30 Years in 30 Weeks - edition 19

That's me and my BFF, Amy, at our high school graduation. I swear, we were pretty much inseperable at the time. We did EVERYTHING together. Movies all the time. Plays in downtown Houston. Baseball games and snowcones. Leaving campus for lunch at the park - even though we weren't supposed to (we came back though!) Hanging out with "the crew" - Tessie, Sam, Leif and Ernie (good times, I tell ya! But some of those stories are better left between us, right?). Shopping whenever we felt like it...because shopping ALWAYS makes you feel better.

During our Senior year, Amy and I decided we needed to adopt some "pet Freshmen". They would do cool stuff for us like clean our cars, and we would take them to do cool stuff like hang out at the mall. Yes. It paid off. See, we had this grand idea of taking a road trip to New Orleans. We were going to fund it by collecting spare change accumulated from the floorboards and seats of our cars and cars of our friends (since neither of us had a job). We even had a big pink plastic piggy bank for said change. We even wrote our slogan on it..."Porking our way to New Orleans" - LOL! Our plan was to do a business-style presentation to our parents to convince them to let us go. Needless to say, the road trip never happened. But I will tell you that the new Taco Bell in town HATED us that summer. We would go through the drive through, make our order and then pay in change...being sure to add "it's all there - really."

We also tried really hard to be the "bat girls" for our baseball team. We petitioned Coach Turner every day. Every day, he gave us the same answer - "only if you wear hot pants and tube tops." That meant "no" from Coach Turner. Since both of our moms worked at the school and we had known Coach Turner for most of our lives, that was okay coming from him. Just kinda like your smartass uncle or something. We still went to every game, snowcones in hand, and heckled the other team. If we couldn't be real bat girls, we would just be the obnoxious fans!

That fall, we went off to college. But, we weren't far from each other. Amy went to UT in Austin and I was just down the road in San Marcos at Southwest Texas. We got together at least once a week to go out or shop or eat. We usually rode home together, too. Four hour drives are much more fun with friends. Yeah, I could have gone to a bigger school, but SWT was the only school I applied to and I think it fit me pretty well. I had some major adjustments that fall...like realizing that I probably wasn't as smart as I thought I was. I had to learn how to really study. Something I'd never really done before. I learned a lot more during my first year of college, but I'll save that for next week...