The Three Chicks Celebrate 50 years!

Yesterday, after several months of planning and anticipation, I spent the day in Portland with two of my best chums from Lebanon High school, Mim and Becky, to celebrate our upcoming momentous golden birthdays. Half the fun was the emails we were exchanging in the months before the big day. Mim had quite a vision for the day. At one point it included such things as facial waxing, pedicures, and massages. But practicality won out. As she put it, "Last time I heard of someone getting a massage, they ended up in the hospital from it. Besides, what do you have to show for it after you've spent all that money? (Once a Mennonite, always a Mennonite!) At least when I buy a new outfit, I'm still wearing it ten years later! Horrible, isn't it?" Yes, indeed, I truly identify with her sentiments!

She was full of great ideas. Years ago, she wrote, she had so much fun garage sailing with some friends in Lake Oswego where things were up-scale and cheap. Becky and I loved the idea of a garage sail cruise. As Becky put it, "Wow, I was just thinking we may have hit on something - I haven't seen garage "sail" cruises advertised - maybe we can start a new business!! We'll call it the BML (Becky, Mim, LeAnn or Broad (or Bra) Minded Ladies - you choose) Cruise Line!!"

We met at 6:45 am yesterday at the Yaquina for breakfast. Becky had elaborate gift bags for us with all the accessories and inspirational items ladies our age need (at least everything she could find at the Dollar Tree and Avon samples), such as funky reading glasses, eye masks, wrinkle cream samples, lotions, bladder control liners, glucosamine, weekly medicine containers, and for Mim, a primary spelling workbook! Here we are with our new reading glasses and the loot.

Becky outdid herself with personal gifts for each of us. Below is Mim's gift, with our high school selves peeking out the portholes! She gave me a little stand with our senior name cards. You can glimpse the top of it in front of my gift bag above.Breakfast was great, but I began to fear we would never get out of Albany. Mim's meal ticket somehow got lost, (I can't imagine how with all the goodies on our table), so they had to get her another one. We headed down the road to an ATM for me, but I couldn't find my debit card when we got there. Mim had a phone book in her car!!! So I was able to call the restaurant immediately and sure enough, my debit card was there.

We finally got out of town and with the help of Mim's on-line navigation system, "Marge", we found all three garage sails that were being held in Lake Oswego that day. (November is not exactly the season for garage sail cruising!) We gave Marge quite a workout. She very patiently said, "Recalculating" every time we missed a turn.

We thought it was quite fortuitous that the last garage sale had the following sign. We asked one of the three chicks to take our picture. Fortunately, after she took the first one, she realized she had failed to get the sign in it so she took another one! I paid a dollar for that nice new duffle bag.

Two of the garage sales were upscale and one was a Sweet Home style. We had good reason to miss it the first time we drove by. There was no sign, but a U-Haul truck was in the driveway. The sale was in the nearly empty living room, and the woman of the house was cleaning out kitchen cupboards and hauling stuff in there. There were boxes full of random items. Mim was going through it, and every time she asked the teen age son how much for something, he said either 50 cents or a dollar. She got some cheap stuff. I realized I really don't like digging through jumbled boxes. I want things to be lying neatly on a table so I can see what it is without touching it.

At the first sale, the woman saw Mim looking at a very ugly teapot (She recognized the label as being expensive). It was kind of flat and shaped somewhat like a mouse. The woman said she has no idea why she paid $65 for it, she was in a tourist moment. She sold it to Mim for $4. Mim got some expensive trinkiets for very cheap. She resells things, so she was quite pleased with her bargains.

Next we hunted down a Goodwill, and believe me, we had to hunt, even with Marge helping us. Marge gave us an address for a Goodwill Outlet, but there was nothing there but a park in a residential neighborhood. We all found more treasures when Goodwill was finally located and worked up quite an appetite for the Cheesecake Factory at the Washington Square shopping mall, where we headed for a late lunch. I will blog that later. I am waiting for one of my chums to send me pictures. They both have sleek little cameras that fit in their purses; mine does not.

In closing, I will pontificate that mixing up shopping for old and new was an appropriately symbolic celebration as we commemorated our old lives and prepared to commence on a new half century. I am very blessed to have such friends, and am pretty annoyed when I think of all the laughs and good times that I have missed out on because I spent very little time with them the past 30 years!