I have some pretty exciting news! I not only got the name I’ve been looking for but made contact, too! Yay! Her name is Eileen.

I got up this morning and found a message from Gregg, saying that one of their alums gave him the names of the unit heads from 1976 and that they vaguely remember Eileen having a dog.

Someone else said she married a counselor there.

So now I had a name. A much more likely name than ever before.

But then I ran her name and got more hits than I knew what to do with. Especially without an exact age and knowing what state she currently resides in.

Then someone named Becky was kind enough to leave a message on the reunion site saying she vaguely remembers a Jodi being in her cabin, but she couldn’t picture her and didn’t remember anyone getting kicked out. Also, there was a unit head around that time who had a dog named Sidney, who fit the description I gave of the unit head.

For some reason, the dog’s name seemed more familiar as opposed to the name Eileen. So I sent Becky a PM, thanked her for her input, described myself, and gave her my photo albums link in case seeing me would help her remember anything more since I have had pictures throughout all my life there. Then, to see if Becky remembered anything else I told her the only other real memory I have of being in the cabin and that would – uh – that would be stealing some other girl’s barrette! I told her that my bunk was on the front wall of the cabin, maybe 3-4 bunks from the sidewall heading away from the door. In the next bunk to the right, closer to the wall, was a girl whose long hair I was jealous of because my mom wouldn’t let me grow mine much longer than the middle of my back. I don’t remember anyone’s names, but anyway, she had a large brown hair barrette and a colored one as well. Being the little devil that I was at the time, I stole one of them. Yeah, I wasn’t a very nice kid, LOL, though as I told Becky, I’d be happy to replace it now!

Becky told me the name of that girl and that seemed familiar, too. Then she sent me an email saying she’d Googled Eileen’s name and provided me with a link that had a photo which she was pretty sure was Eileen. It was a picture at an education site showing her, her daughter, granddaughter and mother. Without seeing a better picture taken from around the time I last saw her, I wouldn’t be able to look at it and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s definitely her!”

We seem to have a couple of things in common from what the article said, like writing and languages. I guess she spent some time in Denmark and learned the language. She seems to be mostly into business-related stuff, though, and has kids. When I looked her up on MySpace she came up as single, though the article spoke of her as married and it’s only a year old, so I don’t know if she’s still married or not. She seems to have done quite well for herself over the years and has led a very busy and productive life.

Had someone told me in Phoenix when my first attempt to locate her came to a dead-end that some guy in Georgia would help me find her 14 years later while I lived in California of all places, I’d have laughed my ass off!

This entry is getting way too long and so I’ll finish the story tomorrow. I’ll just sign off by saying that Brandy and the puppy came down today and this time it wasn’t quietly. The puppy barked just outside the porch. Tom said he thinks something happened to scare it, but I think it was playing. It not only distracted me from my work, but it really startled me. So I called up to let Jesse know his dogs were loose. Damn, I wish that guy would keep his dogs to himself! This is the whole reason we came out here; to try and finally escape this shit.

Up to $11.59 now on MT, but I’m afraid there are not going to be as many jobs as I hoped there would be. I’m also still owed about $20 in pending payments.

Oh, I keep forgetting to mention this and then I’ll sign off – I apparently scared off whoever the hell that really was that contacted me on FB claiming to be from outside of Thailand. I don’t know what their motives were, but when I confronted them with the fact that I ran their email and found them to be just 134 miles from here in a place called Mountain View, I never heard from them again.