#gratitudeNow: The heights

So I’m a busy guy.

This morning I was cleaning the kitchen, as Missy tasked me to do before work. (Task is an interesting word in this case. She told me to do it, while asking, so even though it’s not really a portmanteau, I’m treating it that way.).

As someone who is very goal-driven, who loves serving his dominant wife, and who craves the simplicity of being tasked, this worked out well for me.

I did in fact, get the kitchen cleaned.

So I grabbed my phone, and I wrote it down in WeMinder, and even snapped a photo and texted it to her.

She was pleased.

I however, was not.

Because as I was entering the good behavior into WeMinder, I noticed something wasn’t right with the look and feel of the screen.

After a bit of thought, it came to me. The height of the card wasn’t right, when the “behavior chip” of my 1 new good behavior was showing on the card.

It pushed everything down, making my brand new bottom navigation icons push too far down.

So I sat and reasoned it out for a few minutes.

I realized that a good fix for this problem was to reduce the height of the behavior list from “40vh” down to 25, 30, or 35vh respectively depending on if I were showing 1, 2, or no chips whatsoever.

Without getting too deep into the weeds of technical details, I figured out exactly how to do that, and got a hot fix ready, tested it, and deployed it into production in WeMinder.

It’s out there now, working just fine. I know, I checked just before I started writing this post.

But this post isn’t really about viewport-height. It’s about the heights of owning my own business, while also having a full-time job, while also serving my wife, while also being polyamorous, while also… the many other things I do.

It’s often really challenging. I have a lot going on in my life.

But honestly, that’s a blessing. My mind is pretty sharp. As long as I take good care of myself, I can maintain and even increase that sharpness.

This means I need to get decent sleep, allow myself rest, maintain good boundaries by often saying no to the things I can’t do, and practice copious amounts of self-compassion.

By and large, I really do, do that.

I’m 50 years old, and while sometimes that seems like a lot, it really isn’t.

I feel wonderfully in touch with who and what and where I am. I like the me I am, and the way I’m stretching myself to be more.

It feels good.

#gratitudeNow: I'm down with OTC, yeah you know me.

So I got to go on the Off The Cuffs Podcast about a month ago, and the episode just dropped. It was a blast. Dick, Max, and Gwen are fun, awesome folks who really do an amazing job.

I really appreciated the chance to go on. Both Dick and Max had special sauce that mixed well with my own. Max himself is an ageplayer, and Dick has a thing for behavior charts.

These are my people!

We had this fun, filthy, very thinky conversation about ageplay, about discipline, and about WeMinder. I really dig their podcast. I only discovered it myself a few months ago, but I love it enough that I decided to join their Patreon, too.

One of my favorite things about OTC is that they treat ageplay as a first-class citizen. We get to sit at the table with the big folks or something, just like any other fetish. They’re very matter of fact about it, in a way that’s super refreshing.

#gratitudeNow: An Agency Position

So WeMinder’s been live for 42 days, not that I’m counting. (Of course I am.)

It’s gone pretty well so far. The number of subscribers is growing. I’ve had a few departures, found a few bugs I’m working on, and had some truly great things happen because of it.

There’s this thing I’ve become very, very aware of, related to having my own software company. I have a yet further, deeper understanding of the concept of agency.

Agency is one of those tricky meta-concepts. It means both “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” as well as “an establishment engaged in doing business for another“.

Put more plainly, in a very real way I am WeMinder. It does things because I coded it to do them. It has customers because of my efforts (or lack thereof). It improves because I improve it. Any issues or problems it has, it has because of me. Any solutions to said problem are squarely on my shoulders and no one else’s.

That is a huge deal. It’s good in many ways, but it is also a profoundly difficult thing in some ways I wasn’t expecting too.

I remember over two decades ago, building my own Windows PC with a friend. We bought all the components at a couple of different places, including the case, the hard drive, the logic board, the memory. Over a weekend, we put it together, installed the OS, all that jazz.

When it booted up for the first time, I was so damn proud of myself. I had a fairly powerful computer, and had it for a fairly reasonable cost.

A few months later the damn thing started to have issues. I lamented to my friend Nullmoniker, who helped me build it, that the huge downside of what I’d done was that when it was super flaky at 10pm on a Sunday, there was no one I could call to help me, that I was on my own.

There are aspects to owning, to being WeMinder that are like that.

But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve said for a while now that part of the process behind WeMinder’s evolution was that I had to emotionally mature as a person. There are aspects to being in relationships I understand so much better in my late 40’s, than I ever did before.

Today as I’m sitting here fixing a WeMinder bug, I realize that maturity thing has to do with being a technologist and a businessperson too. I see that one of the ways I’ve matured is that I’ve embraced the concept of practice.

When you begin a practice, you commit yourself to well… practicing it. You embrace the concept that you’re doing a thing, but that there isn’t any done per se. There’s always going to be a bug to fix, a feature to add, a place to promote the app, someone to tell, something to improve. The joy isn’t in being done with the whole thing. There is no done.

There’s only doing.

Which makes me laugh, because I’ve been studying that particular truth for a very long time now. And there’s no end to that in sight, thank goodness.

And we're live....

So for a year now, I’ve been working on a secret project, a behavior chart app for people in discipline based relationships. It’s not a secret anymore.

It’s called WeMinder. And I released it today.

I’m very proud of it. WeMinder is the culmination of multiple decades of experience as a kinky person, and a year of very hard work.

The application consists of two big features.

There’s the chart, used by the top and the bottom to track the bottom’s good behaviors and misbehaviors. It’s also where the top records rewards and punishments.

Then there’s the mood thermometer, used by both partners to make sure that their feelings are known.

You can see more about that in a video over at the WeMinder blog.

I can’t wait for you to try it.

#gratitudeNow: Support, I has it

I am so lucky.

I have a crew of people who have my back, in all sorts of ways.

First there’s my friend and co-worker T. who is incredibly knowledgeable and digs in to help me whenever I ask.

Then there’s my wife Missy, who is my biggest cheerleader, and who lifts me up when I’m blue. I’m in awe with how much she loves me a little bit more than the day before, and has been doing so for more than a decade.

My brother Spacey, from whom I have no secrets. We lean on each other for perspective, and help. He’s constantly there for me.

And then there are my WeMinder beta testers, who lovingly trade ideas with me, and spend time considering all sorts of possibilities.