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,
"Don't look back. You can never look back."

A day late, but for once, perhaps not quite a dollar short.

We are not date-obsessed people. We have spent anniversaries apart over the years. We passed 'couple' and 'handful' and are rapidly lazing our way toward double digits, and yet ... here we still are.

Perspective says how utterly young and naive we were on that day. We probably haven't learned much, but at least we have a mortgage to show for it.

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.