hthomas98's Journal

So today is the 9th anniversary of when Jon asked me out and the 8th anniversary of when he asked me to marry him!  We call it Armadillo Day.  Here's our story... warning... be prepared for some nerdiness...

Fall of 1999, I was starting grad school here at Auburn.  My first week here and I'm running around trying to figure out classes, e-mail, and basically how everything works.  I'm walking into the building where my office is and I run into one of my lab mates, John, talking to a professor, Jon.  John introduces me to Jon.  Jon is immediately interested in me, but I'm so not looking at this point.  I've just started a new school, I've got to find a research project, write a proposal, etc.  So I talk a few minutes, find out he studies fish, which is something else I have no interest in.  I'm a mammalogist and working on bats after all.  Ok, so we are both in biology, but that's it.  So finally I ask John to show me how e-mail works etc.

Fast forward a few months and the Folkerts have their annual potluck departmental picnic.  I go as I am still trying to meet people and since I am part of the department.  At some point.  Jon, John, and a few other grad students got into a very spirited game of croquet.  I was practically rolling on the ground laughing it was so funny.  Jon is still interested and he's beginning to enter my radar.

The next semester and I am at Biolunch (we eat lunch while someone presents their research or recent field research trips).  Jon comes in and sits down next to me.  We are chatting.  I look over and notice Jon has mustard on his sleeve.  He tells me later he was trying really hard to impress me and here I am pointing out mustard on his sleeve!  LOL!  It turned out to be a good thing though b/c he had a meeting with the dean that afternoon so he had time to go change.

Then there is a potluck at his apartment to show slides from his latest trip.  He specifically invited me.  I make my Kahlua Choclate Nut cake (chocolate and alcohol... perfect grad student food!)  At this point we have talked enough that I am starting to get interested.  I get there and I meet Carol.  Carol is very comfortable with Jon and in Jon's apartment.  My hopes are dashed as I become convinced I misread his signals and that he's involved with Carol.  By the time the evening is over I figure out that Carol and Kevin are married.  I still wasn't sure about the relationship between Carol and Jon, but it was platonic.  (More about Carol later)  I was talking to Jon about some of the cool fish in his slides and he tells me to stop by his office, in the basement of the building where my office is) so he can show me one that has teeth that grow through it's skull.(I warned you about nerdiness!... Yes he flirted by showing me dead fish!)

The next week I have to go on a field trip with my Advanced Mammology trip to Florida to go to the Lubee foundation where they are doing some cool bat research with GIANT fruit bats (6 ft wing span!) and swimming with manatees.  We are camping out one of the nights.  Yes, camping out in Feb, but it was Florida... except it was below freezing that night!  Jon was advisor for Marine Biology club who is also going on the trip.  He wasn't planning on going until he heard I was going. Needless to say there was some serious flirting going on that trip.  I wanted to kiss him or at least hold his hand.  I got back to Auburn and decided he had 2 weeks to ask me out before asked him out. 

He took one week. It was a Friday afternoon.  I had just wrapped up a meeting with my advisor and was headed home early to start printing the programs for the conference we were hosting (part of my advanced mammalogy class) Jon sent me an e-mail asking me to stop by his office before I left.  Romantic isn't it. ;-)  Anyways, I got down there and his one grad student was sitting about 10 feet away with no door between.  He was not about to ask me out in front of Justin.  He instantly remembered that for some reason there were baby armadillos in the fish collection that needed to be returned to the mammal collection.  So he told me he had something for me.  I was actually hoping it was the tent I lost on the trip. ;-)  Anyways, he led me into a back room of the fish collection to the armadillos.  He asked me out, which I barely gave him time to finish asking the question before I said yes.  Then he opened the armadillos (almost passed out from the preservative LOL!) and put them in a new jar.  I ran back upstairs and gave them to my prof and then left.  So that's the reason we call it Armadillo Day. 

We had our first date the next night.  He picked me up at 7, I finally kicked him out and sent him home at like 1 am.  After several hours of kissing. ;-)  Needless to say it was a very good date.  And here we are 9 years later!  Oh and when Jon proposed 8 years ago today, my ring was in an Armadillo puppet. ;-)  And before you ask, he was at the time he was hired, by far the youngest prof in the department, younger than many grad students.  There's only 7 years between us. A lot of my friends raised an eyebrow when I said I was dating a prof, till they found out how old he was.

So I came to Auburn planning to be here for 2 or 3 years for my Master's and then go somewhere else for my PhD.  I'm still here, in August it will 10 years.

Oh, I promised more about Carol.  We started out as okay friends, but as time went on I got put on her shit list.  Even though she and Jon were never more than friends/colleagues/lab mates, I stole him from her.  I gave him a life outside of work and she hates that.  She's a strange person Jon never knows if he is on her good list or bad list.  In a way she is jealous of him, esp when he got his $5 mil grant.  I'm cordial to her, but that's about as far as I go.  I've given up.  She takes more energy than I have.

In other news, parents just left.  Jon's left yesterday.  So we are back to just us for a few months. We closed on our loan this morning.  Construction on the addition starts Monday!