My daughter is visiting with me from Florida. She’s the one who met her husband on SexyAds.com and is one of our favorite success stories. Anyway, I’m going to take her to Auckland (in the rain) and show her the sites and then we’re headed to Rotorua for a bit of touristing there.

I’ll be back with photos.

There are days that I am and then I try to stop myself and think about how lucky I am. Once I do that, I immediately start to feel grateful for all that I have.

My ex-husband is probably the grumpiest person I’ve ever known. He’s a brilliant man and has a lot of good qualities but his negative personality is not fun to be around. I’ve often thought that if he concentrated on what he has and how wonderful it feels, then he’d be happier. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just me wishing he had a better life.

When you’re not feeling on top of your game, try thinking about how lucky you are. No matter what’s going wrong in your life, there’s a lot that is right about it. You probably have two arms and two legs, feel relatively healthy, have a family who puts up with you when you’re grumpy, a job that pays you enough to live, sunshine much of the time, rain when you need it – and I could go on but I’d have to throw up from grateful overdose.

When we are grateful, we’re happy. When we’re happy we attract other happy people to us. That makes everyone happier. If you’re having a bad day, try it and let me know.

Remember back in the early days of Playboy when it was finally OK to look at sexuality? In spite of what the internet has offered in terms of accessibility to pornography, Hugh Hefner taught us all that it was OK to get the magazine. The photos each showed off the sexuality of the woman but done so in such a classy manner that “normal” everyday people were buying the magazine. I only read the articles, I promise.

When the Internet was in nearly every house in the US it became OK to look at sexuality and many (most?) men had a field day looking at women who were sexual in a way that their wives and girlfriends were not. Here was a new sexual outlet that made them feel good and they took to it like a magnet jumps on a fridge.

Now that the world wide web is in nearly every house around the world, changes are still happening. Now it’s the women who are realizing that it’s not just OK to look at sexuality, it’s finally OK to “be” sexual in that safe environment.

When we first started SexyAds.com, in the sealed section we had a few raunchy photos of women submitted and few more raunchy photos of couples and the rest were men. There were heaps of regular photos too and still are. Lately we’re seeing more women comfortable with uploading a sexy photo of herself. Not necessarily nude, but the photos evoke a sexuality we weren’t seeing five or ten years ago.

Women are catching up to the fact that sexuality, touching and sex are an important part of a relationship and a woman wants to choose a guy who’s going to flip her switches.

Before you tell me, I know it’s possible to have a relationship without sex and be completely happy. I applaud those who can be happy in that situation. Don’t count me in that crowd because I crave touching, being touched and everything that goes with it. They don’t call me a sexy old broad for nothing.

In Australia there is a geek magazine that comes out monthly called APC and it reviews computers, printers, operating systems, games and all things a geek needs to know more about. In their March issue 2008 they ran a big spread about how to get lucky on the Second Life site. I nearly fell over. I don’t normally read the magazine because there’s so little geek in me it’s not funny, but sometimes when you’re on the throne and there’s nothing else to read, even the APC magazine will do. Anyway, according to the article, women join Second Life with all their parts – ready for action it seems. Men join and they get a body but they don’t get a penis. They have to buy one. The point I’m making is that 5 years ago APC wouldn’t have run a story about how to get lucky with cybersex. It’s OK to talk about it now.

We all have fantasies, I’m sure. Many women fantasize about slowly undressing before a roomful of appreciative males. Now most of us wouldn’t dare getting up on stage in a club and doing that (I’d worry that my pasties would fall off or that I’d get booed off the stage) but online that’s what is happening night after night. They are feeling sexy and safe in front of adoring crowds in video chatrooms all over the net.

Has this changed the morality of the people? I don’t think so. We’re all the same people we were before. We wouldn’t think about robbing a bank or stealing from our neighbors or conking our grandmother over the head. We still go to church and PTA meetings. We still vote and we’re still kind to animals. The difference is that we’re taking charge of our happiness in every aspect of our lives – including sex.

Imagine seven middle-aged women posing nude for a calendar and losing money! That’s what happened to a group of mothers in Spain who wanted to raise money for their kids’ school. They’d heard that a similar group of women in Britain had made more than a million pounds with a discreet nude calendar back in 2000. Their story was then made into a movie called “Calendar Girls”. They figured they couldn’t lose.

They all used different objects to hide their private parts but they were mostly nude. One posed with Christmas tinsel, one carried a shotgun and wore a fox pelt and one woman laid on a picnic table and covered herself with a red umbrella. Sounds good to me. I’m thinking heaps of men would buy it.

Men didn’t buy it, nor did women. They have 5,000 unsold copies and the women are in debt for $16,000.

How did it go so wrong?

The women are amateurs in the world of photography and publishing and nobody thought to check to see when the calendar needed to be produced in order to hit the holiday trade. Now, not only don’t they have money to improve their one classroom for all elementary students in the village, they also have no space to store the unsold calendars.

Now that the news media has picked up on the complaint by the printer that the women were behind in their payments for the calendar printing, maybe someone will buy the calendars and sell them on the net. I’d buy one just for the school fundraiser.