Our story’s a long one, sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee / beer depending on the time of day you’re reading this. 🙂

We’ll start with where the story starts for Blair. Back in 2017, she decided to move to Plattsburgh, NY after she finished optometry school in Boston. The first person she met in town was Sara LeMay while she was moving into her apartment. Turned out that Sara was one of her colleagues at her new job. They became friends, even though Sara has opinions on Blair’s choice of fun socks 😛. During the summer of 2020, Blair decided to move back closer to family in Rochester. But she still kept in touch with her Plattsburgh peeps, and went up to visit Sara one weekend in June 2021. During a car ride out to Winooski, VT, Sara was talking to her mom Christi over the car speaker phone. At some point in the conversation, Christi was lamenting about her friend Sharon in Utica, who wished that her son Adam could meet a nice girl. Sara’s response to Blair: "You're a nice girl." Blair laughed at this idea, because when has that ever worked? This did not dissuade Sara and Christi.

We then confirmed that Adam had no cat allergies, liked cats, enjoyed Star Wars, appreciated the Legend of Zelda, and facebook stalked his profile photo. Blair agreed to let Christi talk to her friend Sharon when she came up to visit the next weekend. No way it was going to go anywhere, what could it hurt right?

Now enter where the story starts for Adam.

Adam was leaving work one day when his parents invited him over for dinner as they were having some friends over, including their friends from out of town Christi and Dale LeMay. Adam decided he would swing by for a visit and bring them some decent beer since normally all that’s in his parents house is Coors. After cleaning up from dinner, Christi and Sharon started asking Adam some very odd questions, including but not limited to: “You like Star Wars right?” and “Do you know what a Zelda is?” to which Dale chimed in “It’s a trap”. This line of questioning eventually led to Christi sharing some videos of a musician playing the Star Wars theme on various instruments, and asked Adam what he thought.

After confirming that Adam was intrigued, it was shared that this girl was Blair, one of Christi’s daughter’s friends. They asked if Adam would be interested in talking to her to which he casually non-answered; after all, being “fixed-up” was not his style.

Less than 24 hours later, after help from his mom and Christi, Adam successfully friended Blair on Facebook and had spent a good 5 hours messaging back and forth non-stop. After several more nights of this, Adam and Blair agreed to meet in person in Rochester the following long-weekend.

This is where Blair and Adam’s shared story begins.The first date. Nothing too crazy, because it was July 5th and most places weren’t open for the holiday. Adam picked up Blair from her apartment and they went to Boulder, a local coffee shop. After talking and having some coffee, they were both feeling something more substantial, so they wandered down to Jay’s Diner (it’s a Rochester staple in Blair’s defense!). They then decided to go for a walk in Webster park. It was 90+ degrees and humid that day, and both of them were wearing nicer clothes with darker colors. It was uncomfortable. So Blair asked Adam “Would you like to come back to my apartment and meet my cats? I have central air.” Not sure if it was the AC or the cats that won, but Adam said sure.

Fast forward a couple years to May 21, 2023. It was a Sunday. Blair had had a long week and a conference the day before, so she wasn’t able to spend as much time with Adam that weekend as she normally would have. It was a sunny day, and she was hoping to maybe go for a bike ride before Adam had to head back to Utica. Except Adam seemed dead set on going to the Lilac Festival. OK, we’ll walk around, grab some festival food, look at some arts and crafts really quick, and head out for a bike ride is what Blair is thinking. Meanwhile Adam is debating what clothes to wear. Blair’s oblivious to the obvious here. So they drive into the city and park a few blocks away and enter through the food vendor section of the Lilac Festival, much to Adam’s chagrin. Blair is hungry and wants some fried dough, Adam is nervous as all get out trying to figure out how to keep Blair away from food. They wander around for a bit. Blair wanders towards the arts and craft section. Adam leads her through the woods and starts reading plaques on trees. Blair’s starting to get cranky - she’s hungry, she’s hot, and she just wants some fried dough. She reluctantly agreed to hold Adam’s hand even though it was hot and uncomfortable out, unaware this was his solution to keep her from wandering off. He brings her off the beaten path away from people and near a larger tree. As they stop by the large tree Blair exclaims “what is going on?” and then as the situation finally dawns on her - “oh, I should probably shut up now huh?!”😂. At which point Adam got down on one knee and reached into his pocket, and as the old adage goes, “the rest is history”.