Mike and I first met in 2004. My laptop was on the fritz, by which I mean it was toast, and I took it to the Dalhousie Help Desk to have one of their fabulous technicians look at it. Other than that visit leading to me getting a new MacBook I don’t remember a whole lot about it. The employee who helped me was tall and made a great joke about how I probably owned a Sony Vaio because it came with a free DVD player or something because the notebooks were such crap they couldn’t give them away… but yeah, that was it. I went on with my life.
Two months later I found myself unable to say no (though I really probably should have in retrospect, if my grades that semester are any indication) to several good friends and mentors when they strongly recommended I try for the position of Chief Returning Officer (CRO) for the Dalhousie Student Union. I was the only poor soul interested in the position and before I knew it I was up to my eyeballs in parliamentary procedure and elections schedules and much more. I knew from reading a past report on trends in voting systems and the spoilage rates of paper ballots that I wanted to run a paperless election at Dalhousie for the first time ever. Thankfully there was already an online voting system in place, all I needed to do was contact the person who owned it, a computer science student named Mike Smit.
I e-mailed Mr. Smit asking him to meet with me so I could talk with him about his software and my election plans. That e-mail would change my life… and provide instant fodder for Mike. Apparently no one calls him “Mr. Smit”.
We bonded instantly over our mutual dislike of candidates, voters, election employees, DSU councilors and, well, you get the idea. Many long hours were spent in the election office, writing reports and judicial board briefs and engaging in total ridiculousness and shenanigans with my committee members and other DSU members. By the end of it all we were great friends. He was the first one I wanted to write to when I got to Poland on the March of Remembrance and Hope several months later and I was the one who listened to all his adventures at IBM.
I was interested in being more than friends; don’t mistake that for a second. I knew it, our friends knew it, Mike knew it. His reasons for not pursuing are his own and I think in the end he was probably smart to let us become the friends we are first.
Eventually, almost two years after we first met, Mike was ready to leave Dalhousie and start his PhD at the University of Alberta. I was on to what I thought would be my next adventure as an student in the new Informatics programme at Dal. I was excited but I could not believe that my best friend was going to be moving to Edmonton. I was convinced that I would never really see him again, despite modern technology, and I was devastated. After regrouping over an impromptu visit to New York City (where I tried to reinvent myself as a whole new person and purchased the most fabulous pair of designer shoes I have ever owned) I came back to Halifax convinced I needed to move on to other things. I would always love Mike, but we were meant to be friends.
He had other ideas.
More than a month after leaving he returned for his convocation and I fell right back in love with him. Several weeks later he finally admitted that he wanted to be with me, that it was worth the time and distance. I didn’t need to be convinced. November 11, 2006 we finally started dating, more than two years after he came into my life.
Despite a few semesters apart fate seemed determined to help us out. I got an open-ended co-op placement in Edmonton, enabling me to spend a year out here with Mike. During this time I realised that I was not well suited for the incarnation of the informatics stream I was in and wanted to take some time off and work for a while. I moved out here for good in 2009 and at the start of 2010 Mike asked me to be his wife… thus the need for this website.
It may not be much of a story, but it’s our story, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
