Wow, do I miss My Boys

And no, I am not referring to small children or assorted pets that I’ve kept in a secret cupboard under the stairs for years and years. I mean my Boys, my guys, my posse of mostly younger sexy smart  men who have entered the Cocoverse at various points in my checkered career and due to their unswerving devotion and unflagging amusement at all things Carolynne still pop up from time to time to lend a hug and a hand where required.

Mostly when I miss them it is the hugs that I miss.  They all give the absolute best of the best hugs.  One of the standards of admission to the club really.  They throw their arms open and step right on in.  None of this A-frame shoulder squeezing pseudo hug crap.  If you don’t get an “ooof” or a sigh of contentment, or best of all a faint crackle of vertebra popping, you ain’t doing it right. Some of them even have the strength and enthusiasm to lift me off my feet. Yep, you read that right some young men are soooo happy to see me that they assume the strength of ten men. Some of them even have the courage to hug me that full-hearted way in front of their women. Well, maybe a little more briefly. The correct length is between 5-7 steamboats by the way.  In truth if you don’t feel you can achieve the standard of hug I’m looking for, I’d prefer a couple of cheek kisses and we can all pretend we are very continental and sophisticated.

The girlfriend hugs are nice in theory, but they always leave me feeling like a bit of a dancing bear.  They are all so teeny and breakable. Girlfriends give the best rah-rah emails though – lots of CAPS and smiley faces and exclamation points and chick power slogans.

All this rumination on my absent friends is because I’m feeling a bit exposed up here in the mountains.  Suddenly feeling like base camp is too far behind and the air is a bit thin and when did I sign up for summiting solo?

You may have noted that earlier when referring to My Boys I said “mostly when I miss them” that means that this time, this day the hug would be super, but mostly I NEED TECHNICAL SUPPORT! That is the other thing my boys bring, calm assured manipulation of the zeros and ones until suddenly I can bloody well do what bloody well needs to be done. Like solve the mystery of why suddenly I can’t get my iPhone pictures to upload to iPhoto I’ve checked and unchecked and rechecked all the freaking boxes and it keeps telling me it is about to replace the pictures on the iPhone with those from iPhoto.  I have done it before, witness the few photo’s I managed to get onto facebook.  I even managed to post one to my sister’s wall. I’m not a total incompetent you know. Or how about Entourage – I find the web support page that tells me how to adjust Entourage so that I can receive from home – except they use Comcast as an example and I am shawmail so I just left that – but nooooo.  So now I’ve probably bloody screwed it up for getting email back home too. ARRRGHHH. Not to mention that webmail won’t download my email from raingirls which is really super as I am about to hand out 500 biz cards with exactly that email address. Not to mention I really ought to replace the pdfs of my CV and the Raingirls one sheet and takedown Gatehouse for another day, but I’ve suddenly developed a fear of my own content management system. Sigh. I guess I can still try phone support. But I bet I doesn’t come with a hug.