Three thousand one hundred and fifty-four or so years after Odysseus’ journey ends, the rosy fingers of dawn stretched across the waking earth, riding the ripples and waves of the oceans approaching the east coast of the new lands to the north, heralding the birth of a girl. On the eighty-ninth dawn thereafter, the rosy fingers of dawn stretched across the waking earth, riding the ripples and waves of the oceans approaching the east coast of the new lands to the south, heralding the birth of a boy.

All good stories have a beginning, but not all beginnings are good stories, yet all beginnings are full of possibility. It's possible we “first met”, or rather, had a chance encounter on a SKIP bus ride in Boulder circa 2003. Jenny has this odd memory of being on a nearly empty bus and seeing a man ask another man carrying a single flower in the right front seat of the bus whether he could take a picture of that moment.

Ten years later, we met online and went to a contra dance in May 2013, but didn’t go out again until months later in October for tango classes, when the romance finally begins. We quickly met again for our first hike in a cold, dreary parking lot, pelleted by shifty weather – Jenny fully expecting Marcelo not to show up. This odd series of non, false, and semi starts is how our good story began.

(This story inspired a nerdy data project: Time and Place)

2014 was the year of traveling abroad, from the Swiss alps to the Amazon jungle, and in 2015 we started living together. In 2016 we embark in career changing adventures, from dog grooming and music to bookkeeping and data science, while hiking, canyoneering, and nurturing our love of owls. In 2017 we experience a total solar eclipse in Jay Em, Wyoming.

In 2018 Marcelo hides inside a computer never to emerge again, becoming a safety nut for the next couple years and an identity verification one since 2021. Jenny grows the number of books she keeps, in all senses of the word: financial, creative fiction, creative finances… (clients: this is a joke). She is a lumper* after all.

* lumper, noun – a person who attaches more importance to similarities than to differences in classification. (Oxford Dictionary Online)

In August 2022 we’ll have been together for almost nine years.

Jenny & Marcelo