I had been standing in line for the better part of an hour to get a photo with Woodie Flowers, co-founder of FIRST robotics. It was finally my turn and then I noticed someone following me trying to get my attention. It was Omar. That's when I found out that he had photobombed my picture, and then he wanted to give me his number so I could send it to him. I was mad, so I wasn't about to just send him the photo. I sent it to some random number similar to his. But if you know Omar, you know he is persistent when there is something he wants. 20 minutes later he found me again asking if he could check to make sure it went through. He caught my "mistake" and actually sent it to himself. I thought that was it, there is 20,000 people at this event, I'll never see him again. Time to see if I can rage photoshop him out of this photo.

That plan backfired and we ended up chatting for the rest of the tournament while he waited in crazy lines to bring me Starbucks every day for the next four days. For those of you here that aren't affiliated with robotics, think of Worlds as an annual family reunion, but add robots. So I was shocked on Saturday afternoon when I asked what part of the world he was from and he said Texas.

We went our separate ways, but soon fund ourselves texting every day. It had been the better part of a year since we met in April, and I wanted an excuse to hang out with him again. So I invited him to Waco to come be a judge at a tournament that I was hosting. I figured, there is no way this guy likes robotics as much as I do and wont drive three hours one way to come to a tiny event that doesnt have any teams he knows. But then he actually showed up at 7am.

So naturally I locked him in a room with a bunch of strangers and proceeded to be so busy making sure everything ran smoothly that i didnt see him until the ned of the day. We went to dinner after and I was so tired that I fell asleep in the middle of the meal. Did that scare him away?

No. In fact we met up again on my birthday a month later at regionals because he wanted to "watch my team compete." He then proceeded to get himself a fieldside volunteer role so he could hang out with me all day while I was reffing.

By now, we are deep into tournament season and between FTC and FRC there is some event going on between mid January and worlds in April. So we spent the next 3 weekends with each other in various cities with various robots, with each one spending a little less time with our teams and more with each other. By then, people who knew us both were starting to ask if we were dating. And we consistently told them no.

Then the world shut down...

Robot season was effectively over and suddenly neither one of us had anything better to do, so we played a lot of video games watched a lot of movies, and stayed up all night talking most nights.

April 1st around 2AM, we were joking around about how everyone thought we were dating. Then he asked "but what if we were dating" I noticed what day it was and thought he was trying to pull a prank on me. So I jokingly said sure, lets be together. Promptly at 12:01AM, I made him confirm we was serious about us. Turns out he was.

The next three years went by in a blur. There was a lot of back and forth trips from Waco to San Antonio. I really dont think anyone wants to know how many thousands of miles we put on Omar's car driving 170 miles one way to see each other.

It wasnt fun being long distance, but we made it work. During tournament season, we would go to tournaments together on Saturdays, then if it was an out of town tournament, we would go to a local museum. After a while, we would purposely volunteer to go to tournaments outside of the usual Waco/Austin/San Antonio, just so we could go to more museums. Over the course of four years, we have visited over 40 museums, zoos, aquariums and arcades.

If you were wondering why we are getting married at a museum, this is why. He took me to the Witte one day while I was in town to visit and I absolutely fell in love with the Valero Great Hall and thought it would be so cool to get married in a room with dinosaurs.

I dont know when I realized I wanted to marry Omar. But one day I just knew that he was the one. It came time to pick out a ring and I had no idea what I wanted other than "something shiny I can wear to robotics." We went to a lot of jewelry stores and none of them had anything remotely like what I wanted. After a while, I decided I had given up on finding the ring in a store, so I opened up Solidworks and designed it myself, called a jeweler friend that owed me a favor and we collaborated on the design until it was perfect.

We picked it up at the beginning of March and from there I was just impatiently waiting. I knew that he was going to propose at a tournament, I just didnt know witch one. Then on the last day of worlds, almost four years to the day we met, he asked me to marry him.