As I'm sure some of you have noticed, shaking your heads with disapproval no doubt, I've been less than productive in my blog posting lately. This is mainly because I've started working again - not that I've become gainfully employed mind you, but I have work to do. This means that instead of waking up, staring at my computer for a few hours, and then deciding, "well, I might as well update my blog," that I wake up, and realize I have a meeting to cover, or that I said I'd head down to the newspaper office and I might as well do that. A few hours of work - real work, people, like, writing things that are being published - later, I'm trying to fit in a few errands or thinking that I need a nap, and well, the blog suffers. Hopefully I'll get it together soon and find the energy and time to do both, and sometimes watch reruns of "Beverly Hills 90210," which I've recently realized are on every day for a two-hour stretch.

The good news is that I think I can say, sort of, that I'm a freelance writer now, because I am regularly writing for a newspaper (a daily, here in Chapel Hill) and not just sending things to magazines and hearing nothing and yet still saying I do something for a living, which wasn't really true unless you call drinking lots of coffee and expertly checking my email every three seconds doing "something for a living."

While I still plan on sending lots of things to publications and drinking lots of coffee once I figure out how to better schedule my time, I'm happy for the steady work I've got going on now for many reasons, one in particular being that my 10-year high school reunion is tomorrow.

I'll get to that in a minute though.

In the time I haven't been spending writing, I've done some things that deserve mention. My friend Sarah, who flew in for the week from San Diego to visit friends and family and attend the reunion, came to visit for a night on Monday and we had a wonderful time. Before meeting J for dinner we sat on the porch enjoying the weather, polished off a bottle of red wine and talked enough to make girls everywhere proud. We talked about our dogs and our newfound love for Cesar Millan. We gossiped. We figured out everybody's problems, and the next day rounded it out by chatting about birth control while visiting the botanical gardens. I only hope that a lot of people heard us, because we weren't really being quiet and it's my experience that people who are trying to enjoy the botanical gardens love to hear two girls yammering on and on, loudly, about their periods.

Because the beginning of the week was so busy - J was busy in the lab and getting ready for a talk he gave in Raleigh yesterday - we hadn't done anything for our anniversary, and decided to go to dinner last night. We went to our favorite place in town, Lantern, where we like to order a bottle of wine and sit for a while over delicious food and talk about everything in the world for a while. Lantern also has an adorable bar in the back and since there is usually a wait we tend to end up there before eating dinner. After a cocktail and shared bottle I was pretty loud, yet again.

That brings us to today and the weekend. Tonight we'll head up to DC, where Jennifer and Max and Sarah are hanging out, and I'm betting will be up for getting together tonight no matter how late we get in, because my friends have an amazing reserve of energy that they utilize sometimes, thus, not needing to sleep all that much. Tomorrow we'll head out to the bar in DC to see people we graduated with ten years ago and when they ask me what I do, I can honestly say, "I'm a freelance writer." And I'll probably leave the part about all the coffee and email and "90210" out, well, unless it comes up.