I’m more convinced that the whole six degrees of separation thing is true every day. That and it really is a small world.

It’s been two and a half years since I moved back from California but it still amazes me sometimes the people I run into being back in my hometown.

This week it was finding out that one of my teachers from elementary school lives in our coverage area and, in fact, Kris Hill had written a story and quoted her right when I started working here back in December. (Hi, Mrs. Acree).

Maybe a month and a half ago I was at Costco with my parents and we ran into Barb, who drove bus 18, and my sisters and I to school, for years.

Last year when I was interning for the Tahoma School District I was interviewing a teacher at the high school and I couldn’t shake the feeling I knew her from somewhere. Turns out she was one of my Sunday school teachers when I was elementary school aged.

It’s one of the cool things about this area. It seems everybody knows somebody who knows somebody you know.

That’s one of the things Kris and I laugh about in the office on a regular basis — who knows someone who knows this person that one of us knows — that and how old I was when she was in high school, in college, getting married, etc. etc.

It usually goes like this:

“When I was in high school…”

or

“When we were living in Vegas…”

At which point I start giggling…

“Okay, just tell me, how old were you? Do I want to know?”

We decided last week that the best example of who knew that we’ve hit on yet is from back in March.

We made a trip to the Kent office one day and made a stop at the archives, affectionately referred to as the morgue by reporter types, and poked around for a bit. As I perused through the stacks of bound volumes that dated back to the 40s in dawned on me that somewhere in the stacks were articles about the Kentridge girls swim team, a team that I was on in the early and mid 2000s. The hunt was on.

It didn’t take long before I hit pay dirt.

I could have stayed for hours, perusing the volumes, reading random stories and getting my hands covered in newsprint ink.

On our way back to the office Kris mentioned she had written about the team in 2003, right after she started at the paper and it was brand new. We have our own bound volumes here in the office and as soon as we got back I was off looking again.

Sure enough, in the fall of 2003 Kris wrote a story about Kentridge girls swim and the teams’ 50-something duel meet winning streak. I was a freshman that year. Translation, she was on the pool deck and I was in the water. Who would have ever though that someday I’d work for her?

So yeah, I’m pretty much convinced that it is a small world after all. Disneyland reference totally intended, because that’s the way I roll.