On Thursday night, Jose got back from a 4-day trip to Toronto, where he presented a paper at a technical conference. Hooray, he’s home — but not that it was easy. His connection in Atlanta kept getting delayed. And delayed. And delayed. Every time I reloaded the website, the estimated departure was another 20 minutes later. He finally boarded the plane, so I got to watch the status change to “Awaiting Takeoff.” And awaiting. And awaiting. When all was said and done, he arrived back in Houston more than THREE HOURS late — at midnight instead of the more reasonable 8:30. Oh, the joys of air travel.
When we’re at home, we often are each doing our own thing, but when he’s not even in the house — and I know he’s not even in the country — it throws me off a bit. I mean, we’ve been married more than a year and were essentially cohabitating for quite a while before we actually lived together. Point being: I haven’t lived by myself in a long time. And it feels a little strange to wander around our big ol’ house by myself.
My solution is to keep myself busy. Jose has only traveled a couple times for work, but when he’s gone, I am CRAZY productive. Most of it is little stuff, but it’s a whole lot more than my standard come home-cook dinner-go running-go to bed routine. I cooked, I cleaned, I ran, I biked, I did errands — including some that I’ve been putting off for months, like getting new lenses for my glasses to replace the ones that have been cracked for, oh, something like 3 years. I framed Jose’s diplomas. I found an outfit to wear to my brother’s wedding. I hung out with spacey Twitter people at Boondoggle’s one day after work. I randomly made a raspberry cream pie!
Since Jose was in Canada (a whopping 50 miles from the border, I might add), I couldn’t call him without it costing an arm and a leg. So, we both got to try using Skype for the first time! WOW. I know I’m way late to this party, but I’d never talked to anyone using VoIP before. With me on my iPhone our home wireless and him on his laptop using the hotel’s wired connection, the call quality was amazing. Head and shoulders above the AT&T call quality we get in Houston — and I’ve been pretty happy with AT&T in this area. It sounded like he was right there in the room with me. Later, I downloaded the app for my iMac and we used the video chat feature. Even MORE awesome. I might actually like talking on the phone again if I could see the person I’m talking to…
Byron and I use skype all the time. Its awesome! I was hoping with the new iphone I could keep skype running in the background like you can do on Android operating systems and you can even get your phone to ring with a skype call via 3G, but so far, no luck.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out whether it ran in the background. Sometimes I think it did. But maybe just on wifi — I never used it on 3G, only while I was home.
Our phone system at work is actually VOIP, and has been since I started 6 years ago. Works great.
I was in Toronto and I did not see Jose. If only I had known to look for him…