It's The Next Best Thing To Being There

Football season is fast approaching and although the summer is my favorite time of year, there is lots to look forward to. Mike and I love to spend Sunday afternoons and Monday nights watching football together. You may be wondering how we pull that off. Well, all I can say is thank you technology and especially thank you Sprint. We actually watch games while we're talking on our cell phones. Since we're on the same network we talk for free (and boy, do we take advantage of that!) so it's a no-cost date.

The only problem is, 99% of the time, the broadcast I see is about 5-7 seconds ahead of Mike's. It takes great restraint on my part to not react and give away the outcomes of plays he has not yet seen. But it's well worth the effort to feel like we're together. Remember that commercial long ago that said - "it's the next best thing to being there"? Well, it's true and it's definitely one of the main ways Mike and I stay connected.

Mike also participates in a Fantasy Football league so we get on Yahoo's StatTracker together and it' s a lot of fun to cheer for his team each week. But beware, it can border on addicting! Tonight he's going to meet with his league so they can pull their order for their upcoming draft. He knows I'm there in spirit and I'm pulling for him to get an early pick.

Racking Up the Minutes

Each day we exchanged emails and each night we talked, always with me calling Mike after 9:00 PM. With each communication I was bursting with love, and the concerns of meeting his children faded into the background. It became apparent that waiting for free cell time was not going to work long-term. As it happened, our cell phone contracts were ending at about the same time so we decided to get on a plan that would allow us to talk anytime for free.

Mike lives in the foothills just east of the Rockies so not every service worked at his house. We decided to see if he could get Sprint service there since that's what I already had. As a bonus, his daughter's boyfriend had Sprint and they would be able to talk for free as well. It took a couple of days but the decision was made. I bought a new cell phone and renewed my contract and Mike signed on as a new customer. If Sprint ever quits allowing people within the Sprint network to talk for free, we just might be to blame. Now Mike could call me during his morning and afternoon drive time. And that's exactly what he did. We talked in the morning, we talked in the afternoon, and we talked at night. We talked for hours on the weekends. We even watched football games together over the phone. It wasn't long before we were talking over 3000 minutes a month. We never seemed to tire of talking to each other and we never ran out of things to talk about. Thanks to this wonderful technological age, we were able to breach the distance and get to know each other in great detail.