21 Years

To some it would be a long time ago but it is amazing how fast the years go by once you finally get out of the stage of wishing you were older and start wishing you were younger.

It was 24 years and 5 months ago that I left Tasmania with my mother and headed west for a new life. This meant leaving behind two of the best friends I have ever had: Amanda and Nicole.

Throughout my high school years I went back and forth visiting family and catching up with these friends. The last time I saw Amanda was 21 years ago. This last week she flew into WA looking for work and seeing if she would like to relocate the family. She stayed with other friends but we got a good 24 hours to catch up. My goodness the things we remembered getting up to:
for one week we did mystery chores for people. We tried to find out who needed help and if we could do it secretly for them. Amanda remembers going down beside the house and weeding mum's garden. Mum reminded us that we couldn't tell the difference between weeds and plants!! Unfortunately (or fortunately) that was as far as we got hence the reason it lasted only a week.

Climbing under the beanbag and calling the dog. She would scratch and scratch until she found a way to get in underneath and find us.

• Eating dog chocolates ... yes I confess and Amanda still says they are the nicest chocolates she has ever eaten.
• Cutting Christmas images out of the newspaper and pasting them to card for name tags and begging my father to sell them in the family shop.
• Getting told off by dad because mum was sleeping (she did night duty) and yet it was him telling us off that woke her up.
• Telling my father to shush when he fell asleep on the lounge and started snoring the roof off. He would stop for a minute and start again. I think we even recorded it once because he always denied the snoring.

I really hope she can come and live in WA and one of these days I really hope to
catch up with Nicole. I believe it has been 22-23 years since I saw her
last.

Oh yes some craft was done on the weekend. I taught Amanda how to be
creative without a creative bone in her body (as she puts it). We did a mixed
media canvas and hers is going to hang in her daughters room. Kicking myself I
didn't take a photo of what she did. I will at least take a photo of mine when
it is finished. It could be finished now, just not sure yet. LOL