About JonathanJonathan is from Cleveland, and as a result he loves every Cleveland sports team that ever existed. In fact, next to Beth and his mom's egg rolls, Jon loves the Indians best. While growing up, Jon did not attend St. Ignatius Boy's High School as previously rumored, but he did attend St. Ignatius College Preparatory School for Men of Cleveland, Ohio.
For some reason, Jon chose Wabash College of all places to continue his education, and although it seems pretty bizarre to choose a tiny all-male liberal arts college to study the sciences, I'm pretty glad he did. Jon ended up with a major in Physics and a minor in Math, but he was also really interested in history and literature. Plus, being a Kappa Sigma gave him plenty of practical experience with planning lavish events on a tight budget. Not to mention practical experience in wearing silly props and eating whatever was put before him.
Jon is currently at Texas A&M working on his PhD in Physics and working at the Cyclotron, but if you act impressed he will get embarrassed. He has taken a lot of classes about things that sound to me like they're made up, and even though he's always up until the wee hours of the morning working on problem sets, he really enjoys it. I would love to tell you about the experiment he is working on with his team at the Cyclotron, but there is no way I would get it right, so if you're really interested you should ask him yourself. Ultimately, Jon would like to be a professor.
Jon loves all sports, although for some reason, despite having grown up in the great white north, he never got into hockey. Baseball is his favorite, and he used to be a pitcher growing up. It's pretty difficult getting a good pickup game of baseball going, though, so he settles for weekend basketball (where his main talent is being tall) and Friday afternoon games of football with his buddies. Lately, he has gotten into cycling, and hopefully his fixed gear road bike will be in one ride-able piece soon. Jon also knows a ridiculous amount of sports trivia, and manages to have an opinion about every significant sports happening in recent history, regardless of what teams or people were involved. He might even be the only person I've ever known to have simultaneous subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and Scientific American.
Jon dreams big. He never reads his books more than once, no matter how much he likes them. His kitchen experiments often look strange but taste amazing, and he really seems to enjoy taking things apart and (sometimes) putting them back together. Jon has eclectic taste in music, is quick to smile and is always ready to take a crack at the next big challenge or adventure, even if he has no idea what's going to happen next.
About Elisabeth Elisabeth was born in North Carolina but grew up in Georgia. She doesn't really have an accent, but she can put one on if necessary. Beth got her undergraduate degree from DePauw University, where she was a member of the Delta Zeta sorority, a media fellow, a music major in violin, and an all-around fun gal. She wisely choose to spend a semester studying and interning abroad in Paris, which culminated with the defense, in French, of her thesis concerning one of her grandest passions: the administering of the arts to the masses. Realizing that she was on to something big and lucrative, Beth made the great sacrifice to spend a year and a half in Bloomington attending Indiana University, where she attained the level of Master in the field of Arts Administration. She hopes to make a career out of securing funding for non-profit arts organization or formulating public policy for the arts. In the meantime though, Beth is employed at Blue Baker and is interning with NPR (where one can only hope she'll be able to meet her lifelong idol, Garrison Keillor, host of A Prairie Home Companion). She is also performing with the Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra.
As far as girls go, Elisabeth is actually tolerable. She has a very impressive vocabulary for playing Scrabble; before Jonathan met her he didn't even realize that "Kwyjibo" is an actual word (that's worth 152 points!). Her literary talents extend further than that though, which accounts for her being named a National Merit Scholar while in high school. As is customary for someone from the south, Beth is an accomplished reader and essayist of Faulkner's works.
Beth is also an avid fan of hair metal bands and classic rock. In fact, one would suspect that she keeps a hair brush on her person at all times merely for the purpose of never being caught without an acceptable microphone-esque prop. Try if you must, but you definitely won't be able to stump Beth in music trivia. She seems to know all the lyrics to every song and is especially adept in the art of cd mixology. When feeling overwhelmed, her favorite release is to drive around in her car to no where in particular and listen to the radio.
She is well-versed in football-speak and is never afraid to intone her belief that a special-teams player should "HIT HIM!!!!" or that a running back ought to "GO FASTER!!!" If pressed, she'll tell you that she much prefers college athletics to professional ones and is loathe to admit that Atlanta even has an NFL franchise. Beth is also quick to point out the fact that Jon could barely even fill out a tournament bracket for NCAA March Madness before meeting her.
Beth loves to laugh and enjoys the smaller things in life. She always has a plan for what will happen next. And if she doesn't have one, she is probably hard at work formulating one. Beth likes to keep things in order and is full of energy, unless she's put on her sleepy koala face of course.
UPDATE: In March, Beth left her job with Blue Baker in order to accept a position with PetroleumETC. It is a small company that spun off of Texas A&M University and is engaged in planning and coordinating petroleum engineering conferences all over the world. After a brief probationary period, Beth is to be promoted all the way to president of the company in May. She is excited by all the new challenges this job will bring.
How We Met
Well first of all, we went to rival liberal arts colleges in Indiana (ha, a liberal arts rivalry doesn't sound so frightening, now that I write it) that were about 45 minutes down the road from each other. It's an old joke that, since Wabash is an all men's school, Wabash guys often come down the road to DePauw to pick up women. Every November, the schools play each other in football in the Monon Bell Classic, the winner of which gets custody of the giant old bell from the train that used to run between the schools.
The first time we met was in early April 2005. Jon and a friend of his had come down to DePauw to hand out fliers for a party they were planning. Jon had met Jennifer, my roommate, at another recent party, and so he decided that dropping in on her at her sorority would be a good place to start. Jennifer gave the boys a tour of the house, which brought them past our room, where I was deeply involved in watching UNC win the NCAA Championship game and only vaguely noticed that there were other people in the room. Needless to say, I had no recollection of this meeting at all.Over the next few weeks, Jennifer and several more of our sorority sisters made some trips to Wabash to visit friends, and I came along for a few of them. I was re-introduced to Jon, and we discovered that we had a ridiculous amount of random things in common, a kindred sense of humor and a shared love for Ben Folds. We also discovered that we were both committed to grad schools: Jon was off to Texas A&M for the fall, and I had decided to defer my acceptance to IU until 2006. Bummer.
After graduating that May, we continued to email and talk on the phone, and one weekend that summer Jon decided to visit me at Brevard Music Center in North Carolina where I had a summer internship. He flew standby and ended up getting stranded, and in those 10 days we decided to go for it and be a couple, even though we knew it would be an uphill battle because of distance.
We managed to see each other quite a bit, especially over holidays, and I spent the summer of 2007 interning in Texas. I finally finished grad school in December, and I moved to Texas over New Year's. Hooray, long distance is over!
So How did he Propose?
Jon and I have our thing with koalas, and we'd been trying to get down to Houston to go to the zoo to visit the real koalas but we never found time over the summer. It had been hectic since I moved here, but MLK weekend was coming up and the weather was supposed to be nice, so I suggested we go down to Houston Zoo and do something fun. Being us, we also brought our little stuffed koalas to see the real koalas. Jon's original plan for the day was to propose at the zoo in front of the koala enclosure, because on the zoo map it looked like they had a pretty big house and outdoor area, but when we got there they only had one koala out and he was in the back sleeping. (His name was Yannathan, though, which made us giggle). So Jon had to change his plan around.
After we went to the zoo, we had a few hours left until we were planning to meet one of Jon's friends for dinner, so we decided to go to the Museum of Natural Science and check things out because it was right down the road. I was really concentrating on navigating the traffic circles and trying to find a place to park on the street, and I barely noticed that Jon had been fussing in my purse and managed to put the ring on the arm of one of the stuffed koalas.
He had planned to leave it there until we were at a quiet or neat part of the museum and then tell me that he thought the koala had a present for me. However, when we went into the museum to buy tickets, he was distracted and handed me the tickets for the planetarium, and asked me to put them in my purse for later. Well obviously once I opened my purse I noticed the sparkly bling that my koala friend was wearing, and I said, "Um, what is this?" And Jon was so unprepared for the fact that I might find the ring on my own right away that he said, "Huh what is what? Oh yeah!" So, in the busy main hallway of the museum, he asked me and I said yes. Of course, we didn't see much of the museum for the first half hour or so, but it really was an amazingly perfect day.
