A Prelude

I think of Dr. Monica Palomo often, I mean without her I wouldn't have met the man I am married to today. No she wasn't a matchmaker or a mutual friend. In fact she was our water engineering professor. Yes we started this romantic relationship discussing sedimentary tanks and sludge removal. Dr. Palomo, half way through our school quarter, grouped our class based on our last names. Powell, Renteria and others were smacked together to design a water treatment plant. I defaulted into the group leader because the guys liked my organization, which really meant they were too lazy or indifferent to take over. At first I didn't like Brian because well I thought he didn't like me. At one point there was a design meeting in which I swore he called me a B*tch because I had disagreed with him over some semantics (and it wasn't until much later that I found out he had only been muttering about the assignment and it had nothing to do with me). I left that meeting thinking "I can't wait for this quarter to finish so I never have to see his face again!" The rest of the quarter wasn't progressing much better, but one day as I stared at my gmail chat I saw his name and that little green bubble signifying "I'm here". For some reason I felt compelled to chat with him, so it started off with the obvious school stuff, but it turned into fun chit chat about our favorite snacks and movies. At the time I had just started a new romantic relationship, so it was off limits to take the fun chatting too far, but our path to friendship finally started. By the end of the quarter we had done so well on our small project that Dr. Palomo asked us to compete at a national civil engineering conference as a team. Most of the guys couldn't make it, or bailed on me, except for Brian and one other group member. This meant long hours writing a technical paper, putting together a presentation and practicing our speeches. Little did I know that my feelings for him were going to grow at such an exponential rate. Meanwhile my new boyfriend and I were not emotionally connecting, and with him living far away, I started to grow distant. In no time, about a couple of months together, I decided to end that relationship so neither of us would get hurt or angry. Honestly speaking I knew that the potential of that relationship paled in comparison to the spark I felt with Brian. As the new year started I was able to admit to my growing affection to Brian, but it really took no courage on my part because he had admitted he liked me beforehand. On his birthday, January 9th, we went on our first date which included skydiving, the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and finally dinner. As we sat there having dinner at the restaurant at the top of the tramway we didn't speak much but it was one of the most romantic dinners I've ever had. Although he hadn't asked me to be his girlfriend at that point I consider it the starting point to our love and relationship.

A few months later we got to Kansas City, Missouri (great city for BBQ) and we gave our best shot at that competition we had devoted so much time to. We came in second place to some school I can't even remember the name of anymore. What a headache that project was, but I still want to thank Dr. Palomo every day.