Happy Birthday E!!!

For those who don't know Erika, (which is most of you since you are all AZ people and weren't around for the Utah part of my life), let me tell you who she is...

I met Erika back in 2000. We ended up being assigned to the same apartment in Provo. I had already settled in and was out running errands. When I came home, there she was putting stuff in the fridge. Big smile, curly hair, and only 17! I thought it was crazy since we were in a major college town and she came all the way from Illinois to brave Utah Valley so young.I liked her from the beginning. If you met her, you'd know why. She hilarious. That's my favorite thing about her. She has my same humor, so she never looked at me like I was a moron. She's not afraid to look stupid and she always has something funny to say.

We were roommates for that summer. Then I moved.

The next year, we became roomies again...along with a smelly Armanian roommate and then a greasy fingered, bi-polar roommate. Luckily, those two didn't last long.Here's our NSYNC door. Erika didn't actually like them, that I can recall...and neither did our other roommates. But they indulged me anyway.
This was a fun apartment to live in--a lot of the time. We'd play night-time hide and seek...do Tae-bo together...walk 100 feet out the front door to the grocery store. I put most of you on every wall of every apartment I ever lived in...that's how much I love you! (This is where I was on 9-11...Erika woke me up to tell me the news.)One night, Erika, Sandi (my cousin), and I were out for a late night walk and we came upon one of the grocery carts a few blocks away. Erika and Sandi (or was it just Sandi?) got in the cart and I pushed them back to our apartment. We decided to keep the cart for a garbage can holder. GHETTO...but we thought it was hilarious. Eventually, we took it back to the store. I moved again.

Erika and I kept in touch and soon we were working security for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics together. It was really a boring job, but we got to be downtown for all the madness the Olympics brought with them. I got to see the Beach Boys, so it wasn't a total loss.

Then Erika and I hooked up with an old roommate, Kristen, and we all moved in together, once again.
We had a ton of fun doing anything and nothing. (This was dancing-and-karaoke-with-a-mixing-spoon-night.)
Then the three of us moved to completely different places. I stayed in UT...Erika went back to Illinois for a few months...and Kristen went to Idaho. (When you move to Idaho, you never get out.) We all got married within a month of each other that next summer--2003.And that is a very brief summary of how Erika and I came to know each other.