As appearing in Dec. 1's Bugle-Observer

Since the bugle-observer is offline, i decided to post today's column here.

By Katelin Dean

John Lennon said, "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

In high school I didn't have many friends, though there were phases that were pretty typical of a teenage girl.

One time, I was excited about four girls who let me hang out with them during school and my mom let me invite the four of them over for a sleepover in Grade 9.

We stayed up most of the night talking about boys we had crushes on, putting make up on each other and watching movies.

It, incidentally, was the weekend Tim Hortons' introduced Iced Cappuccinos, and we lived within walking distance to a Tim Hortons.

Picture this: five 14-year-old girls, too much caffeine and talking about what our lives would be like when we were older.

We talked about getting married to the boy of our dreams (or at least who we thought was cute at the time), having kids and having wonderful careers.

I know I had it all planned out.

I was going to marry the French horn player from my high school band. We were going to have a terrific swing band – comprised of the people in our high school band – play our wedding reception and over 200 people would be there to see us celebrate our undying love for one another.

Then, after our honeymoon in Rome, we would come back and I was going to be a civil engineer – just like my dad – and he would be a professor.

I planned for us to have one child when I turned 25. Her name was going to be Abbey Rae – named after my two grandfathers. I wanted to have Abbey at 25, so I would still be fairly young when she went off to university because the French horn player and I would still have a lot of living left to do.

This, of course, was unbeknownst to him. But to me, once I admitted it to these four girls, it was real.

It seems hilarious now, as a 26-year-old single gal

I maintained a fairly close friendship with two of these for ladies for the past 12 years, though it has been sporadic, and they came to visit me this weekend.

Just before going to sleep on Saturday night, we reminisced about the over-caffienated sleepover so many years ago and how our lives are so much different than we had planned.

If you're reading this column, you know that I'm not designing bridges for you to drive on as a civil engineer.

As for the French horn player, he is playing bass in a reasonably popular pop/rock band in Halifax and is in a long-term relationship with a woman he met after university.

And as for me, I am super single with no immediate plans of entering a relationship or having little Abbey Rae.

Until fairly recently, I worried about when I was going to marry and have kids, but now, I'm just living life and having a good time.

Though it's different from the plan I had originally crafted as a young teenager, my life is working out pretty well overall.

John Lennon was right.