The Standings So Far

Well, per the urgings of Joie, I'm assigning nicknames to all my dating cotérie. Now all I have to worry about is using their nicknames when I talk to them. Thanks, I think. %-) I can try the "pet name defense" if that occurs, but I doubt that'd be any better than telling #1 to "make it so." And initials are too detached, so I'm just gonna go with stage names and hang the consequences. :-)

"Jordan" (5'7", straight shoulder-length dark hair [according to her photo]) is a swim coach and the "faith and morals" girl from a few posts back. So far she and I have only "spoken" via e-mail and phone messages over two weeks of acquaintance, but her schedule is a hectic one and she's been ill, so she gets a bit more slack before being declared a non-starter. She and I are very compatible on paper--I look forward to actually meeting the woman...someday...

"Kristin" (5'4", curly shoulder-length blond hair and cute-severe horn-rimmed glasses) is a business controller (accountant with teeth), and is the dating-service referral. She plays volleyball and golf and reads a lot of true-crime novels. She and I had coffee this evening. More on that in a moment.

"Florence" (5'8", permed shoulder-length brown hair) is a nurse (heh) and was my "out of the blue" e-mailer based on my Match.com profile. She and I had coffee this past Sunday afternoon and are meeting for dinner this coming Saturday for further mutual study.

Tonight's Coffee
"Kristin" and I met at the local Starbucks tonight and chatted for an hour. Initial impressions: well, our inaugural phone conversation over the weekend was more of a mutual job interview than anything social, but things lightened up a bit after I got her to laugh. Still, that job-interview atmosphere bled strongly into tonight's meeting; luckily I interview well, so it only took ten minutes or so to break us out of shop talk and get onto stuff like music, pastimes, etc.

Long story short: We wound up talking about me a lot more than her, simply because "Kristin" didn't have much to say about herself. She might have been nervous, or I might have been in some jazzy manic state, but she seemed reluctant to talk much, and sort of shy; for once I felt like the colorful one. Still, I was warned about this in the précis I received from the dating service (wow, they do add value!), so I'm going to set things up for another meeting; probably over Thai, as she mentioned being fond of it. Still, she's not much of a moviegoer, music-listener or big conversationalist, so I'm sort of short on raw material here unless something huge dawns when next we meet.

This Past Sunday's Coffee
"Florence" and I decided to do a spur-of-the-moment java-meet on Sunday afternoon. If I'm not mistaken she's new to the online-dating scene, and as such was a trifle nervous, but she seems to be softspoken anyway. In any event, I got her laughing a bit, and things loosened up some; convo ranged all over: from career paths, to places we'd lived growing up, to (oddly) how our divorces were similar and different. Still, things stayed pretty light, and from there we decided to meet for dinner this coming Saturday.

So Anyway...
No real sparks with anyone yet, but the experiences have all been good ones so far. Not much more to cover, but watch this space for more details as events unfold.

-Rich