My friend Jan

I haven’t told you about my friend Jan yet…

It’s all her fault…

Jan did it! (finger pointed away from myself, at Jan)

I can hear our husbands laugh and shake their heads now.

OK, here’s the background story…

Jan and I met through our daughters.  She and her husband were looking for a pen pal for their daughter, as they lived 100ish miles away and would be moving here in a year.  A friend connected Gabi with Cari and the rest is history…the two are pretty much inseparable.

Which brings the story back to Jan and I.

Once we were introduced, we went through the traditional Hello’s…what do you do’s…how many kids do you have…what are their ages…and on and on.

Well we discovered that not only do we both have three girls, but they are all the same ages – which is quite the oddity since there are 4 years between the first two and 7 between the last two!

Then we started talking about things we liked to do…

And then she started e-mailing me all her favorite blog links…

And we started having coffee together at my house…

And then, THEN she tells me…”You should write a blog!  Your ideas for home decor are great!”

And so here I am…

Writing about my adventures with Jan.

We had one of those immediate connections.

Like you’ve known each other forever and yet you’re having this fabulous time hearing about each others adventures and ideas.

That’s us.

We sound like two chipmunks chattering once we get going…filled with ideas, excited about future ventures, and future projects!  Going from one subject to another…the husbands can’t keep up!

Our husbands think we’re trouble.

Seriously!

Right away her husband shook his head and said “This is going to be bad”.

And so it was…

Picture the look on his face as we pulled up to their house with an overflowing (literally) truck, was priceless.

We’d had a great day at the dump having found some great bases for tables – such as an industrial-heavy duty-base that had a motor still attached.  An old commercial kitchen stove base.  An old metal bed frame, lots of old half log siding, a few doors, two wood boxes, various smaller items, and a few windows thrown in.

We had seen my husband in town and teased him that this was all going to our house.

{pinched look on hubby’s face}

He looked much happier when we came back to our house with about 1/5th of the load, having left 4/5ths of it at Jan’s house!

{pinched look on Jan’s hubby’s face}

But that wasn’t the best part of the story!

As we were looking for goodies, Jan climbed to the top of a junk pile and all of a sudden from behind us came a voice yelling – “You can’t be up there!”  Uh-oh!  Caught by the dump patrol!  She came walking over to us with a release form for Jan to sign, and a “dump scavenging rules sheet”!

We giggled about that for days.

In the spirit of true disclosure, I have to finish with the story of how I got scolded by one of our facebook site managers.  It’s a great little buying site.

But sure enough Jan was involved again!

She’d posted this wonderful desk that she’d refinished and I thought it might work in my office.

We bantered back and forth in the comments and she made some quirky comment.  I responded with the comment “You are such a shit…said with all the love in my lil’ pea pickin’ heart!”

I was told to watch my language!  No swearing allowed on the site!

I generally don’t swear much…it was all in fun really…

But I apologized to the site’s manager and swore (not literally) that I’d never do it again.

Jan had a good laugh at that one!

…Yes, we’re going to be trouble!  And boy are we going to have fun doing it!

I hope you have a friend that you can cause a little good-natured trouble with!

Have a fun, safe and swear free day!

Patty O