It was a baseball cap with an abstract grey and blue pattern across it. He dressed well, but casually. A brilliant white smile lit up his ebony face. His watch showed the time in 3 countries, one of which made emotion run thick in his voice when he said it's name.
He brought four carts full of clothes up to my register, asking that they be rung up a certain way. I did my best to accomodate him. As I ran the register he dispatched one child with him to hang up the hangers that came off the clothes. He set the other to folding and bagging as we discussed the author of a fascinating book he just bought.
Halfway through the third cart another man wandered up to my register. He was a regular customer, a favorite to see. Today he was looking for a wallet. This second man happens to be visually impaired. Not completely blind, but he does have significant trouble. Usually, we have an employee or volunteer to help him shop. Unfortunately, for the last several days our regular floor walker has been out due to serious health issues. We only had 2 employees to handle the entire crush of the holiday sale. Neither of us could leave a register to help him shop.
By now I'm sure you can guess what happened next. Our man in the white hat turned the rest of his transaction over to his wife, took the customer who needed help by the hand and helped him shop for his wallet. When they returned to my register the man in the white hat paid for the wallet, wishing the other customer a happy birthday.
I was touched, but not quite surprised. The identification the man in the white hat showed me when he gave me his credit card named him as a member of the United States Air Force.
We give alot of attention to our solidiers out on the battlefield. This is as it should be, as Heinlein once put it "the most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation." However, let us not forget the every day difference they make while interacting with the world. We see a lot of press about the occasional negative behavior of our service men and women off duty. We tend to ignore the code of ethics they uphold, the example they set for the rest of us, the self-discipline that makes them who they are.
They don't have to be on the battlefield to be heroes.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone.
Ms. Betty
Friday, July 4, 2008
Hey, where's the spanking?
I can't believe it's Friday and I've gone the whole week without posting about anything kinky.
To be honest, work has been on my mind so much and I've been so exhausted I haven't even really thought about spanking and the only close to bear bottom I've seen was when a co-worker bent over and his pants accidentally slipped. However, I don't think I can count that. I seem to have permanently repressed the memory of what it looked like.
(before anyone asks, yes it really was an accident. I thought the poor guy was going to die of humiliation)
I'm not living a completely spank free life, I spanked someone last week, I just haven't blogged about it. There will be a spanking next week, too, but it's not one I'm looking forward to giving. It's a punishment for a repeat offense for someone, and a major backslide for the person in question so I'm very disappointed, all the more so because it's a health related issue. I'm sorry to say this will end up being the harshest punishment I've given anyone in a very long time. That being the case, I can't really get excited about giving it. Still it has to be done.
Here's looking forward to happier spanking days to come.
Ms. Betty
To be honest, work has been on my mind so much and I've been so exhausted I haven't even really thought about spanking and the only close to bear bottom I've seen was when a co-worker bent over and his pants accidentally slipped. However, I don't think I can count that. I seem to have permanently repressed the memory of what it looked like.
(before anyone asks, yes it really was an accident. I thought the poor guy was going to die of humiliation)
I'm not living a completely spank free life, I spanked someone last week, I just haven't blogged about it. There will be a spanking next week, too, but it's not one I'm looking forward to giving. It's a punishment for a repeat offense for someone, and a major backslide for the person in question so I'm very disappointed, all the more so because it's a health related issue. I'm sorry to say this will end up being the harshest punishment I've given anyone in a very long time. That being the case, I can't really get excited about giving it. Still it has to be done.
Here's looking forward to happier spanking days to come.
Ms. Betty
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Ms. Betty's day off
Yep, I finally got one.
I've slept a bit late and I refuse to do anything productive with my day.
Well that last isn't quite true. I intend to go shoe shopping later. No, not blowing the budget on all of this season's latest pumps shoe shopping, work shoe shopping. It seems I've put a few too many miles on the poor old sneakers I've been wearing to work. The heels are completely gone.
So I'm off to find a pair of the super industrial work shoes I used to wear for restaurant work, and enjoy a beautiful Colorado summer day.
Be good everyone.
I've slept a bit late and I refuse to do anything productive with my day.
Well that last isn't quite true. I intend to go shoe shopping later. No, not blowing the budget on all of this season's latest pumps shoe shopping, work shoe shopping. It seems I've put a few too many miles on the poor old sneakers I've been wearing to work. The heels are completely gone.
So I'm off to find a pair of the super industrial work shoes I used to wear for restaurant work, and enjoy a beautiful Colorado summer day.
Be good everyone.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
This modern world
I was on the way to work yesterday when a young lady boarded the bus wearing what was very clearly a collar with a little brass tag in the front. Looking closely, I saw it was indeed an very narrow black nylon dog collar. The tag bore an long engraved number.
I was surprised but not shocked at the boldness of it. It was quite a brave thing for her to be doing, I think.
As I got off the bus I complemented her on the collar and wished her the best of luck. She blushed, but she smiled, too.
I think she's very happy.
Ms. Betty
I was surprised but not shocked at the boldness of it. It was quite a brave thing for her to be doing, I think.
As I got off the bus I complemented her on the collar and wished her the best of luck. She blushed, but she smiled, too.
I think she's very happy.
Ms. Betty
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Dawn has rosy fingers after all...
Back when I was very, very young (barely 18) and very impressionable. I took 18 months worth of writing workshops all with the same professor. These workshops consisted of us all tearing apart a different victim's work while the professor went on and on about how:
1) There was absolutely nothing new any of us could do, everything had already been done and been done better than we could ever do it
and
2) Every word we wrote was wrong. The words were not perfect, only perfect words would do and if they weren't perfect we had to keep working them until they were. This was futile because they never could be perfect but we had to keep trying anyway.
We all wrote crap. None of us was any good and we never would be. Needless to say these workshops did not help me develop my voice as a writer. What they did was leave me with huge knots of anxiety. Even after I quit the classes the imprint of them stayed with me. With time I actually developed a paralyzing fear of writing. I couldn't even write an email without second guessing and revising it 15 times. Write my resume? Forget it. Communicating in words at all became so awkward I couldn't even talk without stuttering, stammering and tripping over everything I said. The words weren't good enough. What business did I have using them?
During the months of these torture sessions, when the teacher found a bit of writing particularly distasteful he would roll his eyes and sneeringly refer to "dawn's rosy finger", a phrase apparently used by some poor student some years before that was, to the professor, an example of the worst thing anyone ever brought into his class. Dawn's rosy finger was a phrase that surpassed "dark and stormy night" in terms of awful. It was, apparently, even worse than the Vogons.
I never got the 'rosy finger' distinction. He was too busy complaining about the rhythm of my words. Apparently, I had/have a bad habit of writing things that have an accidental meter to them. "Poetic" he'd say with a sneer. Apparently this was not good. This was not me carrying on the traditions of the epics of Ancient Greece, or possibly me tapping into the cultural memory of the Irish bards; it was a bad habit I needed to fix. How I didn't know, but according to everyone he was THE writing teacher. No one knew better. If he said it, it was law. He was never wrong.
So I didn't dare argue. Of course my way was wrong, it wasn't THE way...his way. I didn't dare say I liked the phrase "dawn's rosy finger." I loved watching sunrises, still do, (something he apparently avoided at all costs) and to me it seemed like the most natural phrase in the world, the perfect description of those first hooks of pink light that come over the horizon. I just kept it to myself, and worked very very hard to make a non-poetic, non-lyrical paragraph a perfect 5 sentences long without using a single "to be" verb. All while trying to avoid the dreaded "dawn's rosy finger."
Force the words, but don't let them sound forced. Cut it down to a bare minimum, but flesh it out completely. Don't use dialog, but don't write all in narrative. Keep one point of view, but let us get inside every character. Avoid cliches, but match the reader's expectations. Don't try to have new ideas, but don't use old ones either. If you can't hack it, tough. Millions of people think they can write and they're all wrong. What's so different about you?
Good question. Apparently what was so different about me is best explained by Robert Heinlein. Some people just have to write. You can't stop us. No matter how ugly, how painful the process, we have to put words on paper, or on screen, or scribbled on the back of matchbook covers. The disease is incurable. All you can do is make the patient comfortable and patiently bear the creative fits. So I had to write, and had to write they words came to me. I could not do otherwise. I was a very disappointing failure.
Fine if I was to be a failure, so be it. I would write my way, for the sake of the stories, and be happily mediocre. Right for him was not right for me, and it was my pen.
But it's funny how things work out sometimes. I came across a reference to Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn the other day. Greek mythology is a hobby of mine and I know most of the major deities fairly well, but this was the first time I'd heard of Eos.
I looked her up briefly, and found this on
Wikipedia.
So dawn really does have rosy fingers. This unknown novice writer, more than a decade ago now, had stumbled onto the classic description of dawn; the imprint of the culture that shaped the western world. And the petty self-appointed god of the written word was wrong.
Ms. Betty
1) There was absolutely nothing new any of us could do, everything had already been done and been done better than we could ever do it
and
2) Every word we wrote was wrong. The words were not perfect, only perfect words would do and if they weren't perfect we had to keep working them until they were. This was futile because they never could be perfect but we had to keep trying anyway.
We all wrote crap. None of us was any good and we never would be. Needless to say these workshops did not help me develop my voice as a writer. What they did was leave me with huge knots of anxiety. Even after I quit the classes the imprint of them stayed with me. With time I actually developed a paralyzing fear of writing. I couldn't even write an email without second guessing and revising it 15 times. Write my resume? Forget it. Communicating in words at all became so awkward I couldn't even talk without stuttering, stammering and tripping over everything I said. The words weren't good enough. What business did I have using them?
During the months of these torture sessions, when the teacher found a bit of writing particularly distasteful he would roll his eyes and sneeringly refer to "dawn's rosy finger", a phrase apparently used by some poor student some years before that was, to the professor, an example of the worst thing anyone ever brought into his class. Dawn's rosy finger was a phrase that surpassed "dark and stormy night" in terms of awful. It was, apparently, even worse than the Vogons.
I never got the 'rosy finger' distinction. He was too busy complaining about the rhythm of my words. Apparently, I had/have a bad habit of writing things that have an accidental meter to them. "Poetic" he'd say with a sneer. Apparently this was not good. This was not me carrying on the traditions of the epics of Ancient Greece, or possibly me tapping into the cultural memory of the Irish bards; it was a bad habit I needed to fix. How I didn't know, but according to everyone he was THE writing teacher. No one knew better. If he said it, it was law. He was never wrong.
So I didn't dare argue. Of course my way was wrong, it wasn't THE way...his way. I didn't dare say I liked the phrase "dawn's rosy finger." I loved watching sunrises, still do, (something he apparently avoided at all costs) and to me it seemed like the most natural phrase in the world, the perfect description of those first hooks of pink light that come over the horizon. I just kept it to myself, and worked very very hard to make a non-poetic, non-lyrical paragraph a perfect 5 sentences long without using a single "to be" verb. All while trying to avoid the dreaded "dawn's rosy finger."
Force the words, but don't let them sound forced. Cut it down to a bare minimum, but flesh it out completely. Don't use dialog, but don't write all in narrative. Keep one point of view, but let us get inside every character. Avoid cliches, but match the reader's expectations. Don't try to have new ideas, but don't use old ones either. If you can't hack it, tough. Millions of people think they can write and they're all wrong. What's so different about you?
Good question. Apparently what was so different about me is best explained by Robert Heinlein. Some people just have to write. You can't stop us. No matter how ugly, how painful the process, we have to put words on paper, or on screen, or scribbled on the back of matchbook covers. The disease is incurable. All you can do is make the patient comfortable and patiently bear the creative fits. So I had to write, and had to write they words came to me. I could not do otherwise. I was a very disappointing failure.
Fine if I was to be a failure, so be it. I would write my way, for the sake of the stories, and be happily mediocre. Right for him was not right for me, and it was my pen.
But it's funny how things work out sometimes. I came across a reference to Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn the other day. Greek mythology is a hobby of mine and I know most of the major deities fairly well, but this was the first time I'd heard of Eos.
I looked her up briefly, and found this on
Wikipedia.
As the dawn goddess, Eos with "rosy fingers" opened the gates of heaven[2] so that Helios could ride his chariot across the sky every day. In Homer (Iliad viii.1; xxiv.695), her saffron-colored robe is embroidered or woven with flowers (Odyssey vi:48 etc); rosy-fingered and with golden arms, she is pictured on Attic vases as a supernaturally beautiful woman, crowned with a tiara or diadem and with the large white-feathered wings of a bird.
So dawn really does have rosy fingers. This unknown novice writer, more than a decade ago now, had stumbled onto the classic description of dawn; the imprint of the culture that shaped the western world. And the petty self-appointed god of the written word was wrong.
Ms. Betty
Monday, June 30, 2008
Weekend? What's a weekend?
I don't talk about work on this blog as a general rule. The reason for that is that it's very hard to describe what goes on in that den of chaos (said affectionately) without being more specific than I'd like about the location. But today I'm going to try, since the place seems to have swallowed my life for now.
Staff turn-over is a normal part of any business. It's sad seeing people you've come to know and feel close to leave, but usually the business chugs along as new people blend in and pick up where someone else left off. Sometimes though, that isn't so easy to do. I'm not sure what would be a "normal" rate of turn-over, but when you have about 25 employees and you lose 5 of them in two weeks, you can't help feeling mortally, or at least seriously, wounded. There are holes to plug everywhere and everyone is scrambling frantically to try and fill the gaps.
In my case it isn't all bad, the gaps have lead to a promotion for me, but it also means I'm doing something entirely different than I was doing before which is taking some getting used to. It also means that since we are still very short handed I'm working more than twice as many hours and filling in not one, but two spots until further notice.
Again, none of this is meant as complaint. I love where I work. I love the people, I love the company, I love the cause we work for. I go in in the morning giddy with excitement and leave at the end of the day physically exhausted, but full of that warm glow of good work well done.
I know our struggles are temporary. Things will be back to normal in a few weeks, so I'm not too worried. But right now it's very hard to think of anything but work. There won't be much spanking going on for awhile, I'm afraid.
Fear not, dear readers. I haven't lost the spanking bug. In fact I have one specific male co-worker I threaten to put over my knee at least weekly. (A lot of spanking banter abounds in our little shop so I can do this fairly safely. There are even a few smacks exchanged here and there. I have some very kinky co-workers, it seems.) I'm just short on time to tan bottoms. Even little bunny's getting a bit neglected.
I'm not sure I'll have much to talk about. I'm only home and awake about 4 or 5 hours a day currently, so I don't even have much time to read the news, but I'm going to try to keep posting. If it gets a bit quiet over here though, you know where I am.
Ms. Betty
Staff turn-over is a normal part of any business. It's sad seeing people you've come to know and feel close to leave, but usually the business chugs along as new people blend in and pick up where someone else left off. Sometimes though, that isn't so easy to do. I'm not sure what would be a "normal" rate of turn-over, but when you have about 25 employees and you lose 5 of them in two weeks, you can't help feeling mortally, or at least seriously, wounded. There are holes to plug everywhere and everyone is scrambling frantically to try and fill the gaps.
In my case it isn't all bad, the gaps have lead to a promotion for me, but it also means I'm doing something entirely different than I was doing before which is taking some getting used to. It also means that since we are still very short handed I'm working more than twice as many hours and filling in not one, but two spots until further notice.
Again, none of this is meant as complaint. I love where I work. I love the people, I love the company, I love the cause we work for. I go in in the morning giddy with excitement and leave at the end of the day physically exhausted, but full of that warm glow of good work well done.
I know our struggles are temporary. Things will be back to normal in a few weeks, so I'm not too worried. But right now it's very hard to think of anything but work. There won't be much spanking going on for awhile, I'm afraid.
Fear not, dear readers. I haven't lost the spanking bug. In fact I have one specific male co-worker I threaten to put over my knee at least weekly. (A lot of spanking banter abounds in our little shop so I can do this fairly safely. There are even a few smacks exchanged here and there. I have some very kinky co-workers, it seems.) I'm just short on time to tan bottoms. Even little bunny's getting a bit neglected.
I'm not sure I'll have much to talk about. I'm only home and awake about 4 or 5 hours a day currently, so I don't even have much time to read the news, but I'm going to try to keep posting. If it gets a bit quiet over here though, you know where I am.
Ms. Betty
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