The Love of My Life

First I will share a post I did on October 6th, 2008 regarding the story of Mr TCI and I and how we met.

 I thought I would share the story of how Mr TCI and I met. I am originally from Michigan, moved to Kentucky to work with horses in 1995. I traveled around a little, went to Florida for the winter while I was working for John Ward and spent a year in Texas training halter horses during my apprenticeship with Mike McMillian and I also went back to Michigan for two years where I was a caregiver with Home Instead Senior Care. I was living a pretty decent life in Michigan, loved my job, enjoyed spending time with my family, was making decent money. The one client I worked for was awesome. She was an elderly woman who had suffered a stroke and needed constant care. She lived with her daughter and son in law and I adored her and her family. They were the epitome of how I wanted to live, a happy, loving couple, a daughter who loved her mom beyond reason. Just being with them inspired me be a better person and get my life in order so I could have a full life of my own. Being with them also reminded me daily how much I missed my own mom, who was still in Kentucky, and made me realize that I needed to come home to be with her. I realized that my place was close to her not only because she's my mom, I loved her and missed her but if anything ever happened to her I needed to be close enough to be there for her. Through 2006 I felt more and more compelled to go home so finally the week of Christmas I picked up and came back to Kentucky.

While in Michigan I had been introduced to an online classified site called Craigslist. I bought, sold and gave away items on there as well many times. There is a personal's section but after browsing it a few times I decided there was never anything in there but porn spam and people looking for one night stands so I quit checking out the personal's section. I hadn't been to Craigslist for a few months but on January 5th I thought of it and decided to check out the Lexington Craigslist, see what was interesting on there (it is a local type site, different sites for thousands of cities). I had been on Craigslist for a few minutes when I thought of the personals section. I dismissed the idea, knowing it was likely the same environment. Over the next half an hour or so I kept feeling like I should look at the personals section. Finally I decided to quit fighting it, take a peek to satisfy my curiosity and be able to move on.

The first ad I saw was really sweet sounding, he sounded nice, sincere and listed as interests a lot of the same things I am interested in! I sent him a relatively long email introducing myself. he emailed me back a few minutes later saying he was at work but would email me again later and also gave me links to some pictures of his dogs and to his Myspace page. He sent me another, longer email a few minutes later and he sounded wonderful! We emailed back and forth all day long then when he got home from work we got on instant messenger and chatted for a while. I had to go to work, this was a Friday night and it was an all weekend job so I told him I would talk to him Monday morning when I got home from work. When I got home I made a beeline for the computer and he was there waiting. We visited until he needed to go to work, then more when he got to work. We "talked" all day and night (I worked nights doing in home senior care but we text messaged too) all week long and decided to have dinner on Friday night. I was supposed to be off Friday night but shortly before we were to meet for dinner work called and asked if I could go in later that night. Pushover that I am I said yes then I was terrified he would think I was making it up to cut dinner short.

We met for dinner at a little Mexican restaurant in Frankfort, he was waiting for me with a bouquet of flowers, it was TOO sweet! He was absolutely wonderful and we had a wonderful time. We were very surprised when we went to pay for dinner and our waiter told us someone had paid for our dinner! We still don't know who it was that paid for our dinner but if by chance that person reads this, THANK YOU! I went straight from there to work and we texted back and forth all weekend.

We went on several more dates and talked nearly constantly when we weren't together. 3 weeks later on January 29th we were officially engaged (we had been talking about it for a week though), I moved in about 2 months later and we got married November 3rd of 2007. I have never been happier in my life! This last year has been the best year of my life.

We both knew from the start that it was right. We are so much alike it's scary and we have yet to have our first fight. We discovered along the way that our paths actually crossed several times over the years. While I was working at Patchen Wilkes, he was working for Vinery and they were leasing pastures across the road from Patchen Wilkes. He was taking care of horses in those pastures as well as working in the breeding shed while I was taking mares back and forth to the breeding shed, it's possible we actually met in the breeding shed at Vinery. We also had been on a couple of the same email lists at the same time (rawfeeding & kynaturaldogs - his own list) and we had emailed back and forth a little about dogs. I used to run a pet sitting business and he still had one of my business cards. Last but not least he was renting a house on a farm I was nightwatching on. It really was meant to be.