Five

Us on our one year anniversary. (I’m also 3 1/2 months pregnant with E.)

Yesterday Andy and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary so I thought I would share our story with you since you can’t be all, What are you? Crazy?! Because, hello? Five years says we’re not and stuff.

First we’ll go back to September 2000. I have bought a computer and the internet is connected. This is the first time we’ve had the net in our house (I was still living at home) and I spent about 13 hours on it the first day. Yeah. I was downloading this and that, IRC was big at the time so I was chatting away on there and I also discovered the wide world of chat rooms. You could speak to people all over the world! It was crazy.

My first computer.

Now Andy enters the picture when one evening, on opposite sides of the world, we’re both in the same random chat room. We talk for a bit, random nothing chit chat and that’s that. Then the next night we both end up there again, and we chat again. I then add him to ICQ and we start “talking” a few times a week. Forward to December 2000…I think 18th, our first conversation on the phone. It was great. We talked like we’d known each other forever. The second, and last time we talk on the phone (Two calls = $100!) is December 22. After that I got a microphone for the computer ($30 or something, just slightly more affordable) and soon after that a webcam and we began talking, pretty much, everyday for the next several months.

::mrtl tangent:: I just got the feeling like I’d written this post before, but then realized I have written this story before just not on the blog, but for my permanent resident visa application. ::end of mrtl tangent::

Eventually Andy and I decided we wanted to meet in person and we began making plans for him to visit me in Nova Scotia. We soon realized that a few weeks wouldn’t be enough time together and started researching different types of visas for him. The only visa we could find that would work was called a Working Holiday Visa and that allowed a person to work and live in the country for on year. There was a problem with this visa though: It was only for people aged 18 to 30 years old and Andy was 33 at the time. So the plan quickly changed and we were planning my journey to Australia as I was only 21. *cough*cradle robber*cough*

Here I am at 21 young years of age. I know it’s kind of narcissistic (Hello! Blogger here.) to post this, but geez! I look so much younger. So, so much younger. I also wore so much more make up then. So, so much more.

Nobody believed I would go. “I won’t believe it until you book a ticket.” And when my ticket was booked, “You still haven’t got a visa…” And then my visa was granted, “Well you’re not on a plane yet…” Which, obviously, I eventually did get on, but not without a little drama first. My original flight was booked for September 14, 2001. Have you done the math yet? Yeah, there was a little incident that shook the world known as 9/11 and my flight was cancelled. At that point I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I actually ended up on a flight only four days later than planned on September 18. Only a week (!) after 9/11, but it wasn’t too bad. There was one incident where a confused, elderly man wearing a turban went through a door he wasn’t supposed to and the airport security freaked! out! on him (which was sad to see since he really was just confused) and on my last flight of the trip there was a man going over every article about 9/11 highlighting things and saying stuff like, “No, that’s not right.” But other than that it didn’t feel much different to any other day.

Ok, got a little off topic there…so I landed in Australia on September 22, 2001. When my plane landed and I was the last person to come out of immigration (because they lost my luggage) Andy started to get worried, but then we saw each other and after maybe five or ten minutes of meet-you-first-time-even-though-I’ve-been-talking-to-you-for-nearly-a-year awkwardness it was good. In hind sight the lost luggage acted nicely as an ice breaker for conversation.

It was only a few months and we were talking marriage and started planning to get married in Canada in December, 2004. But since I told you we’re celebrating our fifth anniversary you know we ended up tying the knot sooner then we planned. It was mostly the issues of visas and the cost of said visas and that if we were not married when I applied for my permanent resident visa that there was a good chance I would be denied and, blah blah blah. So, instead we got married in Port Douglas, Queensland in a lovely little chapel beside the ocean (that hosts nearly 400 weddings a year – we lived in a money sucking, tourist trap, but absolutely beautiful, small town) on July 31, 2002. We had about 35 guests and the whole thing was very casual and relaxed. The day was almost perfect and about the only part I would change is that my family and friends (from Canada) were not there (too expensive with too short notice – a month I think) and I would have loved to have them with me.

St. Mary’s By The Sea, where we were married.

About eight months later I was pregnant with E (she was planned, I guess we just like to move fast) and six months after that we drove from one end of the country to the other with a cat, because as beautiful as Port Douglas is neither of us could really imagine raising kids in a money sucking tourist trap and also because Victoria is where Andy’s family lives.

And the rest is history, which if you’ve been reading long enough I think you know by now!