Joy of Love Day 24

Where We Met-

See that little symbol above.  Do you remember it?  Yes, that the AOL Instant Messenger symbol.  Back in the days of dial up, I think a lot of us used AOL.  Rewind to July 2002.  

I was a single girl living in Indianapolis.  I worked at Apria Healthcare in Southport full time and Walgreens part time.  I spent many hours working and so fostering relationships with guys wasn't really on my high priority list.  I had a couple of pretty rotten relationships that had gone south so I just figured that it wasn't really worth it.  I did however decide that since I was working so hard that I would shop for a new SUV to replace my 4 year old Honda Accord.  There were lots of deals out there, but being female I knew that I needed to be prepared so that I didn't get taken advantage of at the car dealership by the salesdude trying to get me to pay out the nose.  So the easiest and coolest and newest thing at the time was to shop online for what was on the car lots by searching the dealerships web pages.  It was slow going, but worth it to know what you were getting and about how much you should be paying..  I was minding my own business when my Instant Messenger went off.  I typically would turn it off because weird people would try to talk to you.  Well for some reason whatever was said to me by BOLTS505 made me look twice.  Whatever it was irritated me and I responded.  We chatted for a bit.  He seemed interesting, but was I interested???  He asked for my number.  I figured he could call my cell phone.  What was the harm.  Well, it was risky and I knew my mom would be furious.  But I did it anyway because I was bored.  We talked for hours.  He was funny in a nerdy kind of way. 

The next day I had an email in my in box from him from his DOT.mil account so I figured what he had said about being a soldier was true.  And he was an officer according to the return address.  He sent me a long questionnaire and I was to complete it and return it to be graded.  Well, I got a C+   Seriously, I'm a straight A student and this dude gave my answers a C+  with some extra credit and boosted it to a B-

We emailed back and forth for a couple of weeks and finally had our first date around the July 26th.  It really wasn't love at first site.  He was "just okay" but he seemed to like me for whatever reason.  First date was drinks at Shallo's, dinner at Carrabba's and then karaoke.  Oh yes, he did.  And he signed me up to sing.  I should have known from that day!