Our weekend was really nice. It started with a lazy Friday night at home. My parents had gone to visit my brother at school, so Rob and I sat on the back porch with my dog and drank red wine, snacking on sweet potato chips and goat cheese spread onto thick slices of salami.

After a morning of coffee and eggs, we got in the car to visit Sean on our way to northern Virginia. We stopped for lunch in Farmville and I had a Bloody Mary and some wings before getting back in the car to go to Rob's brother Dan's house.

And then we woke up on Sunday and it rained. I drank coffee on the couch, snuggled under Rob's arm as we watched previous episodes of Girls and then a documentary by Stephen Hawking. Blanket, boyfriend, a cool rainy morning--that's my kind of Sunday.

When we got to the hotel where Rob will be living for the next month and a half, I felt overwhelmed. The place is beautiful and cozy, and I did not want to drive four hours into the evening without him. But we've done this before, and we talk all the time, and I'll see him on Friday.

But damn it if I don't miss that guy already.

Sometimes, I feel that maybe there isn't enough substance to these posts--they're just a compilation of photos that you've probably already seen somewhere else. But then I look back on them a month or even a week later and I love being able to re-visit two weeks of my life that have been summarized into a block of pretty photos. So here we are again.

1. Breakfast of champions--buffalo chicken sausage and two eggs over medium, over spinach.

2. Rocky may be 14 but he still jumps in the lake when no one is looking! Look at his little wet paws!

3. In the car on the way to New Jersey.

4. All the conference rooms were taken the other day and we had to have a meeting at a picnic table. Not bad.

5. Another workout with Emma.

6. I don't really know what happened here, but I like it. Also, this is my new hair. It's shiny and almost black.

Do you share your phone pictures on your blog? Leave me a comment with a link so I can see yours, too!

Life Lately According to Instagram is a semi-weekly feature in which I showcase a few of my favorite Instagram shots. You can follow along with me in real-time if you'd like--just search for username @megan_flynn.

P.S. I wrote about all my favorite Autumn things for Jigsaw London's blog. You can read it here!

[Columns in Richmond, November 2011.]

People will be going back to school soon.

On Monday, one of my college roommates posted a couple of things to my Facebook wall, and they made me laugh until tears ran down my face. It reminded me that my old friends are only one of those far away things in my life that makes me miss undergrad so dearly.

Autumn is my favorite time of year, and I think a lot of it has to do with college. The packing and moving and starting over as the leaves begin to change--it does something to me. There's magic in the new notebooks and the old books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, with treasures of underlining and notes just waiting to be discovered. When Rob and I first started dating, I was taking a Victorian class and we used to sit down together with my used copy of an extraordinarily large Norton Anthology of English Literature and read what the people who owned it before me had written in the margins.

I try every time, but I can never quite put my finger on it.

And so, for the third time on this blog, I quote:

"If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted...then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one's own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things." --Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night