30 Years in 30 Weeks - edition 21

Okay...you get two pictures for this episode...mainly to show you how much I worked on ruining my hair (surprisingly, it survived). See, I met some really good friends while I continued to work at HEB. One of them was Amanda (she's the butterfly with the green eyelashes). At first, she thought I was total hick because of my accent, but she quickly got over that and we became very good friends. Okay, back to my point. Amanda changed her hair color as often as she did her underwear. Pretty sure her hair has been just about every color. While I never went for the hot pink or "dreamcicle" orange like she did, we colored my hair a lot, too. The first pic is from a Halloween party in October. The second is from Christmas of the same year. Please note that if you try to lighten hair that has been colored dark auburn, it will turn a lovely shade of orangey-yellow.

I finally moved out of the dorm shortly after I turned 20. I moved to a cute 3-bedroom apartment with Cary and Jaime - two girls that were my suite-mates at the dorm. That was a pretty interesting experience, too. I won't ramble on about that.

That December (the 18th to be exact), I met Chris. We (Amanda, Sylvia - the other girl in the Halloween picture, and my other friend, Lydia) went to a dance hall in Austin. It was called Midnight Rodeo at the time, but was previously Dance Across Texas and then several other names, I'm sure. Anyway. I had absolutely NO interest in talking to guys that night. See, James (the evil ex-boyfriend from my last post) had somehow found my email address and had emailed me from Bosnia and made me feel all angry and stuff a few weeks prior to this night. We were having a good time, just being silly girls and dancing a lot. At one point, I was walking around and suddenly felt my arm being jerked backwards - almost out of socket it felt. I swung around ready to give someone a piece of my mind and it was Chris. He asked me to dance. I took a good look at him and thought that *maybe* he wasn't in the ARMY since he had on a Texas A&M hat. (Most soldiers were pretty easy to identify with their "foreign" ball caps.) So, I said yes and ended up talking and dancing with him the rest of the night. When we left, I gave him my phone number and thought I'd never hear from him. BUT - he called me the next evening and hasn't left me alone since then. We realized that we actually had a lot in stuff in common - the obvious name similarity, both of us were born on the 31st of a month, born the same year, liked the same music, both of us had been raised Baptist, both of us were from Texas (this is very important!), both of our last names started with "G" AND his parents and my dad actually had worked together at some point!

So, yes, I gave in to dating a soldier again. What he failed to mention to me was the fact that he would be leaving for Bosnia in a little over two months. I'm not sure I would have stuck around if I had known that from the beginning. Fortunately for him, he waited until after I was "hooked" to unload that information on me. Oh wait. *HE* didn't tell me...his MOM did! I must say though, I'm glad I stuck around...