Twelve years ago yesterday, my life became a bright and wondrous place. See, that's when I first saw the woman to whom I am now married.

The Divine Ms. C. and I met on the Stan's Blue Note patio on the evening of July 3, 1996 — that's for all of you who have a hard time at math, and believe me, I feel your numeric pain.

We'd exchanged e-mail correspondence and telephone conversations for about a month and a half before meeting in person. We'd gained a pretty good understanding of each other through multi-byte messages and multi-hour talks, so we were pretty sure of what we were getting into.

Little did we know.