Here’s to good friends…

jeff’s dirty thirty surprise party :: august eighteenth two thousand seven :: viz, jeff, me

“My college experience wasn’t what I had planned. It bore no resemblance to the pictures in the brochure. But I’m not unhappy; I don’t think any of us are. We got what we needed out of it. It’s kind of like going on a vacation - you plan everything out but one day you make a wrong turn or take a detour, and you end up in some crazy place you can never find on the map, doing something you never thought you’d do. Maybe you feel a little lost while it’s happening. But, later, you realize it was the best part of the whole trip.”

That quote from the movie “Threesome” says a lot of what’s been on my mind - but it totally skips over the importance of the people you shared your college experience with.

College brought me two of my best friends ever and the end of college slowly took them away.  While the road back together wasn’t without its bumps and bruises, I’m still not sure I would change the way things went down over the past several years. Everything happens for a reason… maybe we really needed to go our separate ways in order to appreciate what we brought back into each other’s lives on Saturday.

I’ve discovered that you don’t get magical moments like Saturday very often and I am oh so very thankful that it came around.  I can’t remember the last time I felt that complete, that whole. It’s amazing the power that friendship has in our lives. 

I’ve always loved these guys - the other half of my brain and my little brother - to the point where they are my family.  My blood.  Saturday was the first time the three of us had been in the same place in years.  There was no awkwardness, no hurt feelings, no anger to cloud the day amd it was amazing in so many different ways. If I had had to live my college life without them, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, it would have been posed and fake like the brochure.  They brought so much craziness and chaos into my life that even today, a mere 72 hours since we last connected, there’s this huge empty void in my life when they’re not around.  Being with these two is like doing drugs -the highs are amaziing and going cold turkey sucks.

There really is so much more I could say, but there are no words to express the gratitude I have for these guys.  I am truely blessed to share my life with these wackjobs and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Five flippin’ years ALREADY?!?!

august twenty-fourth two thousand two :: the venetian :: blogcon 2002

This is one of my most favorite wedding pictures… It still blows my wee little introvert mind that I hopped on a plane to go to Vegas to meet a bunch of people I only knew from their blogs.  I still can’t believe that bloggers were at my wedding!  God bless teh interweb!

ALL DONE!

“Child’s Aran Sweater” by Yankee Knitter, Addi Turbos (6 & 8s - I knit tight), Lion Brand Wool-Ease in forest green heather

The Baby Sweater of DOOM! is finally finished. 

Note to self: it doesn’t matter how stinkin’ small the sweater is, aran sweaters take a sh’load of work.

Second note to self: blackberry (bobble) stich makes you break out in hives. Do not knit anything that requires blackberry again!

Third note to self: I bet I could fly through a baby sweater that doesn’t require 2 types of cables and the flippin’ blackberry stitch….

I have apparently been bitten by the sweater bug.  Is this a good thing?

I don’t wanna grow up!

blue chucks :: lawrence, ma :: sometime in two thousand four

My dad used to make fun of me for wearing Chucks.  He used to make fun of a lot of the things I did in high school. 

There was a song by King Missle whose name escapes me, but there’s a bit in it where the guy goes “I want to be different like everyone else I want to be like.”  Once my dad heard that, it was all over.  I don’t know why I did the things I did - I was a teenager! Somethings came and went.  My fascination with The Cure is better left in the 1990’s. My love for Chucks and flannel shirts? I was grunge before grunge was ever cool.  Now I’m into Doc Martens again (better for the corporate world), but as I order them off the web,  I find myself thinking about how hard it was to find them “back in the day”.

Seriously.

Kids have it too easy.  They want to dress all punk rock, they buy it off the rack in their neighborhood mall. I used to spend hours in Army Navy stores, buying shoes out of magazines… I even went to the pet store for a dog collar at one particularly alarming point in my life. (Now I hear you can buy them at Hot Topic, with or without the optional padlock.)  There was no internet - there was only word of mouth and you had to hang out with the totally freaky people if you wanted to find out where they got those cool plaid combat boots.

It’s a good thing I like being a dinosaur.  I’m just going to sit here doing my homework in my flannel shirt with Chucks on my feet, and a little Poison pumping out my speakers.  I’m partying like it’s 1986-1992 over here tonight.

Reflections…

There’s so many lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way, that I am becoming amazingly aware of what I have, what it took me to get it and how it compares to others.  I may complain a lot (too much), but I know I have it good.

When people hear my life story to this point, they are almost always sorry for me.  I don’t get it.  I really don’t.  Sure, I was dealt a bad hand, but you have to play it.  There really isn’t much of a choice… besides forfeit and I’m not one to quit.

So anyway… this land we own in Maine is now my number two obsession. (There’s something going on with the Goo Goo Dolls, but I don’t want to discuss it.)  One of the first times we drove out there after we owned it outright, I looked at our neighbors and all the other houses on the other lakes nearby and I wondered if they knew how lucky they were.  Then it hit me.  I was one of those people now. I was lucky.  I worked hard and I would one day have one of those houses…

It put everything into perspective. And I haven’t looked back since.

I took this pic while sitting on the shore of GKP, watching our neighbors play in the water, on the water and near the water.  It was, without a doubt, one of the most fulfilling moments of my life (and the pic didn’t come out half bad either!).