Three months and 15 years

As of today, we've been married for three months. We celebrated by ... doing laundry and generally lazing about the house, because we decided not to be one of those couples that celebrated every single milestone in our marriage with some overly shmoopy public display. Plus we made a really nice dinner last night.

As the calendar would have it, though, today is also the 15-year anniversary of the day we met. And that deserves its own story.

Feb. 15, 1994, was a Wednesday, I'm pretty sure. I know that the previous night, my roommates and I, none of us having girlfriends and all of us possessing a soon-to-expire rain check from a couple weeks earlier when there was a power outage at the theater, had seen Schindler's List in Wilmette (there's a nice Valentine's Day -- four dudes and a Holocaust movie). My friend Chris had extended his usual invitation to Evanston's only real student-friendly bar, The Keg, and it must have been a fairly light week for me at The Daily Northwestern, 'cause I went.

I sat down in a booth with Chris and a few other folks, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn't. One of the latter was Lisa, so by way of introduction Chris said to her, "Do you know Rick?" Her response: "No, but I have seen you naked."*

(*In the previous week's issue of tgif, the Friday entertainment section of The Daily, had aped a Jimmy John's ad by posing naked, with only cardboard Valentine hearts covering our business, for a staff photo -- which, by the way, was taken by a future Pulitzer Prize-winning shooter. When we tell this story, people always seem to raise their eyebrows at Lisa, but as she rightfully points out, I was the one posing naked. So lay off her.)

Ice thus broken, we hit it off pretty well, and enjoyed a good night of cheap pitchers with our friends. She was wearing a green sweater, as I recall. I don't remember what I was wearing, though chances are it was my (still) standard uniform of jeans, T-shirt and untucked button-down shirt. I gave her, and a couple other people, a ride home, with no ulterior motive beyond not making people walk if they didn't have to.

Chris and his roommates had a party about a week and a half later. I don't entirely remember if I'd heard Lisa was going to be there beforehand or if we just saw each other there, but anyway, I kind of made sure we ended up sitting next to each other for a good portion of the time. We kissed for the first time that night, and dated until graduation, pictured above, before having to go our separate ways -- Lisa to New York for an internship, me home to Kettering for a few months and then to California for my first newspaper job.

We stayed in touch on and off in the intervening time, seeing each other a couple of times. Chris, the guy who invited me to The Keg that night, got us back in touch in the summer of 2006. First we e-mailed, then we talked, then we talked a lot, then Lisa came to Santa Monica for Thanksgiving that year, and then that was it. By an extreme stroke of luck my bosses let me move to Virginia in the summer of '07, and 15 months after that we got married.

And now here we are. It took us a while, but here we are.

Continued ...

Beer, Barbecue and Birthday

Just got back from an all-too-short weekend in the Outer Banks, where we attended the first annual PigStein -- a beer and barbecue festival thrown by our friends Chip and Tammy of Chip's Wine and Beer Market and High Cotton. Whole hog cookoff, more than 100 beers for tasting, and staying with friends at an insane beach house. Happy 36th birthday, Rick!



We hit the highway on Friday afternoon, and in just 4 1/2 hours we arrived in lovely Kill Devil Hills -- the site of the Wright Brothers' inaugural flight, and if you want to watch Rick quietly seethe, just bring that up as part of a conversation about North Carolina's "First in Flight" license plates. At Tammy's recommendation, we had dinner at a great Frenchy restaurant, and then headed back to the beach house they rented for themselves and their friends for the weekend. When I become a cult leader, I fully intend to do it in a house like this -- 14 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, roof deck, volleyball court, pool, 3 kitchens, and 2 hot tubs, even though it was too cold to use them. Right on the water. The opposite of tough to take.

The beer and barbecue festival was the first of its kind, and we look forward to many more. Particularly fabulous, in addition to the many, many, many beers we got to sample, was High Cotton's "'Cue Cup" -- a savory parfait in a cup that started with baked beans, had a cole slaw middle and a barbecue top -- completed with a cornbread stick. Brilliant.

The rest of time we hung out with friends, visited the Bodie Island Lighthouse on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, slept late, and watched the Red Sox win. Oh, and drank a lot of beer.

Now if we can just get the mega millions to come in...

Continued ...