A love hate relationship

And to quickly squash all rumors, no I'm not talking about me and Alexandra; if anything we have a love-love relationship...I'm talking about technology. Specifically Skype and MSN.

Now Alexandra and I talk every day on-line. Since the day I got back from Europe we haven't missed a day. We usually average somewhere between 3 and five hours a night. This is facilitated by my webcam. Trust me, when you are separated from your preance, seeing and hearing them makes all the difference in the world. And for that I am eternally grateful to technology. However it also seems that technology is consistently conspiring against us too.

Everyday we go through a little routine. We'll log onto Skype, type a few messages back and forth and after a few minutes I'll press the video call button. That will start a process which scares my computer into freezing up but still allows me to hear my love on the other end. We'll say helloooooooooooooooooo to each other and soon enough my computer will calm down and we'll see and hear each other as well. But that is not the end of our happy little story. At some point, some days after 3 hours and others, like today, after 3 minutes the quality of the picture will start to get worse. Sometimes it freezes, sometimes the color changes to make it look like the negatives for film, some days it randomly moves parts around to end up looking like a Picasso painting. Often it will be all three at once. Usually when this happens we'll have about 30 seconds before the picture will freeze and the sound will stop as well. Then it will randomly disconnect. Occasionally this will be due to a computer error in my laptop that is only fixable through restarting it. This usually takes 10-15 minutes.

We have recently been trying MSN which has a video chat feature as well. This usually works well with one slight problem. Roughly half the time one of us will be unable to hear or see (or both) the other one. We can both send messages but not see or hear the other person.

These make it very interesting to communicate. It really makes you appreciate when technology works well. Alexandra has no classes tomorrow and I have only one that starts at 1:00 tomorrow so we were able to talk late tonight. Still the first few hours were mostly a lot of trying to get the technology to work. The last few were pretty good...

So that is my love hate relationship with technology. I depend on it quite a lot in my day to day life and it likes to pull pranks on me, often failing at critical moments in the conversation. The one solice I can take in this is that soon Alexandra will be coming to Seattle and I won't depend on Skype or MSN to talk with her anymore. And for those of you planning on coming to Port Angeles this Christmas you will all get a chance to meet her. I am very excited to introduce her to you; and she has learned most of your names and relations pretty well by now which as any person in my enormous family can attest to is no mean feat.