Estimated time remaining: 7 hours, 3 minutes and 34, 33, 32 seconds ... Wait, make that 8 hours, 55 minutes, 46, 45, 44 seconds.

I have a birthday card written up, stamped and everything, sitting on the counter with a Post-It note that says "Mail Feb. 21." I am what some people call "the opposite of procrastinating."

Sometimes.

But until tonight, I could not bring myself to walk from this recliner to the shelf eight whole feet away to grab a CD and upload photos of my wedding day, then order and send them to my parents and grandparents like they asked me to. At Thanksgiving.

I promise. I will tonight.

It's not that I didn't want to before tonight. It's the Internet.

Remember 1999? Remember how cool dial-up was? Super-fast, never took longer than 2 or 3 minutes to load a page or anything. Remember how you'd wait, watching the little globe spin in the corner of your browser, watching the blue bar at the bottom get ever-so-close to the right, signaling a freshly loaded page (only to get that annoying "Page cannot be displayed" page?).

Ah. Dial-up. Those were the days.

(Who am I kidding, I had dial-up 'til 2005.)

I can't complain about my Internet connection now; it's not fast, but it's not 1999, either. But these photo upload programs? They're still dancing to (the artist formerly known as) Prince on a cassette tape boom box while the rest of us bob our heads to bands "influenced by Prince" on mp3 players.

I don't want to upload these photos because I have hobbies. They include "eating," "sleeping," and "getting to bed before 11." Photo sites aren't cool with that. They demand all your attention and bandwidth.

I'm perfectly aware that the program I'm using is just slow (but it's so cheap!), or that it's my fault (yeah), or that I could just go down to a photo shop and have them do it (but, but it's so cold ...).

Anyhow, I've waited long enough. If you don't hear from me within a few days, assume I'm still waiting on my fifth or sixth photo to load to the Web site.

(Photo: Getting the most out of my uploading time. And, in case you forgot what our wedding looked like.)