05.18.06

not talking

Posted in Married life at 10:14 am by ducky

On Monday and Tuesday, my husband, my mother, and I drove from Bellingham, WA to Oakland, CA. Mom was going down for a party and was interested in more drivers; Jim and I were interested in cargo space in her minivan, as we are moving to California for the summer. (I have a summer job at Google that, incidentally, I am hugely excited about.)

It was interesting how we didn’t talk much. Partly we were tired. Mom wasn’t feeling well. I was tired from final project frenzy, packing our stuff, and then helping Mom pack the next day. Jim was tired from packing and packing.

Partly it was hard to hold a conversation. The fan and/or air conditioner was blasting most of the way — it was quite a warm day. Add in that Mom is hard of hearing, and three-way conversations were tough.

And with Jim and I, we just didn’t have much to talk about. We’ve been together for ten years, had just spent three days near each other practically 24 hrs/day, and there are only so many observations one can make about how the terrain changes from forest to savannah to scruff while going from British Columbia through Oregon to California.

I used to worry about running out of things to say to Jim, but it was okay not talking. It wasn’t that we were avoiding talking to each other — we weren’t mad at each other. We weren’t frustrated at trying to find common ground or common interest. Rather, we are so much a part of each other’s lives, so intimately tangled that there just aren’t that many things that the other doesn’t already know about.

About the only thing we did talk about at length was Webfoot Maps. Because I’m going to Google this summer, I can’t work on my maps. Google owns my brain this summer.

I’m fine with trading working on my maps for working at Google. However, I get approached once or twice a month by people who want me to make a Google Maps mashup for them. Given that my husband is pretty unscheduled so far this summer, it seems like it would be useful if I could do a mind-meld with him so that he can help these people with their maps.

Thus I’ll be working at Google and Jim will be doing Google mashups. Avoiding the conflict-of-interest will be annoying.

I am not worried that we’ll be able to do it, however. This is the husband that I made sign an NDA before I would tell him what I did at Interval Research, after all. Two weeks after the Google Calendar showed up in my Google Trusted Tester account, I finally mentioned to Jim, “it’s too bad that you’re not in the Google Trusted Tester program, because there’s something that I’ve been testing for two weeks that I think you’d really like.” He responded, “I am in the Google Trusted Tester program. You mean you’ve been testing GCal too?

So I’m sure we can keep a wall between our work, it’ll just mean we’ll have to find other things to talk about.

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