Today is Little Miss Giggles tenth birthday. She is a whole decade old. Amazing. (See the post just below this to see how much she's grown!)
This month also marks another pretty amazing "anniversary" of sorts. I have officially known my best friend for three decades. Thirty years! That is a long. time.!! Not often do you know someone for that long much less stay as close as we are!
I am not a huge "anniversary" person - but thirty years is a big deal. So I told Michael I wanted to do something fun to celebrate - but something we both would enjoy doing. So today we headed to Oak Ridge where we grew up and had a great afternoon driving around seeing familiar places....
Starting with lunch at Bid Ed's Pizza.
Yum.
Big Ed's is just an OR tradition.
If you've never been there, I'll be happy to take you sometime!
That's Big Ed right there. He used to always be there in a white tshirt sometimes with a white apron hanging around his neck.
The highschool....where neither of us went to school haha.
The library...where we both definitely went often.
This is where the church met where our families first met when I was three and he was six!
Robertsville Middle School where he went for the first six weeks before being homeschooled...also my first year of homeschooling but I was in third grade.
When we were little, there was a little grocery store here called Bruners. And to the right kind of back behind that tree was a restaurant called Eddie's Malt Shop that's not there anymore but oh was it awesome! Lots of good memories from there.
Such a familiar sight turning into our neighborhood off the turnpike!
Finally up to our street where we parked and got out and walked around past familiar houses....
Our neighborhood had lots of kids. This is where Mandy and Monica lived.
My brother's friend Jennifer's house
Someone decided to get creative with the mailbox lol.
Billy, Jennifer, and Ellie lived here first. Then Jack and Anna and Sarah.
The crazy dog lady lived here. Er. I mean. Eh...yeah, that's about right. lol
"You are behaving worse than a child!!"
Seriously. Words we heard her say to her dogs.
His house. Floods of memories.
And diagonally across...my house.
Minus all the beautiful trees that used to be in the front yard.
Those flower beds are new. And that's my old bedroom on the front corner there.
My dad built the deck on the back. Someone else apparently added a screened in porch to it.
This is a very familiar sight to me. :) Except we didn't used to have cell phones in our hands.
We did used to stand in the middle of the street all the time and talk for hours. (It wasn't a very busy street.)
Selfie standing in our "spot" in the street. :) Best friends for 30 years. Good grief.
And really, I should clarify. I would stand in the middle of the street...he would walk in big circles around me lol.
This was one of my favorite things to do - lie on my bed and look up out the window at the sky through the leaves on the trees. I love TN. :)
We used to think it was amusing to drive out past our neighborhood to the "rich neighborhood" and check out all the big houses - this one in particular - at night you can see that it has stairs going up and then splitting to the right and left in that big window above the front door. :)
I'll say it again: I love TN!
Across from our neighborhood was a sportsmans club where there was archery and skeetshooting etc. I grew up with the sounds of guns going off all the time - and still barely even notice the sound it's so familiar ha. This is a pond that Michael and his brother used to go fishing at a lot.
"Kathryn, take the picture quick as I drive by! It says no "stoping"!!" lol No stoping. ok.
Our elementary school!
Where we had the same kindergarten teacher a couple years apart. Took bus #7 in the mornings and #18 in the afternoons. Which is just one of many little details that he remembered during our day yesterday.
Yep. Looks the same. We went up and peeked in the doors. It even smells familiar.
I remember swinging on those swings.
Children's museum. I think we both took classes here at different times. There's so much more to it now. The one thing that I always remembered was right when you go inside there was a huuge stuffed (real) polar bear. I'm talking it was enormous! It felt like I had to look up a mile to see it's head. A couple years ago I took my kids for the first time in years and on the way I thought about that bear and how if it was still there, I was sure it was going to seem so much smaller now that I am an adult...and then to my surprise and happiness - it was just as huge and tall as I remembered it being! I'm glad some things don't change. :)
We drove around to a few more places that I didn't get pictures of and then stopped in front of the science museum where there were some picnic tables. I hadn't told him what I'd brought for us to do lol but I knew he'd go along with it just cuz. When we were little, we sometimes sat underneath our old deck where there were lots of rocks and we would paint them, with the goal of selling them like a lemonade stand, planning to make big bucks. Although we never actually did anything with them. lol But I remember painting them. Although he says we mostly just dumped the tempera paint powder on them. lol
So I brought rocks to paint. Just for the heck of it. Kinda fun just sitting there outside painting rocks and talking about old stuff....who our teachers were...did we eat lunch at school or take it...etc.
My "souvenir" for the day...those are our thumb prints on the back. :)
Thanks for taking the time to take a drive across town and into our past today M! I am thankful for the past 30 years and everything we have been through together...and that we are still good friends.
P13 as always. :)
