saturday, on the deck

Today was a lot of fun. For the first time in a long time, I got together with a bunch of friends from work. It's a bunch of women who I used to work closely with; some of them are no longer with our organization and some, work in different departments than I do now.

We did a potluck / barbecue thing and I haven't laughed so much in a long, long time. There were about 8 of us so there was a nice variety of salads and stuff and the meal was delivious. The company was fabulous too. It's so weird when you are used to seeing people, every day, to suddenly have that stop. One of the girls had quit and moved on, another had been fired, a third had been constructively dismissed. The nice thing about today was that we were all able to pick up like we've not been apart. We're planning to do this more often now, possibly every month. It had been almost a year since we'd done this and that was waaaay too long. Email only works for so long. Unfortunately, my cold got the better of me and I had to drag the two girls I was "designated driving" out of there around 7:30 and head for home. It was a good visit though. We got there around 2 p.m. so, given how I'd been feeling all week, lasting five hours (while breathing in the beautiful, fresh air) outside was pretty impressive.

One thing that made me smile today: The friend who hosted our barbecue today has a 6 year old son. He was running around with his sister's stepson (long story) and just before we left, they were roasting marshmallows on the fire. I laughed my head off watching their cheeks bulge out (as well as their eyes) as they stuffed handfuls of hot, gooey marshmallows into their little faces.