making it real

I love the colors in this Dream Street Cookies 'n Cream from Allyscraps, and the papers are all double sided! I didn't use it for the "cooking" theme, obviously, but it's flexible enough to work for lots of things. This is my long-time online friend, who I finally got to meet in person last month. The journaling gets a little sappy at the end, LOL, but what can I say... I'm a sappy kinda gal!

Journaling:
Some people don’t really understand how you can develop a bond of friendship with someone via an internet forum. Even Mark used to sometimes refer to my “fake internet friends” – mostly just to irk me, I’m sure. Still, II know that he didn’t quite get it, having never been involved in that type of a community.

But when I started to mention “my friend Joodie from Washington” more and more frequently, even he came to accept that you and I had a connection. He knew that we emailed quite regularly, so perhaps he came to see you as a pen-pal of sorts.

And so after “knowing” you, first for a good year or so through various scrapbooking forums, and then more exclusively through our regular emails back and forth for the past two and a half years, there was no question in either of our minds that we should meet in person when you visited your family in northeast Ohio. And what could be more appropriate than a rendezvous at a scrapbooking store? I drove a little over an hour, and you and your mom a good two hours.

How strange it is to meet someone who you already know! But it was just like being with an old friend, and as natural as can be. We shopped and chatted for quite a while, and then enjoyed dinner together at a nearby restaurant. Sadly, just a few short hours after our hello hug, it was time to hug goodbye and head off in our separate ways. It will probably be quite some time before we are face-to-face again, but in the meantime, I will treasure the memories of our afternoon together – our chance, finally, to make it real.