Yesterday I had a long video chat with Margaret; her connectivity has been limited for the past few days, but this weekend she and Pippa discovered (to their glee) that the bandwidth was flowing, so they fired up the iSight and showed me (and Josiah, who came home partway through — shown here with Frank) what the apartment looks like now that Pippa has had a couple of weeks to decorate and arrange it.
Margaret and I were glad to make some eye contact, but we couldn’t get out more than a few phrases before our junior performance artist intervened with some outrageous outfit, or her beloved snaggle-tooth mouthpiece, or a drawing, or a song, or interpretive dance. It would have been poignant if it weren’t side-splittingly absurd.
Here, Pippa submits a picture of what I looked like during the video feed. Now, as it happens, iChat provides a small window that shows the speaker what she or he looks like, so I know full well that the camera frame included the top half of my face, too. Perhaps she just had a funny angle on the computer screen.
Life as a two-city family entails stresses. Margaret is going above and beyond, handling Pippa while also keeping up with one of the most demanding doctoral programs around; I’m just coasting with Si up here, though my situation doth not lack challenges of its own. At the same time, we can see with new-prescription-glasses clarity how solid a basis we have for weathering all the circumstantial bluster.
