Look at this photograph... everytime I do it makes me laugh

I have the spaghetti sauce in the crock pot simmering away for the second hour now and the white cake from scratch with the yummy whipped frosting that doesn't have cream or powdered sugar in it is in progress- five minutes on the cake, thirteen minutes on the frosting. They should be done- cooling and all- just in time to come together. It's a going away dinner. It's a sad day for Snarcy's.

I would dare say the average friends talk about three hours a week. I don't know that for sure, I am guessing. If you go out to dinner once or twice a month and you see each other at church or work, or wherever you find your friends, and we're talking solid conversation here, three hours is probably a good, solid average. Bear in mind, some people do not conversate well and struggle to meet the average. They are playing a role here too. If my theory holds up, in the course of a year average friends talk to each other for a total of 156 hours a year. That's a lot of conversation and each year that goes by, every hour in the bank is another brick in the mortar. It solidifies their friendship.

Consider this. Tiara Fairy and I have been working together since the middle of October. We have known each other by name and vague familiarity for close to three years. Our friendship really began in October. It is now the end of April. That's six months. We should be just past vague familiarty and into acquaintance. But we're not. We are good friends. We will be friends forever because of the brick and mortar that has been laid over these past months. What has created such a close bond is our conversation. (And we are master conversationalists as a result of our impecible vocabularies.) It is because we work together for twelve hours, fifteen days, out of every thirty day month. I mentioned that we talk for about eight of those hours while we are working. 720 hours we've spent telling our stories, and laughing, and retelling our stories, and crying, and eating delictible, man-sized portions of flavor-sensational food. According to my calculations, we've been friends for six years. We're good friends, and she's moving away.


So guess what time it is??? That's right! It's beer-thirty, so get your deveilll horns out! Here's to you, shandalere, for always trashing your diet on the same day I do, and for sharing my addiction to Pepsi and Reese's Peanut butter cups, and for teaching me the basics to delicious food, and for listening to me ramble for hours about my life philosophies and internal tsunamis; but more than anything else, here's to you for knowing who you are, and being honest about who you are, and for being yourself, completely. You are the kind of friend everyone wishes they had. Love, b