The last couple days we’ve had to turn the heat on for a few minutes in the morning for the first time in months.  The temperatures still got up into the 80’s and 90’s by the afternoon.  I guess next weekend they’re predicting it will drop into the 70’s.

Last weekend was the last one I had to plan and the last where we showed a movie.  It was Crazy Hat Weekend, so I sold all our straw hats that have been kicking around the back office and let people decorate them with our odds and ends.  Then we had a people’s choice contest for the craziest hats.  I think it was a little rigged, because a birthday boy who had a lot of family with him won first prize, but I’m sure it made a great birthday for him.  Our last movie for the year was Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who.

The best thing that happened to me this last weekend was that I found a long-lost friend.  Wendy Starkey was my best, best friend in high school.  We looked like Mutt and Jeff together because she was a foot taller than me, but we had such good times with each other.  After high school I went to her wedding, and I even visited her home once, but somehow we lost touch.

I went to my ten year high school reunion hoping she’d come, but she didn’t.  I had forgotten her married name by that time.  Over the years I’ve tried looking on the internet under her maiden name.  I’ve tried driving through her old neighborhood to see if I could remember which house was hers.  I talked with someone from the church she grew up in, but they were new and didn’t know her.  I signed up to receive the alumni newsletter from my high school in the hopes that I’d see something about her in it.  Last weekend I received another issue of the alumni newsletter online, and it suddenly occurred to me that they might have a record of her married name.  I wrote to Linda Doyle and asked her for her help.  Within minutes she wrote back to me with Wendy’s contact information.

I wrote to Wendy immediately, and the next day I had an e-mail from her.  Turns out she’s been looking for me all these years as well.  We have been trying to catch up on about thirty-five years of each other’s lives.  Unbeknownst to me, she wasn’t living all that far from me when Mark and I were living in Oregon City.

Who would have thought that coming to Gore, Oklahoma, Mark would find a couple distant cousins by a common ancestor, and I would find my BFF from high school?  🙂