Get your friends together that you really like to do things with--you know, the ones you like to "play" with; the ones who like to do the same things you do--the ones you can laugh with, sing with, cry with, pray with, get silly with, and be serious with. Get them together under one roof for a whole weekend and remove all other "distractions" for that period of time--like jobs, spouses, and children. Pick a name for that group of special friends and plan to have a "retreat" like no other. We tried to get 10 women together, but you know how that is. We ended up with 8, which was a good number. We also ended up with 4 dogs and 2 cats under the same roof. It was an exceptional group of women. We called ourselves the "Popular Girls"--mostly because none of us really felt very "popular" way back when we were in school, but we do feel like we're popular with each other! Of course we didn't have the luxury of being able to invite ALL of our friends -- there just wasn't room enough for all of our friends, and we didn't mean to exclude anyone from this group--you can be a Popular Girl, too, you know. It's just a label we adopted for ourselves to make us feel good--and to have something else to laugh about. It's not like we have "rules" or anything like that! Two of the Popular Girls adopted the names "Paris & Niki" for the weekend, which caused all kinds of behaviorial issues to come to mind--and most of us were of the age when "Paris" or "Niki" was easier to remember than their real names! (Isn't that sad?)
We started the festivities at Sue Dial's house in the mountains of western North
Carolina on Friday night, May 23, and didn't stop until after we attended the "White Squirrel Festival" in Brevard on Sunday afternoon, May 25. We slept on couches, in bunk beds, on sleeping bags on a screened-in porch, someone
even slept in a van. Truly, there wasn't much sleeping all weekend. We did very little cooking (ordered pizza one night), only a short shopping trip (to a bead store and the local yarn shop), brought most of our "provisions" with us, and stayed very busy. Normally after a weekend like that I would come
home exhausted and have to rest and sleep for a couple of days (at least) to recover; but not this time. It was really
refreshing, renewing, and oh so much fun. We knitted, dyed yarn, worked with polymer clay to 
make special beads, learned how to attach beads to an already-knitted garment, talked and talked and talked--and laughed.
I hope to post more pictures when we can get the time to "pool our resources" and share photos.
