Today it rained. It was cold and grey all day long.

I helped my friend Alexann pack what was left of the home that didn’t go into the two pods on their way to Colorado. We worked through the things to be tossed. The last of the cabinets. Her landlord fed us warm apple cake out of the oven. The back of the car was packed with the last of the closet items. That was an adventure that involved folding for a quarter of an hour in the rain.

There was cleaning. I felt inspired to go home and throw out the majority of my belongings to avoid the hassle of any future moves. I inherited a Swiffer. I adopted her violets. I really hope I don’t kill them.

And then, after some hours of good hard work, we were done. Just like that. The rooms were empty.

And so we rested. We drank tea, and coffee. We got carded at the wine store. “And how old are you today?” the woman behind the counter asked me? It took me a full minute to think about it. We left with a bottle of red, and parted ways, briefly, before heading towards another friend’s house to have one last celebration.

We had burritos.

We stood in the kitchen, watching Love Actually, but not really watching. We talked. For hours, about all the usual things. It was good.

We talked about blogging, about business, about creating something to support women and moms. About what it means to make a place for yourself on the internet in this day and age. I gave my best advice I could. If you want to really get into blogging. Write. Start writing now. Forget about the blog, web hosting, comments. Forget about it all, and just write. For days, weeks, months really. Write until you have enough content that you can go on autopilot and learn all the things you’ll have to learn to run a website, at least, if that’s what you ultimately decide that you want to do. I think there’s so much more out there though. A blog – it can be one piece of. But the internet, it can be scary. You have to learn, I think, about the hard things. The horrible comments. The trolling. I had to tell them about gamergate, about how the internet can be a violent place for women. It really pained me to share that. It’s a lot, really. But all this – it’s nothing to worry about. Start writing now. Just write.

I’m getting a little heavy here.

We drank wine.

Tonight I’m grateful that dear friends can be kept thousands of miles away. That the internet and modern technology bring us all together like never before. I’m looking forward to a weekly email chain. A book club where you read the books together, and don’t meet. (The inverse of our usual book club, which should have been called drink wine and talk about the gym club.) Although, on further thought this evening, I realized that we could just have book club on Google Hangout and each sit in our respective houses and crack open bottles of wine and talk about the book together. Wouldn’t that be nice?