Chapter 1: How we met (and the times we didn't)

Many of you have heard of the way we met in college, it's one of my favorite stories to tell. I'll start with how we actually met, which is also the short version. I was good friends (and lab partners) with John's brother James. James, Stephanie (James' girlfriend at the time, and his wife now) and some other good friends in Electrical Engineering played together on an intramural soccer team. Goalies are always hard to come by and so James volunteered his brother, a lowly Computer Engineer, as a goalie. John joined our team and the rest is pretty much history! Our getting to know each other better was facilitated by the fact that I was playing goalie for a women's team, only it had been about eight years since I had played goalie and so I asked John for some 'coaching'.

It turns out there were a couple of situations in the three years prior to that when John and I had almost met. My freshman year I took programming and was struggling with a homework assignment. My friend Dave, who lived on my floor in the dorm, took me to his cousin Keva, who lived the floor below us to get help. Keva was a sophomore and in computer science/computer engineering. I spent about 20minutes with Dave and Keva getting programming help and found out four years later that was John's room too!

Later in college, not long before John and I actually met, there was an evening where I was extremely bored. It seemed all my friends had plans for the evening. I tried to get James to go to dinner. James, Jeff, and I were lab partners for a pretty intensive lab class that had us working most evenings/nights. So the three of us would get dinner and one of us would pay one night and we would rotate. I think I had paid the last time and so I tried really hard to get James or Jeff to go to dinner since *they owed me*. Alas, Jeff had plans with his girlfriend Allison and James had plans with Stephanie. I was so desparate that night to do something I think I ended up at a basketball game with my friend Stew. Much later I found out that just before leaving on their date, John had also whined to James about how bored he was and James said "Well, you could go out with my lonely lab partner!" John said "No Thanks, I'm sure I'll find something to do".