I'm such a slacker.

Really, though, the longer I go without updating, the more the empty space weighs on me. I start feeling as though I have to be brilliant and witty and long-winded to make up for my absence, and I can't write a word. Then I remind myself that I get twenty hits a day, max, and I should chill out.

Then Tony tells me that everyone's waiting for a Swerve fix, and I get all neurotic again. Thanks, Tony.

Tony was one of my best friends in college, part of the Magnificent Seven: Tony, Matt, Jess, Doron, Anatol, The Other Tony, and me. Think The Secret History without the incest and murder. I thought we would be friends forever. Now, of course, we're scattered across the globe and only sporadically in contact. But Tony lives in DC, and he came up last weekend to hang out and catch up.

As Murphy's Law would have it, the weather was oppressively hot and humid, then raining. Everything I'd planned fell through in one way or another, most notably Sunday's jazz festival.

See, the Boston Globe sponsors a blues and jazz festival every summer. It kicks off on a Sunday with three stages and nine bands on Newbury Street and continues for a couple of weeks with a series of free shows in Copley Square or down by the river at the Hatch Shell. Of all of the free music events in Boston every summer, the jazz festival probably takes the most elaborate planning; closing Newbury Street for a day isn't easy. And this year it rained.

I mean, it really rained. The organizers must be cursed. A few years ago, the temperature hovered around 100° all day. Just brutal. Local blues singer Toni Lynn Washington collapsed from heat stroke halfway through her set and was taken away in an ambulance. I'm imagining a hail of locusts for next year.

So instead we watched Traffic, which was riveting, and listened to the rain, and ate popsicles, and laughed a lot, and hung my big antique mirror on the wall (finally). We found that we liked hanging out together as adults as much as we'd liked it as college kids.

That's where I've been. What did I miss?