So I wasn't technically "tagged" with this... I just stole it from Reva. And the tag doesn't really work for me: going in to my pictures folder, opening up the 7th folder and posting the 7th picture. I don't have 7 folders yet. (I imagine a wedding will change ALL of that.) So I simply got my 7th picture in iPhoto, and that is the gloriousness you see above. The fellow getting pummeled is my hubby-to-be, while the fellow doing the pummeling is his buddy from tech school. This was taken last year, when the Rockies and the Phillies were vying for a World Series spot, and both these guys felt they needed to represent their respective home states. (In case you had forgotten, the Rockies made it all the way to the World Series, only to be swept by the Red Sox... booooooo.)

I have actually been thinking about this guy and his fiancée a lot lately, and was happy to find this picture. Last year, that couple happened to be at as similar a point in their lives as we were. She's a really kickass piccolo player looking for an orchestral career, and after an undergrad in music, he decided repair was the way to go. Sound familiar? We devised a plan last year that both she and I would make it in to the same orchestra, and then our hubbys could open a repair shop together. Then they ruined everything by moving back home to the east coast once repair school was done. And now? Well, we just miss them like crazy.

It turns out Portland, while one of the coolest cities ever, puts you pretty far away from a lot of places. We find this longing for our friends creeps up on us a lot. And our families often seem out of reach. Knoxville's an even harder place to access than Portland, it turns out: on Thursday we're taking an hour flight to Seattle, a 4 hour flight to Cinncinati, and then another hour flight into Knoxville. We're leaving the house before anyone should humanly be expected to function in the morning and getting in just in time for dinner. My brain is still doing backflips trying to figure all that out. I just hope the exhaustion from travelling will get me to bed at a decent hour and I can get up early enough to offset the jet lag. (I guess I'm not that worried about sleeping in... Thanksgiving with my family includes a 6-year-old with some big lungs.)

I always seem to wax nostalgia in this thing - don't get me wrong, life here is still pretty great. We've got great friends who we've all sucked in to our world of card games, and just last night I had a tremendously fun and educational time reading Beethoven quartets with some great people. Seems like there's this constant balance, though - how often to feed the part of me that misses people, and how often to indulge in the present. I think they're both necessary.

For now, though, I'll do neither. Our apartment's a mess, and I've got it in my head that it's going to be clean before we leave. Who knows whether or not this will actually happen. :)