Let the countdown begin

After I made my post yesterday about our upcoming anniversary I became very nostalgic. So I've decided to entertain you with our own personal love story.

Andy and I met back in 1999. We worked together at Staples. When we were hired the store wasn't open yet and we were part of the set up team. There were lots of other people there from other stores and from companies that came in to do that sort of thing. So in the beginning he was just another face in the crowd.

Then the store opened and all those other people left except for the permanent staff, and Andy became that scrawny younger guy that hung around with the even scrawnier guy that was annoying. I would see the two of them coming and groan internally because scrawny guy #2 was sometimes overbearing and hard to be around (he turned out to be a very sweet fella' and a really good friend, but that's beside the point). It seemed like if one of them was working so was the other. They were always together and any chance I had of getting to know Andy by himself was thwarted.

Not that I wanted to get to know him. He was just another guy that I worked with and I knew he was younger. Of course I was oh so mature and was about to graduate from high school (early because I had my fill of high school by the end of my junior year so I had decided to cut my senior year short), and he was only a junior at his school and dating someone younger was beneath me. So, initially, there was no interest at all.

Then, finally, Andy started getting some shifts without his sidekick. I got to know him for him. He's very quiet and unless you have him alone he doesn't really say much. He was younger, but not that much, only 6 months and he was in a grade below me because his birthday was in the fall. And then I began to notice some flirtations coming from his end. Was this shy, quiet, younger dude trying to pick me up? And was it possible that I thought he was kind of cute? I think I did.

He was in fact planning to declare his love for me, or at least to ask me out. But that is a whole other post for another day.

At this point you must be asking yourself, "With all this flirtation and getting to know each other going on, did these kids ever get any work done?" Absolutely not.