Books! Books! Books!

I finally pulled my bookshelves and books out of storage and set up a corner of our living room as a little book nook/reading area. My husband is bewildered at the amount of joy this simple act has brought me. As a lifelong bookworm, I just missed my books! They've been in storage since our short lived move to SF 6 years ago! It was like greeting old friends as I pulled them from the boxes. Now I suppose it is possible that there's a box of books still sitting in our storage space that I missed, but my big surprise was the titles that just aren't there. The very first how-to books I ever read on BDSM (penthouse forum letters excepted) were S&M 101 by Jay Wiseman and Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns by Philip Miller & Molly Devon and NEITHER of them seem to still be in my collection, thus they've been promptly added to my amazon wishlist.  I did find that I own more "sexy books" than I had realized.  A combination of erotica, BDSM how-to and more intellectual sexual theory take up several shelves.  I'm going to have to do a culling before our extended family is in the house for our daughter's birthday.  I'm thinking it will be fine to leave the sleeping beauty books, but perhaps The Family Jewels will need to find a more discreet spot in our home.

A Decade of Anticipation

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My site is gone, but...Instagram! Twitter!

As you may or may not have noticed, octaviaarena.com is no longer my website. It's some link farm that has absolutely nothing to do with me. You see, I never owned my domain. A friend registered it for me and then (very kindly, I might add) hosted it for free for approximately 15 years. The unfortunate part is that I never even had the chance to renew it when it expired this last time as it was out of redemption and owned by someone else by the time I realized my site was no longer live. So...that kinda sucks, but I'm a grownup now and will be taking care of registering a domain and hosting my site myself.  I suppose new photos were in order anyway. That will happen along with a new site at some point, but in the meantime, I've joined Instagram and Twitter. My handle on both is @MsOctaviaArena

I feel like I left you hanging with my pregnancy....

My daughter is now two and a half. This kid had stories before she even came out of the womb! She was conceived on our one year wedding anniversary during the Hurricane Sandy blackout.  I did not discover I was pregnant until we were 19 weeks in (no, I am not an idiot, I just have PCOS and a very irregular period). She then made her grand entrance into the world via emergency c-section 9 weeks early. Basically, to my knowledge, I was pregnant for 12 weeks. She is so smart, utterly adorable and amazes me nearly every single day.  She is also healthy, but her first year was pretty intense.  To put it succinctly, she was (is?) medically complex.

She was born with a birth defect that required three surgeries in her first year.  She was hospitalized four times and underwent full anesthesia four times before she was 7 months old. Her genetic anomaly is called Imperforate Anus and means that she was born with her tiny baby butthole sealed shut. Modern medicine and surgical techniques are truly miraculous because unless you caught sight of her colostomy scar, if I didn't tell you, you would never know.