Happy Birthday to Steve!

Today is my Hubby's birthday - he is 53 years old. We spar constantly (over pretty much everything) about the year we met. I know it was our junior year at Ohio State so that was 1976. We have known each other for 32 years! That is an amazing number.

We met in Computer Science 211 - Fortran (am I dating myself or what?) for Business Majors. We were told we could partner up to work on our lab assignments and I was secretly thrilled when the good looking guy with the gorgeous blue eyes asked me if I wanted to work with him. I was only secretly thrilled because I had a boyfriend that I had been dating for 3 or so years. I couldn't appear to care even though I thought my new lab partner was cute, and funny, and made my heart skip a beat whenever he called me (to discuss class work, of course.) My roommates saw right through me!

Anyway at first we really only got together outside of class for lab work. At that time you had to enter your program onto punch cards and then run the card stack through a compiler and then "run" the program to see if you got the correct results. How archaic thinking back on it now.

Hubby had a couple of friends in our class that he had gone to high school with. They all grew up in the Columbus area and one of them knew a kid who was in 8th or 9th grade who they called Univac. Univac was willing (for payment)to write the programs for these guys and then Hubby's peeps would have to punch the cards, compile and run. Even this was somehow too much for them so I got to go along too. Univac would explain to me what we had to do and I would be the card puncher, the compiler and the program runner for Hubby and I. In exchange he would buy me an occasional lunch or a beer. I drew the lines at his friends - they would get the original card stack from me but they would have to figure out why it didn't work on their own.

I was always busy on the weekends - my boyfriend would either come to town to visit me or visit him at Salem College. How different our two worlds were - but that is the topic for another post. Hubby gave me a lot of grief over the fact that I was never around on the weekends to go out with him - as friends of course. Finally at one point towards the end of fall quarter the computer lab went down for all of Thursday and most of Friday. I was supposed to go away that weekend but we had an assignement due on Monday. I couldn't leave until we had the program completed. When it looked as if the lab might not be up and running until Saturday morning I boldly asked Hubby if he wanted to go out for a beer that night. Now remember he had been asking me - repeatedly. I was therefore dumbfounded, angry and hurt when he said he couldn't because he had a date! WTF! (I actually did not say things like WTF back then!) Not even a - gee I'm really sorry about that. At the time I had 4 roommates and as it turns out none of them were around for the weekend. I was determined to go out so I went over to the apartment of a bunch of guys that I had gone to high school with (one whom I had dated for 4 years) and asked if I could hang out with them that night. They said yes so off we went to High Street to do some partying.

I remember very clearly walking into my favorite bar on High Street - The Travel Agency - and running smack dab into Hubby who was out with his friends. No date. I was pissed. So I walked right up to him and called him on it. He sheepishly said he had been stood up. Then he bought me a beer. We talked for a really long time until I finally said I had better see what my friends wanted to do next. Turns out they had left - so I was now flying solo. And the rest, as they say is history!

Happy Birthday, Steve! I wouldn't change a thing about the past 32 years - well, maybe one or two!

Many happy returns of the day - I love you!

Monday 6/2/08 postscript - over dinner last night I mentioned to Hubby that he should read my blog post for 6/1/08. He commented that he had never read it (I knew this). My one daughter said it is embarrassing when I write about them. My other daughter said I should write a book. When I told them what the June 1st post was about they chastised me and said it seemed more appropriate for an anniversary post than a birthday post. Rereading it I think they are right!