port aransas happy hour
I had my rescheduled February virtual Happy Hour with Laney last night, and even though it had to be only over the phone, we both felt like it went really well. Indeed, neither of us felt like we connected any less than we could have over Skype, although we did still also agree that we prefer being able to see each other.
The hope right now is that we'll be able to for the March happy hour. Right now it's scheduled for March 12, but it will likely get rescheduled for sometime the previous week, before March 5. She is currently scheduled to stay in a campground in Louisiana, only a half hour drive to the French Quarter, between February 22 and March 5, and this place apparently has free wifi! She'll have to test it to make sure how well it works, but assuming it's all good, then we'll finally be able to do a virtual happy hour where we can both drink, as she won't have had to drive to some parking lot where she can mooch off a business's free wifi.
She's currently on the Gulf Coast in Texas, not far from Corpus Christi, by a town of roughly 4,000 people on the beach called Port Aransas. She's also in the Central Time Zone, so when she asked to schedule for earlier than the previously-planned 5 p.m. Pacific (my) Time, I suggested 4:30, right when I got off of work. That made it 6:30 her time.
I took the photo of myself with a glass of wine and the AirPods in my ears out on my balcony, but I waited a little while so the sun would be behind the Seattle skyline in the background and not completely turn me into a silhouette. The days are slowly but surely getting longer, so now it was roughly 5 p.m. by the time even that happened, and thus the photo I posted of Laney, above the light of her lantern in the dark of a foggy Texas beach at night, was taken at roughly 7 p.m. her time.
We proceeded to talk on the phone for a solid three hours. Three hours and 15 minutes, to be specific: it was a quarter till 8:00 my time—and thus a quarter to 10 her time—by the time we hung up, and even that, surprisingly, was because I ended it. I was just hungry and needed to get a bit of dinner in me, but I felt like Laney could have gone on even longer, which was in pretty stark contrast to our virtual Happy Hours when she was still on Capitol Hill and would regularly cut it off at about ninety minutes so she could make dinner. A lot is different now though, and perhaps not least of which is that she doesn't get the opportunity for long conversations with people a lot lately. She does get to meet a lot of interesting people though.
She did tell me one interesting thing about fellow travelers she meets. Apparently quite frequently when she tells people she's from Seattle, Texans say to her, "I've always wanted to visit Washington, but it's just so far!" or some variation thereof. She then tells them, "Well I came from Washington, and I made it here!" She says there's an interesting kind of phenomenon where people in the Eastern U.S., at least around roughly Texas and then further east, just think of the West Coast as "too far" by default. But, it doesn't take a huge amount of effort to do that travel, especially when you're traveling full time.
Laney was also interested to learn that my own paternal grandparents had been full-time RVers for nearly two decades after they retired, between 1992 and, I'd say, maybe around 2009. They had a map of the U.S. on the inside of the door to their travel trailer, and they put a sticker on for every state they visited. By the time they stopped traveling, there were only two states they had never been to. Laney asked me which ones and I can't remember, although right now I want to say one was Florida. The other one, maybe either Vermont or New Hampshire? I'm kind of spit balling now. Anyway, I should share the video I made of home movie clips of time with Grandma and Grandpa with Laney, as a whole lot of it is from when they were traveling, which might give it a new point of interest for her. And also seeing me so much younger maybe!
—Aha! I texted Dad and Sherri to ask, and Sherri got right back to me. I was half right: Florida was one. The only other was Kentucky.
After getting off the phone with Laney, I made myself a veggie hot dog for dinner and we watched a few episodes of the first season of The Larry Sanders Show.
And just now, I finished with Office Lunch Meetup #28 . . . and it was the lowest attendance since November! Just Rebecca and Noah and myself today. I guess I'll have to grill anyone else who returns next week about where the hell they were today.
Not that it mattered a great deal, as we still found plenty to talk about. Snow expected this weekend (we'll see whether that pans out, as I never truly trust Seattle forecasts more than two, sometimes even only one day out). Sleep tracker apps and exercise tracker apps. Movies we've watched recently. Rebecca has never seen Death Becomes Her and she really needs to remedy that right away.
I just looked at my calendar and I have my next FaceTime lunch with Karen scheduled for tomorrow. This means that between yesterday and this coming Sunday, Friday is actually the only day I don't have anything social scheduled! I'm just a social butterfly, even if it's almost exclusively via video chats.
Anyway I should get back to work now.
[posted 1:04 pm]