Everyone, I'd like you to meet Brent.
Yes, we met at Iowa State. Our sophomore year he moved onto Coover, the 2nd floor in my building, and my escape from my succession of awful roommates. Anyway, I had the pleasure of starting out that school year with a nasty case of mono (note: never ever live in a frat house for the summer, despite the cheap cost. I'm lucky I came away with just mono and not Ebola or some other disease contracted from monkeys. Yes, I am comparing frat boys to monkeys.)
Ever since the middle of my freshman year, I'd hung out with, ate with, ran with and played ultimate Frisbee with the Coover guys and apparently they thought I was cool enough to come up in a large herd to see me when I was sick. Some of the floor veterans rounded up every new guy on the floor and they made the journey four floors up. Their banging on my door awoke me from my stupor, so I crawled out of my loft, preparing to muster all the strength I had to yell at them. In the end, I couldn't really yell, but I must have looked pathetic enough for them to go away. I've been told that Brent was in that group, so that was technically our first meeting. I don't really remember too much, and I didn't even fill my codeine prescription. When I was finally feeling better enough to want to get the hell out of my room, I wandered down to Coover and sat between the elevators, eating my KFC mashed potatoes and biscuits (yum!) and Brent came over, sat by me for awhile and we actually had our first conversation. And no, it wasn't Earth shattering enough for me to even remember the topic or topics covered.
We did the classic friends first thing until we both headed down to the Insight.com Bowl in Phoenix. For whatever reason on that trip, things just clicked, despite the fact that some other girl that had a crush on him was trying to woo him with "Get Better Bears" (an attempt to get children to take their medicine by making it look like a bear-shaped lollipop. Oh, and he was actually sick.). Neither of us actually asked the other person out, but that worked just fine for us.
Fast forward to our senior year when I decided to head to Muncie, IN and Ball State for my final semester of class work and Brent took an internship near Akron, OH. We drove 4 hours one-way to visit each other on the weekends. IM was a godsend since we both suck at talking on the phone. We got through that, and then I took an internship in Wisconsin while he was still working on his in Ohio. Luckily, Kenosha is just over the WI/IL border, and therefore close to O'Hare. Being the intern at a daily paper, I was stuck with the Saturday night shift, so I couldn't get away for the weekends, so Brent did all the flying. The weekend of the 4th of July, he came, gave me a ring that I'd picked out, and we called our parents to tell them we were planning on getting married. In fact, we called my parents while finding a decent vantage point to shoot fireworks since I was in charge of the token fireworks photo for the next day's issue. None of this was a shock and/or surprise since we'd been talking about the whole marriage thing for a while. No elaborate proposal here.
We finished out that summer in Wisconsin and Ohio. After that, his internship pushed back his graduation and he was back at ISU, so I looked for a job in Iowa, found one, and we were in the same state, albeit 4 hours away, (I just realized that we were about the same distance apart time-wise when I was in Indiana and he Ohio) for the first time in eight months. Finally, this May, he graduated, and one week later, we got married.
I realize that you may want more details (such as wedding details...and to settle this now, yes, I did wear a dress, and no, it wasn't white), and this really doesn't tell you anything about him as a person (side note: he was a construction engineering major, and anyone in the industry knows that the construction engineer is the arch nemesis of the architect, and vice versa. Our life together today would probably be much more complicated if I stayed in architecture.), but this has gotten really, really long. I'll take a poll...if you want more, let me know and there shall be more.
