A new girl

Well, get all excited and go to a yawning festival... it's starting again.

I had an unexpected date tonight. I say "unexpected" because I didn't dress for it, mostly because until about 5:30 I had no idea it was even in the offing. The last several nights I've had some great, if wide-ranging, late-night conversations with a woman we'll call Linda. She's 44, recently-divorced, has one son who's out of the house, and most surprisingly, she and I were born in the same place and we know an aburd number of places and things in common about that region. We agreed to meet after work, and did.

I was really bowled over by her. Not just looks -- she described herself initially as "chubby, but smile a lot," but that was a completely unfair description, because she was really well-proportioned, and she was dressed very elegantly from work -- but just the way she talked, the way she thought. I kept wanting to ask her where she'd been for the last 20 years, except that I already knew the answer. She'd been married.

For the first time in a long time, the ease we'd had talking on the phone carried over almost entirely into in-person. The place we went eventually sent a few gentle hints they were trying to close, and we discovered we'd been talking for well over three hours. We went back out to the cars and talked for a few more minutes, then said goodbye.

So, what interests me about her? She's had an interesting life, and even with what she said was a difficult divorce, she's not sour about anything. She admits she's unused to dating, since she'd been married since forever, a situation I've seen before with Penny and a couple of other people to a lesser extent. More than anything, she's just... warm. A good person, distinct in who she is, what she wants.

Oh, and if you're keeping score, she was wearing a really nice suit and heels that showed off her really elegant calves.

No, we did not kiss.

I am now home, installing Windows 2000 on a truly ancient Toshiba laptop. I've gotten so spoiled by my iBook that the crudeness of Windows just shocks me. The Toshiba itself, an old Satellite 4000-series laptop, is a horse. It feels gigantic and chunky and awkward. Its Pentium II/233 chip and 20Gb hard disk were once spectacular... now they just feel old. I do sort of miss the old joystick sort of thing in the middle of the keyboard, but the touchpad on the iBook is considerably more accurate. The joystick is more like trying to push spaghetti through a keyhole from across the room.

And oh, joy, 320Mb into formatting the hard drive, it encounters a bad block and is too stupid to skip past it. It will now waste its time trying to recover 128K chunks of a 20-gig hard drive, one at a time, as if that much space is too precious to waste. Windows always was about nickel-and-dime behaviors.

If this was like an Apple, I could simply plug in an external drive with the desired operating system on it, and tell the system to boot from it. What a load of crap this is!

Any wonder I live with the iBook all the time now?

I want to be on the road already.