"New" Friend

Samantha and I have been trading blog comments and Facebook messages for probably over a year now. We got to meet her in person a week or so ago. Since then, we've been out to eat at a 50's style diner, watched the kids perform in a church play, made her dinner at our home (and she bought us some delicious pizza last night), went geocaching twice, and rang in the New Year. We've stayed up talking past 1 AM quite a few times. She's a really amazing friend, and both Nikki and I are very fond of her. You can find her blog here, with entries going back to 2003! Wow.

We thought (and so did she) that Samantha was going to be heading back to Ohio sometime this week. I just got the good news from Nikki that Samantha won't be going home until early next month. Yay! I hope it doesn't inconvenience her, but we're really glad our friend will be around for quite awhile longer. We were already starting to get a bit melancholy in anticipation of her departure.

Samantha is a survivor. After years of abuse and depression, threats and stalking, she emerged as quite a strong woman, with a love of bicycling and the outdoors. I'm so glad she persevered, and lives on as a truly kick-ass woman.

You know, I was going to start talking about the caches we've discovered together, but I figured that would be best done in a separate post. But here's a few miscellaneous photos with Sam.

I have this cow that moos when you squeeze it. For some reason, Samantha goes into hysterics whenever she hears it moo. In fact that's what is happening here, though it looks like it's attacking her.

Sarah, Samantha, and Savannah at a the site of a geocache. (Great, we really need another "S" person in our family!) Yes, the cache container is a film canister.

Estrogen based lifeforms rule! Nikki told us to say "bull dookies" or something like that when she snapped the shot, and Samantha fell for it, ha ha! I'm holding my Garmin GPS, and also the cache, which is disguised to look like a piece of wood. More to come in my next entry.