More on how odd the universe is...

We met our friends Tif and Nick through Kelly, but it was a few years before we put together the quirky connections. I caught right away that their wedding anniversary was within 2 months of ours (it'll be ten years for them this year, too!) but, it wasn't till much later that AJS and Nick realized that not only did they both go to University of Maryland at the same time, they had back-to-back shifts at the college radio station. AJS had even told me stories about the anonymous guy with the shift before his: he called the genre "grind-core" and recalled that the play list announcements went something like (in a low voice), "that was Faust, playing Faust, from his first album, Faust." And we were friends with that guy and didn't know it! It was like meeting the subject of a novel. Here's a photo of Don holding Nick and Tif's daughter Izzie:

More recently, another unexpected connection was with Susan and Don. Kelly had gone to grad school with Sue and they both worked together after college. I met them about 3 years ago, but it wasn't until about six months after that I realized that I knew Don. At a party (at Tif and Nick's, coincidentally), Sue was wistfully hoping out loud that she wanted their daughter Lila's hair to look like Don's. (Lila is on the far right in the photo with Thea and Emma.) My initial thought was, what's special about Don's hair? and in a flash, I remembered a Don I knew in art school who had fabulously beautiful, long, wavy, strawberry-blond hair. We both volunteered as monitors in the art school computer lab and I'd had a bit of a crush on him. After a couple pointed questions, "are you from the Midwest?" and "did you go to University of Michigan?" I discovered that he was the same person. Wierd, huh?

Kelly and Todd, Sue and Don, Tif and Nick, and AJS and I all have an older girl and a younger boy (Tif and Nick are expecting a boy, imminently).

Coincidence? Um, yeah! What were you thinking?