A quick entry of two notable photos.

After a not-so-good day, Jeff hands me a little package and tells me to open it. Inside I find Moleskine's Paris city notebook. [what is it?] I see the 'CDG,' for Charles de Gaulle, and I burst into tears, for his spouse is a fountain pen lover who adores little perfect notebooks like these and who is very very nervous about going to Paris alone.

"Make your notes here," he says. "It won't be the last time you go to the city."

I may not have him with me on his trip, but suddenly I have city maps and addresses, and I have a spousal good luck charm.

My smile blossomed at ten after four, when he walked in the door, unexpected, early.  I had commented to Adam online a bit earlier that there was something calm and perfect about the afternoon: the raging storm; the slanted lamplight across my laptop; the soft sound of snoring, geriatric cats.  Suddenly, it was better.

Jeff smiled as he put his bag down and said, "Stacy sent us all home."  He put down his string bag of water bottle, lunch remnants, and snacks; he took his place on the other couch and I paused from debugging.

"I don't know what it is I want tonight," I said, "but I want to do something a little different.  I just don't know what."

"Why don't we go out to dinner?"

Coming home from my mother's wedding, with thoughts of Washington and Arkansas and Alabama mixing reluctantly in my head like oil and water, the thought hit me. Last Q standing.

I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he'd talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother's engagement.

Sarcastically muttered near the peanut butter: "Holy shit! Thanksgiving is this week? Why the hell didn't anyone tell me? When did this start getting scheduled in late November?"

I have to brag a little. I was quiet, so Jeff could make the announcement over on his site first, but Jeff is now a part of the Huntsville Master Chorale.

A little voice inside my head said,

Some days you know early on that you've lost your mind and it just isn't coming back. Some days you also know early on that you have beaten on too much code that week, and that it's time to walk away, unplug for a weekend, and not look back until Monday.Today is that day.

How do I know?

She and I are the unintentional peas in a pod; five or six years ago we were introduced by friends who knew her, and her husband, first, and who thought of Jeff and I as "another Brian and Suzan." They were as right in many ways as they were wrong, for we are as radically different as we are eerily similar, and our friendships keep doubling over and crossing themselves and coloring and re-coloring over the lines as a result.

We've relaxed since getting here, having put down our daily lives on the floor next to our bags and picking up something simpler. We've flitted from restaurant to restaurant, snagging wings here, Chinese there.This afternoon, we went gifting, bringing Patrick along for the plan of getting him a birthday shirt. A simple plan, a dress shirt; help Patrick finally find a dress shirt he liked that actually fit, buy it for him and wish him a happy birthday.