sopmething that I love (and miss) about my hometown

My hometown of Petaluma is only about 20 miles away... and while I go to visit my parents often like a good girl, they live outside of town, so I don't make it into the actual town of Petaluma very often. Also, it's changed enormously since I was little, and even in the last decade, with lots of development and a population boom. So, I'm allowed to miss it (even though it is less than a 30 minute drive away).

Today I had a fabulous, exhausting and exhilarating collaborative shoot day with my friends Jude and Paige, which I will post more about as I have time to edit the photos. What was exciting and new was that, for most of the day I was the model! We are all three wanting to push ourselves to produce more stock shoots, so we decided to try assisting and modeling for each others' visions, and I think it went really well. Modeling was SO fun with two very encouraging women, and I went from feeling shy and self-conscious to just basking in the limelight. Regardless of what Tyra tells you, it's really NOT that hard to model - it's fun!

Anyway, there were several small-town things that happened today to remind me of the beauty of living somewhere for your whole life:
-my photo friend Jude lives right across the street from the house I was born into and lived in for the first 6 or 7 years of my life!
-currently living in said house is the woman who I used to take pottery classes from when I was young; who also used to be married to the teacher of my very first photography class!
-when I was looking at my new photo friend, Paige,'s blog, I realized that her fiancé is in a band with a woman that I went to elementary through high school with!
-I learned today that my very first boyfriend now works for a company that my dad has been doing business with for decades!
-while at a salvage yard that I had never been to before, I bumped into my cousin Morgan! He doesn't live in Petaluma either, making the coincidence even more random!

Even when things get really cheesy, and somewhere between the yuppies and the hicks, I do love my hometown (though I hated it in high school and wanted to get FAR away from it). I guess I am a Sonoma County girl through and through.

Okay, more pictures tomorrow. For now, here is a very random one of a bowl of spaghetti I dropped months ago and have had no real reason to post. So there.