IRL

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the acronym that titles this post. Most of you probably do know URL, which stands for "Uniform Resource Locater", and is what any techno-geek you may know will call the address of this blog, or anything else on the internet. (When I asked Roger a little while ago exactly what the letters stood for, so that I could use them in this post, I got a three-minute discussion of why they're called that, and how it's supposed to work but doesn't always. TooMuchInformation, to use another acronym!)

IRL, on the other hand, is a blog and text-message abbreviation which stands for "In Real Life." I know most of the people on my blogroll only from the internet, but obviously I know Arwen IRL, since she's my daughter! One of the benefits of meeting people online, however, is that if you really hit it off and find you have a lot in common, you can meet IRL. This is not without its dangers, of course, since people can lie on the internet, but adults who have a common interest in knitting, or theology, or literature, or whatever, are in my (NSH) opinion less likely to actually meet up with a weirdo than kids who just want to meet a "friend".

Arwen has met several online friends IRL, and a couple of them have become the kind of friends that you take an airplane trip to visit, and stay in their house, and invite to your in-laws condo, and generally do all the things with that you do with any real friend. I, however, (partly since I am newer to blogging) had never done so before yesterday.

But yesterday I hopped in my car and drove the 90 minutes (or two hours home during rush hour :-( ) to Arwen's town to meet up with "Liz." Liz doesn't appear on my blogroll, because hers is password protected. Arwen and I have been reading her for several years, since before her password, and leaving comments of the kind that caused her to deem us nice enough people to be let in to a blog that's now family and IRL friends only. Thanks, Liz, for the compliment! Liz normally lives half a continent away, but is doing a three month training stint in a city only 2 1/2 hours from Arwen. So we decided to meet up in Arwen's town due to the logistics of transporting Camilla, who is an important part of the package. It was wonderful!

Liz is just like her online personality -- I hope I am, too; I know Arwen is! -- and we chatted about this, that, and the other thing for five hours. And then I had to head home for choir practice and Liz had to go in the opposite direction for what I hope was a hot date! Since she returns to her home state in three weeks, I don't know if we'll have another chance to meet her IRL. But I surely am glad we had this one!

Note to all 3 of my readers -- if you ever expect to be in Michigan, email me and we''ll see if we can work something out!

Disclaimer from last post -- It appears that a lot of DaVinci's Notebook's songs are raunchier than I would care to listen to. Rats, and I'm sorry if I steered you in the wrong direction.