Many Moons Ago

Ten years ago this month, Rob and I got engaged! We had been dating about two years, doing the long distance thing for about 3/4 of that as I was in grad school in Austin and Rob was in med school in Dallas. I was at McDonald Observatory in west Texas for a late January observing run and Rob drove out there, all secretive and such, coordinating with the people who were there to surprise me. He surprised me on the catwalk of the 2.7-m telescope in the middle of the night and is lucky I didn't have a heart attack, because that is not exactly a place one expects to run into other people. Rob had a ring and the stars in the cold winter west Texas sky and it was all lovely and wonderful. Everybody say, "Awwwwwwww..."

Just engaged, in the west Texas dawn

A ring!

A while before we got engaged (in the summer of 2000, to be exact) we both went to Central Asia with Campus Crusade for a summer to teach English and work with college students. Unbeknownst to either of us, some of my roommates went around on the last day we were in the country taking pictures with themselves and random people holding this sign:

I decided not to put the one featuring a dead goat on the internet.

We had just been dating for about a couple months at the time.  But then... my friends lost the roll of film! They were so sad. But then... another team from our group came to the same city later and found the roll of film in the apartment we all lived in! They developed the film and left the prints in a desk drawer where my friend found them, upon returning to the same city for about a year later! She brought them back to the U.S. and gave them to us after we got engaged and now here they are, for all of you to see.