Seniors!

This final high school throwback post landed on a very appropriate day.  I took 300 eighth grade students on a field trip to my alma mater so that they could tour the campus.  So, today, I also got a tour of my old campus.  It was fun and a little weird to be wandering the halls of my former high school.  The kids were great, though.  I am really, really enjoying this population of students.  Now for my final year of high school.

This was the year, as I am certain it is for every high school senior, that I mentally checked out.  My friends and I were out of class far more than we were actually in class.  My second period econ class was a joke, so my sister and I always told him we were going to the library to work on our project and really went down the street to get breakfast.  Every.  Single.  Morning.  One day, the teacher told us, "Okay, don't get in an accident."  Yeah.  We had fun our senior year.

It was also the year of 18th birthdays.  My best friend turned 18 first.  We, of course, skipped class to decorate her car.  It was the one and only time we ever actually surprised her.

It was the year of my first job.  I became a phone recruiter at the local blood bank.  I am pretty certain that every single teenager who has ever grown up here has been a phone recruiter for the blood bank at least for one week.  I lasted my entire senior year.  It was a great job.  We just had to go in two hours a night and call people to ask if they could come in and donate.  There obviously wasn't even a dress code.

It was the one year that I actually participated in Homecoming.  The theme was "The United States" and each class had a state for their float.  The seniors, of course, had California.  They decorated half of it as Northern California and half as Southern California.  All of the popular girls decided to dress like they were from SoCal, and my sister and I couldn't let NorCal not be represented.  We raided our closets and came up with the best outfits ever.  Yes.  We owned every single piece of clothing we have one.

This was the year I met the man I thought I was going to marry.  He was 22.  I was 18 (17 when we first met).  At that time, he seemed so old and this was kind of scandalous.  We dated for 6 years before heading our separate ways, so something must have been right.  This is what I looked like the very first time we met.  No wonder he couldn't turn me down......

We took our annual family trip to Mexico that year.  We spent Thanksgiving in Cabo.  We had Thanksgiving dinner at this Asian Fusion place and they served us turkey sushi.  It was possibly the weirdest Thanksgiving I've ever had.  We should have just had tacos. 

My sister and I were SO close to legal drinking age (I was less than a month away), so we felt really cool when we got to go bar hopping.  We learned quickly that they began carding at 11, so if you were in before then, you were golden.  Please note that my sister has braces in this picture.

I gave up drinking until I was 21 sometime during this year because I realized that I didn't know how to drink correctly and I always ended up feeling like dying.

The most exciting part of all was graduation.  I was more than ready to move on and be an actual adult.  I walked across stage barefoot in shorts.  I really took it seriously.

I also got a dinosaur as a gift.  So that was pretty cool.

That summer was a great summer of boyfriend, river, and working at the blood bank.  In August 2006, I quit my job, said goodbye to the boyfriend, and moved 800 miles south.  It was one of the hardest things I have ever done.  I lasted a year before returning home and moving in with said boyfriend.  Stay tuned for next week when I discuss my freshman year of college.

Tell me about your senior year!