love is in the air...

*disclaimer: sappy post.*

On this day in 2003 I blindly began a journey down an unknown road with a 19 year old boy named Justin. this is the condensed version of our story and how we came to be...

My first memory of Justin was during the first week of class in August 2002, my roommate (Mel) and I took a shortcut through his apartment and stopped to say hi. this was a justifiable act as anyone at CCU who has a bottom floor apartment could expect a person to knock on the door and wander through to the back sidewalk, additionally Mel and Justin had a class together so we at least "knew" the 4 guys who lived there. We opened the door and Justin was building a TV stand, not putting togethe a TV stand he was actually constructing it from various hardware items and I vividly remember asking him, "why dont you just go buy a tv stand instead of build one?" ha, clearly i did not know him at all. he has said that he too remembers this encounter and was not exactly knocked off his feet by me...mostly because i dared to ask why he would buy something when he could build it. needless to say, it was not love at first sight :)
over the course of the next few weeks/months we began to get to know each other as his group of guy friends and my group of girlfriends became one large group of friends. i remember thinking he was an interesting guy, so not my type who always had a story to tell and was easy to just hang out with.
Justin has said that he also remembers one of the first times he came to our apartment i came barelling in the door saying something like, "wow, i could sure go for some apricot tea" as i wandered to my room. why he found this random statement of mine as intriguing, i will never know... :)
When it came time for winter break i would say that justin and i were friends, nothing more and nothing less. however, we did exchange AIM screen names before going our seperate ways for Christmas so that we could keep in touch via instant messanger over the long holiday. i will never forget that he was colorado95zj.
We chatted a couple of times over the break via AIM and he would tell me how warm it was in Texas and how excited he was to eat at this place called chuys because they have this dip called creamy jalapeno...my thoughts on that: gross, i didnt even really like mexican food at the time. but i was starting to become more interested in the boy who liked this so called creamy jalapeno sauce...
when we returned for spring semester in january 2003 the dynamic of our group changed slightly and justin and i found ourselves hanging out more often, spending more time just the two of us and i found myself really enjoying those times.
In Feb 2003 i knew that there was something about justin, i didnt just want to be his friend any more but i wanted to wait for the right timing and didnt want to jump into a relationship too soon (lets be serious here we were 18 and 19 years old).
however, neither of us consider patience to be one of our better virtures so on march 1st, 2003 justin sat in my apartment with me and said somtheting like this, "rachael, when people think of you i want them to think of us." to which i replied, "ok, sounds great" and the rest is history.
we found out later from some of justins guy friends that they bet we would last 1 month, now here we are 8 years later. it has been a long, hard, trying, adventursome, interesting, thrilling, loving journey that we have travelled but we've lived to talk about it and more importantly we have done it together.
i am so blessed to have this now 27 year old man as a husband, father of my sons and best friend. i started to fall in love on this day in 2003 and on this day in 2011 i am still falling in love.

here is us at chuys on spring break about 2.5 weeks after we started dating. the same chuys we still frequently dine at (the boys love this giant fish). i had scanned a bunch of other pictures from the 2002-2003 time frame but i am technically inept and couldnt figure out how to get them from the pdf version into this blog. not sure how this one worked but none of the others did...oh well.