Mick and Dee Luvbight

Test iPhone post

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:09:30 GMT

One of my favorite PA roadsigns...hey it's great to have a lover, but here you only get sex once a night.

Gagdet Fever!

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:11:11 GMT

Got myself the new iPhone 3G today...we're in Vegas for family vacation, and since the Apple Store is in the Fashion Show Mall, it was efficient for me to stand in line for 3 hours while Dee and youngest daughter shopped for clothes.

I even managed to outspend them just buying the phone.

I figured I save hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour for every hour I'm not at a Blackjack table, so that more than paid for the phone.

We're going to see Bite again at the Stratosphere...youngest daughter has a vampire fetish.

--Mick and Dee

Big day at the ranch...

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:33:26 GMT

We had our first calf of the season today:

click to enlarge

Mother is doing fine:

click to enlarge

This is the year our herd gets large enough to start selling. We should have four more calves within the month. Guess I need to buy the bull a cow treat. Or a box of cigars.

--Mick

Books I've Read, Books to Read

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:08:03 GMT

Per elorin's meme:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

And where the HELL are:

101 The Fountain Head - Ayn Rand
102 Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
103 Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
104 The Story of O - Pauline Reage
105 The Kama Sutra - Vatsayana
106 Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
107 The Art of War - Sun Tzu
108 The Prince - Machiavelli
109 How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
110 The Boy Scout Handbook
111 Future Shock - Alvin Toffler
112 Looking Out for Number One - Robert J. Ringer
113 Das Kapital - Karl Marx
114 The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
115 Mein Kampf - Adolph Hitler
116 The Koran

I added these last 16 because to me "Important, Life Changing Book" and "Great Literature" are two overlapping but different collections. And clearly some of my additions come under the heading of "know thine enemy".

I would have added "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks and "Software Tools" by Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger, but those are important books for programmers; they are not accessible to the general reading public.

I'd love to see other's suggested additions to the list...or reasons I should be intending to read the remainder of the first 100.

Thanks for a very thoughtful post, Elorin!

--Mick

Husband meme

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:06:56 GMT

Per metamistress:

As a 1930s husband, I am
Very Superior

Take the test!

Maybe I'd score higher if I smoked and cursed?

Traveling circus...

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:00:44 GMT

We're in a Super 8 in Jackson, TN with two cars, one room, two beds, two parents, one 17.975 year old daughter, one labrador retriever, two cats and a ball python. Tomorrow we arrive in Texas!

Miles clocked today: 705

--Mick

Back from ShibariCon

Fri, 30 May 2008 04:30:19 GMT

We're back from ShibariCon (it was the fifth ShibariCon, but only our fourth, as we missed last year to go to BoundCon).

It was great seeing a lot of our friends both new and old. But I gotta put out a request: please help me link up your scene name with your LJ name...for example, I was really looking forward to talking with ralinad, whose photography I really admire. I was actually speaking with him on Sunday, but his badge name wasn't Ralinad, so I never put two and two together.

For the first time, Dee and I taught a class (we even made our handout available online: Mick and Dee's guide to Karadas and Rope Dresses). I am really anal about preparing for classes, so it's a good thing we only had one. I spent most of Saturday morning tying rope dresses and karadas on our volunteer models. One dress had been tied years before and had already been worn by Dee at the first ShibariCon. This time, we were very lucky to get roxifox to model it:

Click to enlarge

We enjoyed the class so much we offered to teach it again next year.

Didn't take too many pictures, but I'm hoping that David Lawrence sends me some of his shots of Dee in rope soon, so I can share them.

Dee and I are spending the week loading a fourth POD for our move to Texas. Next Thursday we load the dog and the cats and the one remaining teenager into our two cars and drive off to Texas for good. Well, almost for good; we'll still be back and forth until the Pittsburgh ranch sells, and we probably still have another POD worth of stuff to load after the sale. But we are really looking forward to being in Texas permanently this summer.

Sometime in the next month I'll write a longer ShibariCon trip report with our take on the classes we took, the few photos we can scrape together. For now I wanted people to know that the Rope Dress Handout was online.

--Mick

Fan Haiku

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:04:09 GMT

I've been reviewing the web logs from luvbight.com, and since the Bondage Awards we've gotten a lot more traffic. I like to check the refer logs to see who's linking to us, and I had to run Google Translate on this site: http://www.syuuchi-lab.com/link.htm

Here's their link to us:
過激な状況の中で見せる笑顔は関係の深さを感じます。

Their translated description of our site sounds like haiku:
In extreme conditions show a smile I feel the depth of the relationship.

Gives us both a warm, fuzzy feeling all over :-)

--Mick

Good Movie: "Deception" (no spoilers)

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:28:28 GMT

Dee and I just saw "Deception" starring Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor.

We've not seen any publicity for this movie, so I thought I'd recommend it to this list. I won't give many details so as not to spoil anything, but this was a fun, intelligent thriller involving two good actors and a plot that turns on an anonymous sex club.

Lots of fun.

--Mick and Dee

How Friendly are We?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:58:54 GMT

Your LJ Slut Stats!
Out of your 50 friends, percentages you have:
met		72%
hugged		36%
dated		0%
kissed		8%
seen shirtless		38%
seen naked		32%
had net sex		0%
made out with		6%
had oral sex		6%
fucked		4%
Get your LJ Slut Stats!

Note: these stats mean that either Dee or I have done the activity in question. Since a lot of our friends have been in our hot tub, we have a lot of "seen naked" responses.

Do you really want to do that [y/n]?

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:25:32 GMT

I was editing a photo of Dee in rope suspension over a pool, and clicked on the STRAIGHTEN tool.

Given that Dee is a highly sought after bisexual, I wasn't sure that straightening her would be an improvement...

I'm married to the best bondage model :-)

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:38:05 GMT

It's official...Dee Luvbight won best bondage model in the first annual Bondage Awards. And I'm married to her! I'm such a lucky guy!

--Mick Luvbight

Dee Luvbight Trivia

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:53:39 GMT

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Dee Luvbight!

Never store Dee Luvbight at room temperature.
The National Heart Foundation recommends eating Dee Luvbight at least three times a week.
There is actually no danger in swimming right after you eat Dee Luvbight, though it may feel uncomfortable.
The Eskimos have over fifty words for Dee Luvbight.
Dee Luvbight is picked, sorted and packed entirely in the field!
Human beings are the only animals that copulate while facing Dee Luvbight.
Some hotels in Las Vegas have Dee Luvbight floating in their swimming pools.
Over 2000 people have now climbed Dee Luvbight, with roughly ten percent dying on the way down.
Dee Luvbight can drink over 25 gallons of water at a time.
Only fifty-five percent of men wash their hands after using Dee Luvbight!

Luvbight Trivia

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:22:34 GMT

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Luvbight!

Tradition allows women to propose to Luvbight only during leap years!
Luvbight will give a higher yield if milked when listening to music.
Luvbight orbits Saturn once every 112 Earth days.
In a pinch, the skin from a shark can be used as Luvbight!
All swans in England belong to Luvbight.
Luvbight is worth his weight in gold - literally.
Luvbight is actually a mammal, not a fish.
In the kingdom of Bhutan, all citizens officially become Luvbight on New Year's Day!
Pacman was originally called Luvbightman.
Luvbight can be very poisonous if injected intravenously.

West Texas in the News

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:30:11 GMT

Dee and I were in Midland over the weekend for a wedding. One of my in-laws is a SWAT officer in Midland, and being the closest SWAT team to Eldorado, he was one of the guys who broke the door on the temple.

We didn't get too much time to chat about it (weddings are kinda busy).

Dee was at a hotel in San Angelo the day before, and said the hotel was so full of FBI and police that the internet wouldn't work.

Having grown up in Midland, it is weird to see San Angelo in the news.

Canadian Court to decide if BDSM is protected as "sexual orientation"

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:12:57 GMT

According to a Reuters report on Yahoo News ( http://tinyurl.com/6a5z7z ), a Canadian Court will hear a case from a man who was denied a permit to work as a chauffeur because of his BDSM Lifestyle.

The police tried to get the case thrown out claiming that the protection designed to protect gays and lesbians did not apply to BDSM, but the court rejected the police attempt to block the hearing.

Does protected status make BDSM less fun?

--Mick

I'm vibrating

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:18:29 GMT

My caffeine level score:

Created by OnePlusYou

That's on a quart and a half of "Texas Sweet Tea". We all know caffeine without sugar is like nitrous oxide without the octane.

Astro-Knot

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:22:18 GMT

I've always wanted to be an astronaut, since the Mercury program. I gave up my dream in the last 60's when I learned that I had severe Myopia (-4 to -5 diopters), and therefore neither the Air Force nor the Navy would want me as a pilot.

After watching the launch of Shuttle Endeavour yesterday, I put my family on an airplane back to Pittsburgh, and stayed in Florida for a behind the scenes tour of the Kennedy Space Center. A friend of mine works there, and was able to wrangle an invitation for me to give a talk at the Space Center in return for an inside tour of several parts of the launch complex.

Since the real astronauts are all busy in outer space, they let me use one of their parking spots:

After a tour of the Vehicle Assembly Building, I got to see the Shuttle Discovery in the Orbiter Processing Facility, being readied for its launch on May 24th. NASA uses highly certified riggers to rig access scaffolding around the shuttle, and here's a photo of an "astro-knot":

Here's a wider shot showing the plank (the other end is held by a C-clamp); that's the shuttle's nose below the plank:

Here's a shot of me with the orbiter behind and above me. I'm right under the nose:

After the OPF, and after lunch, I got to visit pad 39B, the northernmost of the two shuttle launching pads:

But they didn't make me stay back...in fact I got to take the elevator all the way to the top of the launch pad and take hundreds of photos. Here's a picture of me with the Vehicle Assembly Building visible behind and below me, about 3 miles away:

All-in-all it was a fantasy come true, and I will be grinning ear-to-ear for several more days just thinking about it.

--Mick

Night launch

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:48:17 GMT

I am still in Florida after yesterday's launch of Endeavour for STS-123. I was lucky enough to obtain causeway tickets for my family, so Dee and I and one of our daughters were able to watch the night launch.

The weather was good for launch, but far too cloudy for good night visibility. Instead of the long arcing trail of light for the whole 8 minutes of powered flight, we got to see the shuttle for only 26 seconds before it vanished into the cloud deck. Still, it makes for a powerful image:

Here we see the launch at T-5 seconds, with the main engines approaching full power:

Here we see the shuttle emerge from behind the huge steam clouds at T+6:

Veterans told me this was a very "disappointing" launch to watch because of the low clouds impeding the launch view, but it was only my second launch, and I was very impressed with the power of the machine. I was also glad it went off on schedule the first time, because I dragged the family down to Florida to watch it.

One things I did notice is that the crowds were bigger. The last launch was poorly attended because most of the people with causeway passes had traveled from Europe in December for the first launch attempt, and were unable to travel back in February for the second attempt.

This time there were more Japanese in the crowd (since the shuttle is carrying the Japanese-built Kibo module for the ISS), and the crowd was 10 deep behind me. Last month we were only 2 deep.

Remember the Alamo!

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:55:21 GMT

Dee at the Alamo, 1991

Today is the 172nd anniversary of The Fall of the Alamo.

William B. Travis' final dispatch read: I shall never surrender or retreat!

Bow your head and tip your wizard's cap...

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:42:36 GMT

...Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died yesterday at the age of 69.

The full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/05gygax.html?ref=arts

I spent many, many hours expanding my imagination and diminishing my reproductive likelihood with his books and manuals.

--Mick

Back from Paradise

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:21:20 GMT

Dee and I spent the last week at Hedonism III in Runaway Bay, Jamaica.

Saturday was our 8th wedding anniversary, and the 10th anniversary of our meeting.

This was our sixth visit to Hedo III, but the first time we went without our friends from Kink in the Caribbean, and it seemed kind of like Vanilla in the Caribbean.

Don't get me wrong...we had a great time; we travelled with another couple from Houston that are dear friends of ours. We played naked with rope in the pool, we took 1,500 photos and even got some good ones, and we got lots of sun. There aren't many resorts in the Caribbean we could go to and play naked with rope and cameras.

It was a relaxing, mellow trip.

But out major fun was raising eyebrows on the people around us..."What's he going to do with those ropes?" Fun, but not as much as having 200 of our kinkiest friends around, too.

We did a couple of fun photo shoots in the sunset...here's one fun photo:

All-in-all this was a great vacation. It was the first time in a long time I've come back from a vacation and still been relaxed and mellow once I got home.

Now I have to process a few hundred photos...

Eight Years

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:07:45 GMT

Dee and I will be celebrating our eighth wedding anniversary this Saturday. We'll be at Hedonism III in Runaway Bay, Jamaica. We've been there for Kink in the Caribbean four times, but we've never been at this resort without 200 of our closest fetish friends.

It will be interesting to see just how kinky the place really is on a "normal" week.

Ending a life of crime...

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:30:53 GMT

I no longer have to worry about going to jail for two years.

On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas Dildo Law was unconstitutional, given the Supreme Court's ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. You can read about the ruling from Law.com, Fox News, and Time or read the court's opinion (it was a 2-1 opinion on the 14th amendment right of privacy).

That means two things:

(1) You can now legally sell dildos, vibrators and male masturbators in Texas.
(2) You can now legally own 6 or more such devices. Under the old law it was legal to own and use a so-called "obscene device", but you couldn't promote it, and if you had 6 or more the law stated that you were presumed to be promoting them, under penalty of two years in prison.

Dee and I have a large stockpile of genital stimulators, and I like to weld new ones, so this F$%@#*ing stupid law was really bothering me.

Thank you Fifth CIrcuit. It was refreshing to read the majority opinion concerning the rights of consenting adults to choose to use sex toys in the privacy of their own home. It's shocking in this day and age to find honest common sense when reading any government document.

--Mick

More shuttle photos

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:21:14 GMT

I'm very happy with my photos of the Space Shuttle launch on Thursday, but I'm well aware that they're not the best shuttle photos ever taken. For example, it's hard to compete with NASA, since they have a monopoly on close cameras.

But I'm sure this is absolutely the best photo ever taken of me, Lochai and the Space Shuttle at the same time:

Me ready to shoot. Note the bubble level on the shoe, and the camera settings checklist taped to the tripod:

The money shot: Atlantis lifts off from Pad 39A:

hi-res: liftoff-8x10.jpg

The shuttle seen edge-on during its roll manuver:

All in all a very satisfying trip, but I have to say that watching the Shuttle Launch reminds me a lot of Disneyworld; you get up really early to stand in line for the right to be body-searched so you can stand in another line to take a bus to stand around and wait for two hours for a 60 second ride. And when you get off, you want to get back in line again.

--Mick