So far, our "family" only consists of two people - my wife and I.  So this little page is for us.  Just us.  No, this isn't about our pets.  Our pets are cool, but this is about my wife and I.  So there.

The following is a short Q & A list (that stands for Questions and Answers for those of you who are a little on the "Special" side) about us.

Q. How did you two meet?
A: This is sort of a long story, which is one of the reasons this page was created...so that people could have a quick reference from a URL instead of me having to type it up over and over again!

Let me start at the begining, chronologically (insert wavy lines and strange xylophone music indicating a flashback here).  The year was 1998, in the fall.  I was a young missionary for the LDS Church in Rancho Santa Margarita (RSM), California, a small town in Orange County.  In our mission on Preparation Day (or "P-day" as it is called), we were asked by the Mission President to wear our "missionary uniform," or white shirt, tie, dark slacks, and a nametag, to the grocery store so that if people had questions about us or our Church, we would be easy to identify.  Well, one P-day while in RSM, my companion Elder Phillips and I were walking through the grocery store of our local Vons-Pavillions, when we heard someone call out to us, "Hey Elders!"  We looked over at the bakery and saw a tall guy with a moustache behind the counter waving to us.  We walked over and started talking to him.  We asked him which ward he was in, and he told us that he was actually not from the area, but he was actually from Whittier, up in Los Angeles, about an hour north of our mission, and that he commuted to work.  He then told us about his family, and how he had two twin daughters our age going to Rick's College in Rexburg, Idaho (now called BYU-Idaho).  He told us that he also had a son who was in Law Enforcement, and another daughter a few years older than us in Utah.  He told us that if we were ever in Los Angeles to look him up, and that if we were considering going to school, that Rick's was a good place to go.  Now, I don't remember every conversation I had while on my 2-year mission in California, but this one stuck out to me, because I recall afterwards walking away and saying to myself, "That's odd.  I don't know this guy, in a year and a half when I get home I probably won't remember this conversation, I'll never meet his daughters, and I'm definitely not going to remember the name Rich B. by then."

 
Fast forward a few years.  The year is now 2001, I've been home from my mission for just over a year.  I've been dating around the entire year, had a few girlfriends off and on, but never really committed to anything.  I was begining to feel like I needed to commit to something in my life, like I needed to finally "settle down" a little more than I was.  I had kind of gotten off of the strait and narrow path here and there, and I wanted to change my life.  It wasn't that I was looking for a girlfriend to do that for me, I was just thinking that having some stability in a relationship would help while I was in the process.  I go on a few dates, several of them blind dates, and meet a few women that I like but don't really see myself with.  One day I get set up with an e-mail address for this girl from southern California that I'm supposedly going to like.  I also get a picture of her that is hard to really tell what she looks like, but she seems fun in our e-mail exchanges.  Two days later, a friend of mine (that happens to be female) is having a birthday party at a movie theater here in town, and I decide that, hey - what a great way to meet someone, on neutral ground and with a group of people so that there's not an awkward one-on-one encounter.  I invite this girl to come to the party with us, and she accepts.  On my way to the party, I go to pickup the birthday girl, only to find out that the people she invited, all 15 of them, cancelled at the last minute, and so it was going to be just she and I.  That is, until I inform her that I had invited an extra guest because I thought it would be a good environment for us to meet.  Well, needless to say, the "Birthday Girl" wasn't very happy about this new situation.  My wife thinks that she had intentionally invited only me because she wanted to be alone with me, but I don't know.

 
We get to the movie theater and right behind the "Birthday Girl" and me, my blind date is walking up right behind us.  The first thing I notice is that she's driving a dark red sports car (I hadn't looked close enough to say what kind - it was a Toyota Supra convertible) and wearing a leather jacket over business-looking clothing.  To make a long story short, I inadvertently made my blind date sit between me and the birthday girl.  At the end of the evening, we talked, the three of us, for a while and she and I got to know each other, and I drove away thinking, "She's nice.  Not really my type, but we could be friends."
So the next night, I called her back.  And the next night.  And the next night, but she stayed home.  Then the next night, she came over to my apartment and we watched Gladiator on DVD (not a great date movie, but she stuck through it with me, she must have really liked me!). We then started watching another movie, I believe it was Jackie Chan's Drunken Master, but I don't recall, because we shared our first kiss, and I was too engrossed to think of much else.  From that night on, we were offically "going out."

 
Well, we dated every single night.  In fact, since we met on March 27th, 2001, we have been together pretty much every moment that we weren't working separate hours or asleep, with few exceptions.  I believe there have been a total of 5 days where went more than 24 hours without seeing each other.  I knew by Easter that I wanted to marry this girl, and that wasn't because I was extremely desperate or naive.  Since coming home from my mission, I had kissed four times as many women in that one year than I had the three years that I had been dating girls leading up to that time (the ages of 16 to 19).  I had dated far more many women, too.  I had a good idea of what I was looking for.  Most of my relationships ended because I would get bored, or put-off by the person I was dating, and end it aburptly.  I figured that if I could spend this much time with one woman and still like being around her, than I had found something good!

 
Time passed by, and in August of 2001 we made a road trip down to California to visit her parents.  She and I had been discussing marriage for a while, and had even gone to pick out the engagment ring and had it on order.  The ring wasn't done by the time we left for California, however, so we went down.  I told my wife that I wanted to ask her dad's permission to marry her, because I had been raised to do a lot of those things the traditional way.  My wife was also looking for a new car while we were down there, because the head gasket on her Toyota Supra was blown and she had sold it.  Well, after we had been in California for two or three days, she still hadn't found a car, and I was having a hard time finding a chance to talk to her Dad in private.  My wife was crying one night after her parents had gone to bed, and talking about how depressed she was that we had tried so hard and been unable to find a car for her because no one wanted to sign with someone that would be living in Utah.  I took her back to her old bedroom where I was staying, told her to close her eyes, opened my guitar case that I had brought with me, and told her to open her eyes.  She was extremely surprised to see me holding the engagment ring we had had designed and made for her.  It really had been done on time, but I wanted to surprise her with it.  The next day, I made sure to ask her father for her hand in marriage.  He said he was shocked, but that he consented and thought it was great that his last daughter was getting married (her twin got married a few years before).

 
On May 11th, 2002, we were married and sealed for time and all eternity in the Los Angeles, California Temple.  We currently reside in Logan, Utah in a comfortable two-bedroom apartment with our pets (I promised I wasn't going to mention them, but I did).  We don't plan on having children for two years or so, about the time that I get out of school.  We are currently working full time at the same office in different jobs.

 
Now, you're probably asking yourself, "So what about the whole story about the baker while you were on your mission?"  Well, as it so happens, on the last day that we were in California the first time I went to meet her family, I saw a picture of my wife's father in a bakery, cut from a newspaper.  The caption read that it was taken at the Vons-Pavillions bakery in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.  I asked her mother what years he had worked there, and suddenly the story about this baker telling my companion and me about his daughters clicked back into my memory.  I never went to Ricks, I didn't go back to Los Angeles to stay with his family, and until then I didn't even remember his name, but oddly enough, I still ended up not only meeting and dating, but marrying one of the "RSM Baker's" daughters.
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