Practicality

Kelly and I had a long talk, starting in IM last night and continuing into phone this afternoon. She's feeling... overextended. I think she feels that I'm being too cautious at a time when she's not, and thinks that I'm potentially causing problems by trying to caution her to slow down.

Next weekend cannot possibly get here soon enough. We've decided that IM, at least for us, isn't a suitable means of communication of anything more substantive than "are you home yet?" and have decided we'll use phone and email instead.

I'm seeing that more and more. IM just doesn't work for relationships; email and phone still do.

I spent a good portion of today at work, resurrecting some ancient, ancient data for somebody. This is the same data that we were told years ago they "never expected to need again," and now, five years later, they think they need it and seem annoyed that we can't put it back online instantly. The server it's on is so old it has neither a CD burner nor any USB ports through which we might connect one. What do I do? Thank my pack-rat sensibility for not throwing out my external parallel-port-powered Zip 100 drive. True, I had to bring in 100-meg cartridges from home to feed it, but I still have the thing and it still works, so it'll stick around a few more years, I guess.

I hate talking about work here.

I really amlooking forward to meeting Kelly, and now that I've told her my fears about getting the "best of luck" email a couple of days after we meet, I think we can get past that. Next thing to worry about, of course, will be the logistical problem of her living almost three hundred miles away... but then again, she seems confident of getting this other teaching job in Virginia, which would be barely a hundred miles away. It makes the difference between a trip that sucks up an entire weekend versus something I could actually do almost any time. Belinda only lived 75 miles from where I work, and that was fairly practical.

Practicality. Blah.