After a less than awesome day at work (which was admittedly made more awesome by the fact that UNC got around to reimbursing me for travel today), Ladybug and I headed home for some solace. We picked up a cell phone battery at Batteries Plus, one that promises longer life from our nerd phones, which had been sucking the old batteries dry within minutes.

We did our now-typical-but-soon-to-be-impossible dinner-and-a-West-Wing date, then took off to walk down to Lake Elton. The lake is a quiet little body of water, and were it not on Lake Elton Drive, I wouldn’t know it was a lake at all. Ladybug surmised that it wasn’t big enough to be a lake and should be Pond Elton, which doesn’t have the same ring.

On our walk, we started talking about a footrace, so Heidi took off running, and about five seconds later, I started after her. I couldn’t catch her until she got winded, but while we were both running hard (and neither of us had the shoes to sustain much of a run), I don’t think I was gaining any ground on her, but I don’t think she was particularly gaining any ground on me. Which is good, I suppose, for several reasons. One: If I ever piss her off, she won’t catch me if I keep on running. The flipside, that I won’t catch her, doesn’t present me any problems. Two: I finally found someone who is as slow as me. Because I am one of the slowest runners on the face of the planet, a fact for which I was mercilessly mocked in elementary school on the various and sundry “field days.” Three: It makes me confident that she won’t be looking to train for any races any time soon.

Now she’s at the grocery store; what was supposed to be a quick trip for some milk and apples has turned into an almost two-hour trip. She asked if I wanted to go to keep her from spending all of her money, and I declined, saying that I would rather work on some DSI stuff while she was gone so we could spend the rest of the evening together. I guess I should have gone; now, she’ll come home when I am almost ready for bed and she’ll be sour at herself for buying $1,400 worth of canned goods when the pantry is already fairly well-stocked. (Plus, I guarantee that we eat out tomorrow night.)

Linda Walters, who works at DPI, called me a few minutes ago. She’s also a wedding photographer, and she wasn’t averse to selling us the negatives. I am sad to say that when she said, “I assume this is in color,” I said that I thought we’d prefer black and white. Linda politely told me that just about everyone does color, and that I would need to talk to Ladybug on that one. And she’s right… when I thought about it, I think everyone does do color, and that probably is what we want to do.

I sent some Gmail invites today, one of which went to Ladybug, who eschewed heidiefird@ in favor of heidiwhite@. Hot damn! (Of course, when it asked for the name of the person to send the invite to, I said firstname: Heidi, lastname: White. Sneaky.) We ate lunch with Pat Shane, nee Bowers, today when we ran into her at Arby’s. Pat, who changed her name back after she got divorced, told Heidi not to change, that it was a royal pain in the ass if you ever need to change back. But still, she took heidiwhite@. And when I got my first e-mail from her, it took me a second to realize that I’m going to be seeing that name a lot in the coming years.