One is silver and the other gold

The nature of my job makes it nearly impossible to make friends outside of work. I never have a consistent day off, so I can't take a class every week, or join a book club, or play a sport (hahaha, I could barely write that last one with a straight face). Luckily, the people I work with are pretty fabulous, but even still, sometimes I need some time away from opera talk. The question is, how do you find friends once you're out of school?

My first year in Houston, I met my great friend ArmyBrat completely by chance while I was visiting my Best Friend in Dallas. ArmyBrat was working in Dallas for a few weeks, hanging out with a childhood friend that happened to be my Best Friend's colleague in grad school. We met and immediately knew we were kindred spirits. When she got back to Houston we started hanging out all the time, and she made my life here infinitely better. Of course, being ArmyBrat, she wasn't here indefinitely, so last January I had to say goodbye to her as she moved to the Netherlands for the next 3 years. Since then, I haven't found any other non-opera friends.

Until now, that is. A few weeks ago I went to a Flickr meet-up, where I immediately clicked with the lovely Fuzzball. Could this be the friend I was looking for? We started out slowly with traded comments on each other's photos, and then I got bold and asked her out to see an opera outside, followed by frozen mojitos at The Flat, with conversation ranging from boys to theatre back to boys. It went so well that we braved a second date...today! We started out with lunch, where Fuzzball made a baby cry at the table next to ours (and you thought I wouldn't dare blog about that) and made me almost cry with laughter. We continued on to a walking tour of Houston, where we met up with 2 more fantastic Flickr ladies, Laanba and Aggiechristine. The tour guide was not great and the weather was far from ideal, but we made up for it with lots of giggling, chatting, and picture taking. I had such fun with these women.

After I parted company with my new friends, lest I start feeling opera withdrawal, I went to the tail end of the Ballo orchestra staging. The show is going to be amazing! I can't wait for the final dress rehearsal on Tuesday night.

Oh, and my Flickr friends tell me that the best way to stalk and be stalked is through Twitter. Turns out I'm a sucker for peer pressure.