This past June, my parents moved halfway across the country and they took my 93 year old grandmother with them. They are absolutely in love with their new home and with their new location. I’m thrilled for them, but have to admit, there’s a big difference being one hour away with traffic and being 4 hours away by plane. How do you cut through that time and space? Why, the internet of course!

My mom is new to the world of computing so emailing was an adventure for her. Once the newness of that wore a bit, I introduced her to instant messaging. Wow!! She LOVED it. She could ‘talk’ to me or to my daughter (her one and only grandchild, btw) as often and as long as she liked. The best part for me, was when Daughter was doing her schoolwork and would suddenly say, “Grandma’s online!” The next thing I knew, they were chatting away. Too cool.

We weren’t done yet, though. We tried emailing and instant messaging…. but there was more. How about computer-to-computer calling? Well. One evening, I’m ‘chatting’ with my mom and typed that I was going to call her computer. She got nervous, typed frantically, asking what I needed her to do. I told her, just click on ‘answer’. She did and the giddy sound in her voice when she realized we were actually communicating verbally with just our computers made my day.

We chat regularly now. Sometimes via email, sometimes via IM. Sometimes we actually use a land line, believe it or not. But mostly, we now make computer-to-computer phone calls.

Up next? Web-cams! 😉