Chapter 3: Courtship part II

Back in August, on the 31st to be exact, I decided to write the 'story of us'. Clearly, that idea has taken a backburner to simply surviving as full-time, working parents. Since I really don't feel like working tonight (yet), here's the third installment for your enjoyment, or slight amusement, or at least a way to kill some time. In Chapter 1, I introduced how John and I met (soccer + brother James). In Chapter 2, I reviewed our flowering romance, accelerated by a summer of weekend trips between Portland and Seattle.

In fall of 2000 I returned from Oregon to my senior year of college. John continued at the University of Washington as a Reasearch Assistant. I can't recall too many specific details from that year. John and I continued to play soccer. In fact, at one point I believe we were playing in three league games a week on three different teams. Perhaps, this should have been a foreshadowing of the degree to which John and I would take our physical hobbies. That fall, my Grandmother passed away, and I remember that I was happy that she had a chance to meet John before she died, since I knew at the time how serious our relationship was. John was wonderfully supportive, which I really needed, losing my Grandmother was very hard.

That Thanksgiving marks the first year I did not return home for Thanksgiving. I stayed in Seattle and went to John's home, partly spurred on by the craziness of traveling at the Holidays and partly by my parents not picking me up at the airport the year before..I was kicked out into the cold when the airport shut down. Sure, it was a simple misunderstanding of the arrival time, but you have to remind your otherwise-perfect parents of a mistake whenever you have a chance. (I should perhaps stop doing that now that I'm a parent myself).

I can't pinpoint when exactly John and I decided to get married. There are stories floating around that John asked his mom 'How do you know when you have met the one?' I can't speak for John, but I knew pretty quickly that I had met my match for life. My favorite thing about John was that he's adventurous and willing to try new things. Just after Christmas that year, John joined my family in Boise, where he learned to ski! It was only a couple of half-day lessons and with his natural athletic ability we were skiing all over the mountain. There's a run on the back-side of the mountain that my Dad and I would often ski. Half-way down, it splits into a couple of options. There are two groomed runs you could follow, and then an off-run section in the trees that we would usually take. When we hit the fork, my Dad 'generously' offered to show John the way (in fact, 'Follow me John!' is now an often used phrase in our family). I thought it was awfully sweet of my Dad to take such an eager interest in showing my boyfriend, of less than one year, the way down the run. It was only a couple of seconds after they started I realized Dad was taking him into the trees and not on one of the two runs. I quickly followed after and caught up just as John yard-saled. There are a few amazing things about this incident: 1) John made it all the way down off-run and only crashed during the transition from off-run to groomed run 2) John loved it! The goalie in him came out and he couldn't wait to throw himself on the ground again. 3) He still married me despite his father-in-law (who now innocently says "I didn't think he would really follow me!").

Chapter 2: Courtship Part I

We left off in the last post that John and I met playing soccer. I suppose our first dates were goalie practices followed by lunch at the student union Subway. After a couple of those, John asked me to go bowling with a regular group of friends that went to Renton on Friday nights for 25 cent bowling. Given that I typically top out at a score of 65, 80 if it's a fantastic night, everyone was pretty surprised that I beat John 136-135 in our first game. I think we are still unsure if this bowling adventure counts as a date. Finally, we get to dinner and a movie! After enjoying a calzone at a local pizza dive, John and I went to see Mission Impossible 2 which had just opened. MI2 was so bad we decided we had to go out the next night as well to make up for it. John walked me back to my place where we stayed up until 4 in the morning talking. As he was about to leave I very awkwardly kissed him on the cheek, just as someone walked in the door, so I don't know if John even noticed it!

We saw a lot of each other in the last two weeks of that school year (John's senior year and my junior year), just before I moved to Portland, Oregon for the summer to intern at Intel. A little while after our second first date, I took John cupcakes in lab, where he was working most nights until 4 or 5 am finishing a senior design course (in fact, when I made plans to meet him for lunch, he would say 'just as long as it's after 11am, before 11am I'm a pumpkin', how can you not fall in love with that?!). We went for a walk around the big fountain on campus, the fountain is surrounded by a few benches, and it looks down towards Mt. Raineer and is the center of the engineering campus. We sat on a bench (this will become important later), where John asked me if I 'wanted to be more than just friends?' So I kissed him again and then said "Wait, does that mean we're dating??" So there you have it, soccer, a few dates, a first kiss, and we were more than friends.

Unfortunately, this all happened just before I left for Oregon. John graduated and stayed on at the University to do research for his undergraduate adviser. It turns out that it was exactly 190 miles from his door to my door and we made the trip every weekend that summer, alternating between Portland and Seattle. Luckily, we both had little red sports cars to keep us company those weekends, shown below, my MX6 is in the foreground and John's Mustang is in the background (and occasionally John would take the train). In some ways the move was hard for a burgeoning romance, but in other ways it was remarkably convenient. John and I spent time together every weekend from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, and it was a quick way to get to know each other. In the beginning John and I would say 'I like you!' It wasn't too long into the summer that I ventured to tell John "I more than like you" and he quickly responded "I love you!"


We had a fantastic time that summer exploring the Oregon coast and getting to know each other. I don't have digital photographic evidence, but a trip along the coast one weekend provided the first opportunity for John to work on his 'pose'. This is his classic picture pose and I'm providing an example below of what I mean (which is from about a year later when we were on a hike). We have pictures like this from literally all over the world, Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, France, Canada, and Utah. Someday, perhaps I can build a montage.

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".

Seven years ago today, I married my best friend

Today, John and I celebrate our seven year anniversary. The time has really flown by, but every minute of it has been fun. To commemorate our seven years, I plan to write seven blog installments about 'the story of us'.

Tonight is our first night away from Davis. Grammie is going to babysit Davis while John and I spend the night at the Salish Lodge, the same hotel/resort we went to the night we were married. I believe people are taking bets on whether we'll stay away the whole night.