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…there was a boy. Despite being as frustrated and annoyed as most 13 year-olds, he went to a camp where he took classes with about 90 other adolescents marked early on as smart kids. Sustained on Dr. Pepper, eye-rolling, an encouraging role in DJing, and new friends, he struck up friendships with several people at the camp, including two kids who lived a hour or two north of his town in the mountains of Colorado.

Those two kids egged on the boy, insisting he return letters, send mix tapes of his high school radio show, and ditch school to meet them for slurpees or other ridiculous activities not usually considered worth driving 100 miles round trip for.

One of the kids had a high school friend who loved designing and making costumes.

Time for college came, and the kids headed to different schools: across Colorado, Utah, Rhode Island….

The second kid reached junior year in college, and needed a roommate. Luckily, the two campmates bumped into each other at an outdoor concert the summer before and mentioned the need for a roommate. Turned out that the costume design friend was moving back to Colorado, and set to start that fall at the same school and needed housing as well. Trusting the camp friend’s judgement without a second thought, the costume designer and the second kid became roommates.

They had many parties, with many great costumes…

And along the way, the original friendships from camp held together – including visits to each other’s schools and more often, invitations for the boy to come to the theme parties. By this time, his DJ skills were definitely developing.

College finished for the kid from camp, and graduation meant a trip away from the state for graduate school. There were tears as what was a very fun household broke up for everyone to go their separate ways. However, the kid from camp came back a few months later to see friends, and in the usual way, gathered together as many friends as possible for a short in-town visit, whether or not they usually hung out together in the kid’s absence.

Somewhere along the way, the costume design girl and the boy from camp had noticed all the neat things about each other – and seemed to share a certain goofiness, an interest in similar music, and it wasn’t long before they started dating.

15 days ago, these two people got married – in a beautiful 1920s ceremony complete with handmade dresses for the bride and her bridesmaids, and guests turned out in bowlers, flapper dresses, and long satin gloves to dance, eat cake, and celebrate most of the night. It is hard to believe that now a lifetime together can happen because of a spark from two people I met 15 years ago and helped introduce to each other.
Congratulations, S & N.

You’re right. I haven’t posted in a while, because it’s hard to know which stuff to post. So let this serve as a jump back into the posting waters, with some generalized updates:

• Both Sam and I are now employed. I am what you might call under-employed, but it works for now and forces some time organizing skills that are worth developing. Also led to an interview for a better job that I don’t have details on yet.
• The garden has gone through two frosts now, and we’ve pulled out most of the greenery. We have a funny system set up to hopefully ripen the tomatoes: a long pole stretched across a chair with the tomato vines draped across it. The tomatoes dangle down, hopefully turning red with a little more support. I wish I could speed up the process with some ethylene. Unfortunately, it’s not sold retail. For the garden plot, the hope is to switch to a sunnier locale next year, meaning that I need to pull out my herbs and sow a winter cover crop to make this plot more appealing. Luckily, I have extra wheat from my uncle to put down – it looks really attractive when it shoots up around Easter, and puts nitrogen back into the soil.
• Our road trip west was wonderful – and included cutting 21 mohawks! But get this: two of the mohawks turned out to be NEXT DOOR neighbors here in town. It was bizarre to meet 1000 miles away and find out we live so close in real life. It also included learning how to provide a variety of services in a pretty urban environment, including lots of bike repair for Sam, and general bartending for all of our friends. It is a great experience to realize how much we all like to fix things.
• I got to meet four bats up close through a volunteer position at the DBG. Wish I had brought the camera – but they were amazing even without it. A neat fact: only New World bats (microbats) echo-locate, and it makes them look like they’re silently screaming. I very much want a bat detector for Christmas, but understand if you’re not interested in dropping $300-$1800 for a hobby device.
• I’ve been tutoring calculus. It’s a good reminder of how much cooler calculus is than the math sections that come before it, and how much fun it is to share with someone else why we need calculus. I think I must be doing a better job than I expected.
• I have an obsession lately with reading and learning about America’s urban decay. That is to say, I am watching The Wire, reading Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and closely following the corruption and replacement of St. Louis’s police chief. Our current city really doesn’t have urban decay – it’s much too wealthy and restrictive for that kind of thing, but St. Louis has it in spades. I’d like to think that there are people in St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, the Bronx, and other major urban centers who are working to improve the education, opportunities, and lives of people who live in crumbling urban areas. I’d like to get back into more of that at some point, even if the overarching point of The Wire is that the situation is hopeless.
• We had a chance to show around an architect friend from Austin recently. Having visitors is fantastic for discovering the area in a new way – she had very different things she wanted to see compared to other visitors, and with the fall color, it was easy to oblige. This is a hint to those of you who might come visit – we are well outfitted to show you around and put you up.
• I’ll end by offering two interesting links that I think reflect my thoughts on the changing political landscape: a meticulously researched poll website called www.fivethirtyeight.com (referring to the exact number of electoral college votes) that gives some very well researched data on how various national and senate elections may go. The second is Flickr’s partnership with the Library of Congress. The set linked to in particular fascinates me. It is all shots of Americans during the Great Depression and just afterwards, showing the poverty, agriculture, industry and lives of citizens during the last period of serious economic turmoil. Flickr and the Library of Congress are asking individuals to tag the photos with any information you might have – if you can identify people, towns, crops, or other information it allows them to have a better understanding of what the Farm Security Administration was recording.

So there – an update – and a likely probability of more updates soon.