Sometimes Landi still has to travel for work. Traveling has never been her favorite work
activity, and when she has to travel, my whole world changes. Not so much in dealing with the kids, the
fish (actual fish, not the boy) or the dogs.
That’s pretty much unchanged. You
just feed them and make sure they have water, and you’re good. I just miss her. I miss her a lot.
Sometimes when I’m supposed to be working or doing something
useful, I just pause and think about her.
I’ll close my eyes and I can almost hear her cussing at her computer
because it can’t find data she just put there…RIGHT THERE….WHERE THE HELL IS
THE DAMN DATA????? ….and we’re off. When she is home, she eventually either finds the
data, or we go to lunch at KCs, but when she’s gone I open my eyes to an empty and
quiet room. It's amazing how empty my world is when she's gone.
Other times, I think about how we always end summer days at
the pool, with a glass of red wine and our feet cooling in the water, talking
and laughing. Sometimes Dixie, our meth lab, feels the
need to get in the pool which means that we both will get splashed soon. I think about cooking sausages on the gas
grill, or chicken on the Big Green Egg. If
I close my eyes right now and I can almost smell wet dogs and barbeque.
Several years ago, when ‘Chat’ was new, I started to message
her on her computer when she was away. I
thought it was so cool how chat would just pop the message up right on the
screen over whatever a person was doing.
I started off being careful when I ‘chatted’ to her because I didn’t
want to screw up whatever it was she was doing.
Eventually we both got comfortable with ‘chat’ and we’d chat off and on
all day while we worked. It made for a
nice workday. It wasn’t as good as
sitting by the pool drinking wine and soaking our feet, but it was nice. You can be witty and sometimes a little
naughty via chat. It was all good fun.
One time when she was at Honda out in California, I saw that she was on line, and I was feeling witty
so rather than starting off with a “Hey Baby!”, or “Knock Knock” like I usually
did, I thought I’d be funny and say something semi-naughty. She had been gone about 3 or 4 days, and I
knew she was as tired of being there as I was of having her gone, and I though it would be nice to make her smile before her long flight home. Suddenly,
I had a stroke of inspiration, sweet inspiration!
I quickly typed my greeting while snickering to myself and hit enter to send my greeting. A fraction of a second after I sent my greeting, she disappeared
offline without a response. Silence. Nothing.
“Hmmmm….wonder what’s up with that? Guess the her network went down.”, I though and I went back to work on
whatever it was I had been doing. Little did I know that in a conference room at the Honda Motor Company in California, my message had been received.
There are moments of inspiration, and then there are life
lessons. Don't confuse the two.
If your wife is working at a client site, and occasionally
does technical presentations on a big screen using her computer in front of
25-30 senior management and technical personnel, never begin a chat session
with her using the phrase “I’m naked.
Are you?”
We don’t chat anymore,and I still miss my wife.
