and sleeping in adorable positions without the fear of being attacked. Everyone wins. :)

Aaaaand maybe one last picture of the stray. Because she’s adorable.

Boston was my home for four and a half years while I was in college, and today it was the site of a fatal bombing attack.

Everyone I know in Boston is safe and accounted for (thank you Facebook, you were very useful today) but I’ve been having chills all day since I found out. It’s not casualties in some foreign war, it’s an attack on my home, where people I love still live.

I was only 12 when 9/11 happened and the actual impact of that day didn’t hit me until many years later because I was in Junior High in Arkansas and the videos of collapsing sky-scrapers didn’t mean anything to me. I was actually kind of excited and thought it was all very interesting, something I feel a bit of shame about now.

On a scale of awfulness 9/11 was obviously so much worse, but on that day in 2001 New York City was a mythical place that might as well have been in another country to me. When I watched the videos from the streets I didn’t recognize anything, didn’t remember good times at that restaurant or chasing pigeons in that park. It was a thing that was happening and I knew objectively it was bad, but it didn’t seem to affect me at all.

Today was different.

Watching videos of the bombs exploding I remembered all the times I had walked past that exact bit of sidewalk, right there, that piece of concrete now covered in blood and shards of human bodies.

I read in a report that the windows had been blown out of the Marathon Sports store, and I remembered I had bought my trusty metal water bottle there.

I never ran or even went to see a marathon, but I crossed that finish line many times – out happily shopping with friends on a crisp spring day, stomping through dirty snow to an appointment downtown, sadly trudging home through the rain after another disappointing frat party.

I heard tentative reports that the bombs were placed in trash cans – if that’s true, I probably threw stuff away in those exact trash cans many times. I wonder if it was the one outside the Dunkin Donuts, were you were guaranteed to be ambushed by a pan-handler? Or perhaps the one on the corner by the Bank of America where that drunk guy once offered to buy my awesome shirt?

I remember my first 4th of July in Boston, I was living in a frat for the summer that was right on the Boston side of the river. I was in my room working at around 6pm when I heard the boom of an explosion. I had just finished my freshman year and was still getting used to not living in Arkansas anymore – my first thought was “Oh my god, I’m in Boston on Independence Day, this would be a great place for a terrorist to attack.”

It wasn’t an attack of course – they were setting off fireworks early to test their detonation mechanisms. I felt awful silly, but that sudden realization that I lived in a potential terrorist target never left me. Today it was reinforced, and while I’m incredibly grateful no one I know was injured, there is a pain in my heart and a great deal of anger that someone would dare do this to a place I called home.

To end on a somewhat lighter note, check out what MIT’s Green Building looks like tonight: (picture not mine, pulled from facebook, unsure of source)

Love you, MIT nerds. Love you, Boston. I’ll be thinking of you all tonight.

EDIT 4/21/13: A home has been found! She is no longer available for adoption. :)

A couple weeks ago I found an injured stray cat in my neighborhood. I took her in and got her well, and now she needs a new loving home!

Deets:

• Female
• Tabby
• Approx. Middle-Aged
• Spayed
• FeLV/FIV Negative
• Litterbox trained
• Not microchipped
• Recently de-flea’d and de-worm’d
• Extremely friendly with people
• Not so friendly with other cats

This cat is really really wonderful and if I didn’t already have two of my own I’d keep her. She’s extremely affectionate and cuddly, loves curling up on laps to sleep, and has never once clawed me (the same can not be said of my cats…).

She’s really kind of a Cat: Classic Edition. She does the head-rubby thing and the dough-kneading thing and likes to sit in boxes.

She likes to sleep on my bed and sit at the window and watch outside and gnaw at catnip mice when they’re around.

She does NOT get along so very well with other cats… All interactions between her and my cats are closely supervised and rather tense.

So if you live around SF, are looking for a first cat, and want an easy-going loveable non-clawing fuzzy kitty, send me an email at cl@rebayley.com and come meet her! I think she’d be particularly good for households with children or several roommates. Like I said, very good with people.

Also the dark pattern around her mouth makes it look like she’s just eaten a grape popsicle. Pretty much the cutest thing ever.

The full (rather long) story:

March 19th was one of those dreary nights particular to San Francisco where the air was just cold enough to make you shiver, the rain just heavy enough to dampen your clothes, and the wind just strong enough to get under your coat, but none of it really bad enough to keep you indoors. I was coming home late from an engagement in the city, treading my normal route back from BART which happens to take me by a local park.

I’ve seen stray cats in this park before but they all hissed and ran off before I got within 15 feet of them. This particular park isn’t exactly what one would call ‘safe,’ so I wasn’t willing to chase them. This time though, the cat saw me first.

I heard a plaintive ‘meow’ and turned to see a bedraggled looking tabby cat walking towards me. I stopped and watched as it approached, friendly as you please, and started rubbing its head on my legs.

It was dirty but not overly so, and seemed thin but not necessarily underfed. I thought at first it must surely be an outdoor cat that got locked out in the rain, because no stray I’ve ever encountered acts this friendly towards humans. I crouched and petted it for a few moments debating what to do – I could take it home and get it warm and dry then try to find its owner, or I could trust it would find its own way back and leave it in the park.

Then my hand slipped around to scratch under her belly and I felt something wet – not the wet of ‘caught in the rain fur,’ but the wet of ‘oozing open wound.’

I picked up her front legs and saw on her stomach a patch about 4 inches in diameter of hairless skin with several gaping holes exposing the underlying muscle & fat. That made my decision for me, and I quickly picked her up and brought her back to my house where I shut her in my bathroom with a great deal of food and water.

Despite having two cats of my own I had no idea what to do with an injured stray so I contacted the woman who runs the sanctuary I’d gotten my own dear Molly from. She recommended a clinic out in Walnut Creek that does special deals for rescue cats, and also came over to see if she could do anything for the injury. Unfortunately neither of us had any clue what could have caused such an odd looking wound, although the sanctuary woman said she thought it might be mammary cancer. (yes, that’s kitty breast cancer) Cancer bad enough to cause this wound would be pretty much a death sentence for a stray cat, but I was hoping it might just be a nasty bite or something.

I rented a Zipcar and took her in the next morning to the Civic Feline Clinic in Walnut Creek, a wonderful cat-only vet that has a special drop-off program with greatly discounted rates for rescue kitties. Basically instead of having an appointment, you drop the cat off in the morning and pick it up at the end of day and the vet takes a look at it whenever they have free time. The downside was that I had to register the cat under a rescue program, which meant the call with results would go to the woman who headed the sanctuary, not me. I came back and picked her up after work, but the receptionist only knew that they’d given her antibiotics, not whether the doctor thought it was cancer or not. I called the sanctuary woman as well, but she said she hadn’t heard anything from them yet either.

I didn’t hear anything about the diagnosis until the next morning. I got a voicemail while I was on BART, and listened to it during my walk to work. It was the woman from the sanctuary, and it was not good news.

The mysterious wound was a ruptured abscess, and the vet did think it was probably from mammary cancer. It was badly infected so it was impossible to tell definitively, and she wanted me to bring the cat back in a week to see how much it had healed.

No one was optimistic, and it seemed very likely that we’d have to put the cat down.

Needless to say this was rather upsetting for me – I heard this news as I got to work and so I did a bit of crying at my desk – always humiliating, but luckily no one but a good friend saw me. (ah, the perks of coming in early)

I had a week to come to terms with the fact that I might have to kill this cat I had ‘saved’ from the street. It made me feel incredibly powerless, something I already wrestle with in other areas of my life. I decided I would give her the best treatment I could in what might be her last week alive, giving her as much food as she would eat and sitting and cuddling with her multiple times a day. I felt awfully guilty because I had her confined in a small windowless bathroom, but no way in hell was I releasing an infected, un-tested cat into my apartment with my own two kitties. Priorities.

The one happy point was that the antibiotics did seem to be helping – her skin was no longer inflamed and hanging away from her body quite so much, plus she continued to be extremely friendly and positive (if a cat can be such a thing).

Eventually the day came, and I once again got a Zipcar and dropped her off at the clinic. When I came back that afternoon they had me wait so the vet could talk to me personally.

I did so with butterflies in my throat.

Eventually I followed the doctor back to her office and perched awkwardly on an extra rolly chair. The doctor had one of those faces that I seem to see a lot in medical offices, a face that has been so exhausted by dealing with terrible situations that I could get no emotional read on whether the results I was about to hear were good or bad.

“Well,” she started, “this cat has healed amazingly well in the past week and I no longer think she has cancer.”

!!!

We talked a bit further about her condition and she asked me to bring her back in another week to confirm the healing was continuing, but mostly what I remember from those few minutes was how my cheeks started to hurt because I couldn’t stop smiling.

I did bring her back a week later, and she was pronounced as having complete good health. In fact, at the end of our conversation another vet came up with a question about another patient of theirs who was in bad shape and the doctor said to me, “take your healthy cat and go home!”

By this point all the holes had closed, only the largest leaving a scabbed area, and the fur had started to regrow. I was actually worried when I first saw that because all of a sudden these weird dark patches were appearing on her skin – then I realized she’s a tabby, and that was her hair pattern coming back in.

Now after all that, I want to find someone who can give her a real, full and loving home! If you’re interested in living with this purring, loving lap-warmer, email me at cl@rebayley.com.

Taped onto an ad poster in downtown Berkeley. Street art makes me happy. :)

Because what this blog needed was a little bit less maturity. ;)

Sorry about the lack of updates recently. I was all “hey I’m working for a porn company! I’m gonna write all about it.”

Then I never update again.

I’ve actually got plenty of posts planned, but I’m trying to work out the best way to include adult content on a site that already has a lot of inbound links. I’ve got the strategy worked out, but there aren’t any decent WordPress plugins for adult websites so I have to write my own.

That’s going, uh, slowly.

(totally meant to post this on Christmas, but it slipped my mind. Still entertaining though!)

For Christmas, Kink put up several delicious-smelling christmas trees in the entryway. They even put presents under it, a giant santa hat on top, and decorated it with lights and shiny ornaments.

Wait a minute, those ornaments look strange…

Welp, that certainly seems appropriate.

Hope y’all had a good Holiday, and I’ll see you in 2013!

I recently joined FetLife, a social network for kinky people, and my jaw dropped when I saw the list of options for Gender, Sexuality, and Role. There were terms on there I had to Google, and believe me, that doesn’t happen very often.

What struck me even more was that these massive lists of options were the only real alternative I’d seen to the gender binary. Let’s compare to two other social behemoths, Facebook and OkCupid.

Facebook’s Options:

The addition of ‘civil union’ and ‘domestic partnership’ are sweet, but mostly it’s pretty standard stuff.

OkCupid’s Options:

Welp, that’s about as simple as you can get.

FetLife’s Options:

…yeah.

And if you don’t feel great about picking one over the others, they have this cheeky reminder:

I was extremely pleased to see a list of genders beyond the standard 2 (or 3 if you count Craigslist’s “m” “w” and “t”) but I was also really overwhelmed. Naturally, I thought I’d share and get all of you overwhelmed too. :p

There are a lot of different holidays that get celebrated this time of year, but I’m going to cover them all in one fell swoop and give you the gift of Mr. December 2012.

It’s been 3 weeks since I started my new job at Kink.com, and so far I’m extremely happy to be working there. Most of the first blush of “OMG I actually work for a porn company SQUEE” has faded and now I can actually dig in and enjoy the work itself. I’ve found the office environment to be fascinatingly corporate in many aspects  - they have an HR department and standard processes for requesting leave and org charts and facilities requests and all that stuff – but extremely unique in others. Over the past several weeks some things have really smacked me in the face (metaphorically) as stand-out realizations about the life of a porn employee.

NOTE: Many of the links in this post go directly to pages with pornographic content, although this post itself has no inappropriate visuals. It does, however, contain sexually explicit language, which you may feel uncomfortable with if you are underage and/or related to me. Consider yourself warned.

Sometimes you have to be quiet while you’re walking to the bathroom because they’re filming porn next door.

Most of Kink’s filming takes place in the basement or upper floors of the Armory but the arena for Ultimate Surrender is on the first floor close to the main entrance. It also happens to be on the way to the main bathroom on the floor, so every now and then when I’m headed to pee there’s a flashing red light admonishing me to be quiet because people are having sex behind those doors.

Sometimes you’ll meet people who you’ve recently seen in porn.

I was sitting in a meeting about medical flex account benefits, which had rows of chairs and projected slides and everything, and a guy in the back raised his hand and asked a question. I glanced at him briefly by instinct, turned back, then did a huge double take. It was Van Darkholme, director and frequent dom on Bound Gods. Just the night before I had watched him tie up and flog some hot guy’s dick, and now he was in my benefits seminar asking a question about medical expenses. Surreal.

Sometimes you’ll see people in porn who you’ve recently met.

Three days a week we have lunch on the upper floor of the Armory (yes, that Upper Floor) and one day I was sitting & talking with some people from the production department. It was clear from the conversation that one of them was a model who had a shoot going on later that day, but I didn’t get a name. Later that night I was watching a video from Divine Bitches and realized the woman who was torturing some guy’s cock was the same women I’d chatted with over lunch. It was in fact Maitresse Madeline, another of Kink’s directors and regular dommes.

There are a lot fewer dirty jokes than at other companies.

There are far fewer unintentional double entendres when you’re already talking about sex and most things are single entendres anyways. Sex isn’t as funny when you’re supposed to be talking about it. It can happen though – I was talking with some developer friends of mine, one of whom was working furiously to get hardcoregangbang.com ready for release, and the other described the situation as “she’s kind of slammed by hardcore gangbangs right now.” Giggle. :)

It’s hard to get used to watching porn at work.

For the entire first two weeks I would flinch every time I opened up a page with graphic material on it, even though it’s not only not prohibited but required for me to do my job. The instinctual panic moment of ‘oh god close it so my boss doesn’t see’ was really deeply rooted in my instinctual psyche. I imagine it’s similar to what Facebook employees go through when they just start and go from hiding their Facebook use at work to being expected to have it open in a tab all the time.

There really isn’t anything that’s NSFW.

When making hardcore kinky pornography is the point of your company, there isn’t much that’s “not safe” to have on your screen at work.

Porn is really, really, distracting.

The girl I sit next to (who is totally awesome) has the job of uploading Kink’s clips to sites like RedTube. Part of this is her watching all the potential clips and choosing which ones go on which site, which means that porn is playing on her large monitor pretty much constantly. I, whose monitor is usually covered in database diagrams or spreadsheets, often catch myself tilting my head to the left just to think for a minute and 5 minutes later realizing I’ve been zoned out watching the porn on her screen. Whoops.

So yeah, it’s been pretty great. The people who work there are an awesome bunch, and I go to work every day in a giant brick castle. It has its downsides like any other job (my work keeps me at a computer most of the day, the bureaucracy of requesting things is annoying, castles can get really fucking cold) but this one has its own particular perks. And yes, I do get free acces to all of Kink’s considerable online offering of porn. ;)

I am so incredibly proud to announce that the Bad Boys of Boston calendar is available for purchase now online!

As many of you know, the Bad Boys calendar was my pet project for the past 2 years. Now that I’m gone it has continued on without me, thanks to the efforts of Aki, Liz, and the wonderful brothers of SAE. I have had absolutely nothing to do with this year’s calendar, and I can’t wait to see it.

As always, all proceeds go to charity. Buy one for yourself and a couple for your friends – it’s a great Christmas present!

Bad Boys of Boston 2013

Oh, and here’s your gratuitous beefcake shot (taken from their facebook page):

Yum. :)