I think I may have a new project in the works, if I can talk a certain someone into it. My best friend, Debi, and I have been talking blog stuff for the past couple of days and she seems semi-interested in having one of her own. I’d love to help her get started out, even though I’m not really the expert that some people seem to think I am (most of that credit goes to my husband, I’m afraid). It will be you, dear readers, who benefit most if she does start blogging, because she is, bar none, the most hilarious person I have ever met in my life.

Debi and I met when we were seventeen years old, in the old Bonanza restaurant in Lewiston, Idaho, on June 1, 1990 (yes, I remember the exact date — it’s one of the most significant of my life, although I didn’t realize it at the time). The guys we were going out with were first cousins, and they decided that we should have dinner together one evening when Jason and I were in Lewiston. From the very first moments I knew Debi, I thought she was absolutely the coolest chick I’d ever met, and fourteen years have done nothing to change that opinion.

We eventually married the cousins (she was my maid of honor at my wedding), so we were in-laws for a few years before everything went south. We saw each other through a lot of rough times in both of our marriages, and we forged a friendship that there just aren’t enough good words to describe. Ultimately, we ditched the guys but decided to stick together since we had such a good thing going.

When we were twenty-two, we were living about three hundred miles away from each other, but I desperately needed a change of pace, so my boyfriend and I hopped in the car and set off driving. Six hours later, at ten o’clock that night, we knocked on Debi’s door in Boise.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here now,” I answered. And I did.

Aside from my immediate family, I think Debi is the only person whose doorstep I could appear on unannounced and declare I was moving in, and be met with open arms, no questions asked. If the guy she was living with then had put up a fuss, it would have been him she told to hit the road, not me. I was, and am, that sure of her.

There are so many memories swirling through my mind right now and I want to be able to put them all down in order to paint an accurate picture of her, but words can’t do our friendship justice. Just believe me when I say you’d be extremely lucky to know her.