SPC: With Someone, Week 4 - Morven

This is the last week for the September theme of "With Someone" for the Self-Portrait Challenge. The instructions are to "...include someone else in your self portrait. Someone meaningful to your life or to the moment or to a specific event that you wish to document." Today I want to introduce you to my friend Morven. Morv and I met online in 1999. I'd stumbled across a quilting email group and decided to join and Morven was already a member. I posted a rambling (and kinda smartass) intro note and mentioned in passing that I lived in Kentucky. Morv emailed me off-list to find out more. Turns out she was living in Kentucky too, although she'd only been there a few months. She'd come over from her native New Zealand to be with her husband while he was working on a long-term project in the US. We found out more about each other and discovered we had loads in common. We decided we were Cosmic Twins! Plus it turned out we only lived about 40 miles away from each other, so it wasn't long before she and her husband came over to meet me and mine. It wasn't the first time I'd met someone in person that I'd first met on the Internet, but it was the first time I'd told someone where I live and invited them to dinner. (We had chicken and dumplings. I have no idea why I remember that, but I do.) Morven lived in Kentucky for three years before returning to NZ and she became one of my closest friends and I still miss her like crazy. We stay in touch through email and an occasional phone call, but man do I ever miss the days when we'd get together to make trips into Lexington to have girlie lunches and hit the stores and talk and giggle. Luckily she makes occasional trips back to the US though. (YAY!!!) The photo below was one I snapped during her last visit in March of this year. "Self-Portrait with Morven" (clickable if you want to see it larger in a new window) If you want to meet Morven yourself, she recently started a blog of her very own, called Food Art and Random Thoughts, so stop over and tell her hello and Happy Birthday! Yep, that's right. That's why I had to feature Morven THIS Tuesday rather than any other is because today is her birthday. Wish I could give you cake and a hug, Morv. Love you! (also clickable: photo features Morv and me as well as our husbands and some of our wonderful girlfriends)