Thursday, March 30, 2006

I Missed My Chance

(I do love spring flowers!)

What a beautiful day! 65 degrees and sunshine. That's about as good as it gets in Michigan in March.

I'm feeling sad in spite of the lovely weather though. I missed an opportunity to chat online with my cousin in Poland. And it's my own fault. I didn't realize that in Poland they are already on daylight saving time while we are not yet. I set up a chat date and then didn't show up (or rather I showed up an hour late). And now I'm really bumming.

I used to chat online with my cousin every day for 2 hours or so when we first connected. And much to my family's and his family's surprise, we kept that up for several months. Every day. We rarely ran out of things to talk about and eventually we added webcams and microphones and we had a regular thing going. I learned so much from him. I learned about the Polish culture, the everyday lives of the people in Poland, and best of all I learned about my family's history in Poland. It would have taken years of letters to convey the information we were able to exchange in those months of daily online chats.

Eventually our daily chats ended. It was bound to happen at some point because let's face it 2 hours of daily chats just can't be kept up indefinitely. It happened gradually. I don't even remember when exactly the chats stopped altogether but it has been quite a while now (more than a year, maybe 2). I think we kept on as long as we did because we were both afraid that if we stopped we'd lose track of each other. I know I feared that. And for the last few months I was sure that was exactly what had happened.

First he had computer problems. Then I had computer problems. Then we both got busy with other things in our lives and the next thing you know months went by with no contact. When we did have contact it was just short emails, no chats. I missed him. I missed our chats. I missed the photos we'd send each other. It's not like we didn't want to chat, it's just that we couldn't seem to connect.

I sent my cousin several emails in the last couple of months but he didn't reply to any of them. I was very discouraged and wondered if he was just too busy or if I'd done or said something to offend him. Then last week I got a short email from him and realized that I had his email address wrong. I guess that explains why he wasn't responding to my email. You'd think I'd have gotten an "undeliverable" message but I didn't.

Anyway, I sent an email to the correct address and asked him to be online today at 21:00. When I signed on to the chat client I immediately got a message from him telling me he had been online for an hour waiting for me. But then he'd given up. I'd gotten the time wrong. I thought I was early for our chat appt. He thought I got too busy to chat with him. So I've missed my chance once again. I'm so frustrated!!!

I left a message on the chat client and followed that up with an email. Hopefully we can try again soon, maybe tomorrow. Can you feel my disappointment?
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