Todd was born in Richardson, Texas, in 1975.
Although he does not have strong memories of being completely bored for most of his childhood, almost no one can be found to account for the bulk of his first eighteen years. He is not known to have made any hit records, starred in any genre-defining television shows, or in short accomplished much of anything.
Except this: in sixth grade, he won first place in his school's lip sync "talent" show with a solo performance of the "Reagan Rap" (sample line: "I'll sign a bill, then take a nap / This is what I call my presidential rap"). Although (sadly) not predictive of his future political leanings, this event would still prove eerily indicative of the life Todd would lead.
Julia was born in Houston, Texas, in 1978.
The observant reader will note that she is several years younger than Todd but quite a bit more mature, having honed her bossiness skills as the eldest of three sisters.
When asked what accomplishment she is most proud of, Julia is likely to reply "winning Todd's heart." This is false. She secretly experiences a great deal of satisfaction from winning the fourth grade spelling bee by correctly spelling the word "mammoth." Since fourth grade her infatuation with spelling and punctuation has continued unabated, earning her the prestigious title of Grammar Queen, bestowed by her mother around 1995. When Todd and Julia marry, he will become Grammar King.
Anyhow, at some point after their grade-school years (historians disagree as to exactly when, although it is generally thought to have occurred in the Holocene epoch), Todd and Julia found themselves attending Rice University in sunny Houston, Texas.
In spite of the difference in their ages, they managed to take one class — freshman chemistry — together, she as a freshman, and he as a disinterested, lazy senior. Though the class was taught by a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist, the main memory Todd has of the course is the awkward way said professor (who was also that year's homecoming queen) announced one day that he was "pregnant", thereby necessitating a "shotgun wedding". Ah, those were confusing days! And also irrelevant, since Todd and Julia did not actually meet in that class, perhaps due to its enrollment of several hundred students.
But luckily for you, intrepid reader, they did meet when one of Todd's housemates decided that he liked one of Julia's roommates, which somehow necessitated the whole population of Todd's house paying a social call en masse to the room where Julia lived (as I already mentioned, those were confusing — if heady — days; if you wish, you can blame Bill Clinton, because hey, it was the 90s).
Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and Todd and Julia had several opportunities for social interaction, in large part due to the insistence Todd's housemate had that he would not live with a bunch of asocial, awkward nerds. And so the awkward nerds of that house had pancake parties and potsticker parties. And yet, to the reader's probable consternation, Todd and Julia did not in any way express any interest in each other.
Time passed. Todd moved to Portland in 1998 to spend the bulk of his days in a sea of cubicles known as Intel. There, he was one of several thousand people working on product smaller than a playing card. In his free time, he pondered the role of computers in shaping human interaction, and why exactly he had chosen to major in computer engineering.
More time passed. In America, a plucky young man by the name of George managed to convince almost exactly half the country that he was a uniter, not a divider. And that same year, Julia went off to Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in theoretical chemistry.
Though hundreds of miles separated them, all hope was not lost for our protagonists, something you've likely picked up on, given that this is their wedding Web site. Through the magic of technology, Todd and Julia were saved the difficulty of yelling very loudly or learning semaphore. They rekindled their friendship of yore via phones (both mobile and immobile) and a new invention that has come to be known as the Information Superhighweb, upon which they passed electronic correspondence (or e-missives).
All of this ultimately led to Todd's flying down to Berkeley early in 2001 to spend time with a former Rice housemate (yes, from the same house with the pancake parties), and, as luck would have it, with Julia. By some accounts, Todd and Julia began dating within hours of his flying down to meet her; other accounts maintain that she had him at "hello," but these were later determined to be movie references.
Thus began the long-distance relationship that would last for over a year. In that time, Todd and Julia came to be very familiar with Alaska Airlines and the specific flight numbers and times that led from Portland to Oakland and vice versa.
But "all things must end" as the cliche says, and soon Todd found himself without a job because he'd decided that a period of high unemployment in Portland was a great time to change careers, without knowing exactly what his new career would be. Not too much later, Julia also decided that the life of a grad student was not all sunshine and glory, and she left Berkeley with a master's degree.
It had all the makings of a rather sad story of two young people, adrift in today's topsy-turvy world, but thanks to the miracle of narrative compression, the miracle of new jobs followed not long after things looked their bleakest.
So it was that in spring 2002, Todd got a job at Timber Press, at first doing data entry and later moving up (in some estimations) to being in charge of the company's Web site, which was nice because Todd had always enjoyed making Web pages, and enjoyed being paid for it even more. And at almost the same time, Julia got a job at St. Mary's Academy teaching math and science — one day after she flew up to Portland to interview for the job! The lesson of course being that in all things God works for the good of those who love him. And that kids today have no idea what they're doing straight out of college.
Since then, Todd and Julia have enjoyed their time in sunny Portland, Oregon, where they walk a lot, enjoy cooking together (when Todd is not being bossy), and spend large chunks of time at their favorite coffee shop.
They also enjoy travelling, and in addition to the many interesting places near Portland that they have discovered, they have made their way by train to the nearby metropolises of Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. They have also made two major international treks, the first to Scandinavia and northern Europe, and the second to Poland, both of which they enjoyed immensely even though most people couldn't figure out why they would go to such places. Do not under any circumstance ask them about these vacations unless you have set aside a large chunk of your day to do so.
Finally, Todd enjoys writing mostly accurate, extremely long-winded accounts of his life in third person, and he tends to end such accounts with self-referential notes such as this one.
