It’s good to be back home after a long holiday season of travel. The highlights of the last two weeks all involve friends and family, some we see often, and some not nearly often enough.

Specific highlights included a murder mystery party hosted by Friend of Pipeline Quinton and his fiancee Dory, and then a fabulous New Year’s Eve party hosted by Friends of Pipeline Brent and Gretchen. Both venues featured great times, great food, and a late morning the next day. It’s always nice to have friends who enjoy entertaining and are good at it.

For both Jane’s family and mine, Christmas serves as a marker of sorts, an easy way to mark the passage of a year. For adults that tends to lose it’s meaning as we get older, but once there are kids around it becomes easy to think back to the previous year and beyond. Kids can change a lot over the course of a year, and when you don’t get a chance to see kids every day, the changes can be profound.

Of course, adults change too, but our changes aren’t always front and center for everyone to see. In fact, I think a lot of times adults minimize the changes in their lives when they are among old friends. It’s not because the changes are good or bad, necessarily, as much as it is that people sometimes revert to the way they were when those friendships were being formed. Again, this is neither a good nor bad thing; I think sometimes that tendency provides a sort of vacation, a way to escape responsbilities inherent in adulthood for a short time.

I found myself at several points this last weekend sitting around with old friends I don’t get to see often enough, and wondering how many times all of us will be in the same place at the same time again in our lives. Not enough, and there were a couple points over the weekend where I started to dwell on that and get bummed out. But our friends have a way of pulling people out of a funk before it even starts, so there were no tears in my beer or whine in my wine. I always cheer myself up by reminding myself we don’t know what the future holds, whether it be more time together or less, and we should just enjoy the time we have when we have it.

We did that in full this last week.