Hands

Blogging - or the thought of it - still seems like so much work but I resolve to just let it be. If I show up here once a year or twice a day or somewhere in between, then that's what it'll be. More being, less kvetching.

I had 10 or 11 (I can't remember) blessedly lazy days off over the holidays. Every single year, I make lists of things I'll accomplish. Cleaning closets, organizing drawers, rewriting recipes. You name it, I've planned to do it. And then come up short. So this year, I planned nothing. And I lived up to it. I pretty much did squat the whole time and I was ok with that. As a result, when I actually did do something productive, it was all bonus.

It came as no surprise to me when I came back to work that my closets are still messy, my drawers remain unorganized and my recipes are a thousand scraps of paper crammed into a file. But I slept and napped and rested and lounged. And after that, I relaxed. A bit too much, really, but that's for another time.

I left my office the day before Christmas Eve at 2 p.m. with that giddy, expectant feeling of a vacation just begun. The highlight of my break pretty much started ten minutes later. I met 3 friends at our local dive. I work in the same building, but not in the same place, with two of the women and the 4th woman moved out of state a year and a half ago.

The three of us who are all in the same building chat or try to touch base every day but we rarely go out. It's like that 4th person is the glue that we need in order to work. Not that we don't have fun when it's just the 3 of us, but it's not nearly the same. We all dearly love and miss this 4th person and so when she comes back and we get to hang out, it is Pure Girlfriend Joy.

We laughed and drank (yes, the two were related but we laugh ourselves silly stone cold sober, too) and had such a good time. I needed that so badly and wish I could have more times like that.

It's hard making friends as a grown-up, she whines.

At one point, the woman who now lives out of state explained that she was telling someone where she used to live in Michigan and she used the "Michigan Map" thing by pointing to the area on the palm of her right hand.

The next part is slightly less clear to me but the conversation quickly turned to planning a group trip to getting a tattoo of what we were talking about. So I took out one of at least 5 purple markers I'm known to have in my purse at any given time and proceeded to dole out the tats right then and there. The next thing I knew, all our hands were in the middle and we all had our camera phones out, clicking and flashing away. Four Dorks Separated at Birth.

It was the most fun I've had in ages and I've opened this pic several times, to remember just that.