Another dinner with Kathleen

I mentioned in this post a month ago that Kathleen and I had agreed to have coffee or something. Well, even though she now lives a lot closer to me than she did before, she's still not exactly local. But this week I'm attending a professional conference in another city, and that put me close enough to her to provide an opportunity. So we decided to have dinner tonight.

(As an aside, it's a little funny that I'm going to a professional conference when I'm unemployed and possibly retired. But so I am, because of ... well, reasons. It gets complicated fast, and none of them is very interesting.)

You may remember that I introduced Kathleen to this blog in this post, a little more than a year and a half ago. So far as I know she was never aware of any of the subtext that I read into the dinner in that post, and you will recall that even at the time I didn't believe in it either. It was a purely intellectual construct, just for the hell of it. Anyway, in case there was any doubt whatever on this point, she invited her husband to come along. The two of them sat on one side of the good-sized table, and I sat on the other. No possible subtext. And that's absolutely fine with me ... I feel like I'm getting a little old to want to have to worry about the risk of flirting with anyone any more. Nice to know it's a non-issue.

And dinner was fun. We talked about the company where she and I both used to work, and how they are making this and that bad decision in the business unit where we were. I learned what her husband does for a living, and told them some of my stories from earlier employers when they were relevant. We drank beer and ate barbecue and generally enjoyed the time. Because they live a few hours away from where I live, it won't be a regular thing; it might not repeat at all, for all I know. But it was a nice way to spend the evening.