Spilling.

All right. I've been ignoring you again.

Not that I want to make excuses, but I'm right in the midst of one of the busiest travel seasons in my job (I leave again this Sunday) and I'm still frantically trying to navigate the whole, two-dog household thing. Needless to say, things have been a little off-the-charts busy lately and as much as I wish I could write...

Actually, I haven't had a damn thing to talk about in the last ten days. It's been work as usual and the whole grad school application process is nowhere near as interesting to anyone else as it is to me. But beneath the monotony of my day-to-day, my mind has been occupied with things I'm not quite ready to put to print. So I suppose there you have the real reason I've been avoiding you. It's not that I have nothing TO say, but rather I have nothing I CAN say.

It's funny - as much as this is supposed to be a free and unrestricted extension of myself, there are so many things I'm unable to post. So here I am, typing meaningless chatter and pointless small talk in order to avoid the inevitable spill.

So to put it briefly, vaguely and without really any satisfaction for either of us, the gears are turning. And for now, that's really all I can put to print.

The Bright Side

Ever have one of those absolutely fantastic, gloriously simple kind of days where everything just sort of falls into place?

Me neither - usually. But Friday could have invented that category.

I should probably rewind here and start from the beginning. Friday morning, I took the GRE. As you may know, I've been pseudo-studying for about five weeks for this entrance exam, staring down the only unknown between me and graduate school. But between work travel and adding a second four-legged son to the family, things have been hectic and the studying has fallen by the wayside. So, I wasn't feeling entirely prepared and was really dreading taking that test.

I totally rocked it. 

Did I get an out-of-this-world score? No. Did I get as good of a score as I would have had I studied more? Maybe, maybe not. But none of that matters because I got a better score than what I needed for both of the programs I'm considering. And I was flying high leaving that testing center knowing that all of the other pieces of my application are under my control. 

After the exam, I had a chance to meet up with an old friend. We had a photo shoot planned to help her build her growing portfolio but we were canceled because of the rain. 

And. It. Was. Awesome.

We rescheduled the shoot for a drier date yet-to-be-determined, so instead of us trying to awkwardly maneuver around puddles and mud, we had a chance to just sit and catch up on the six (seven?) or so years it's been since we've really spent any time together. And the ease with which we caught up around her dining room table reminded me of the exact reason we were close to inseparable for the better part of a decade. 

Because real friends don't have to catch up; you just pick up right where you left off.

After I left her apartment, the whole family got together for a spur-of-the-moment dinner in celebration of me surpassing my expectations for the GRE. It was unplanned, we had to wait and it was smokier than all get out in our favorite meeting spot. But the food was delicious, the beer was cold and I got a free pen from our favorite waitress. 

And it couldn't have been better.