We're getting married!

We have slightly different versions of how this happened. Marty says that we met when he came to visit a friend in Fall 2012. Erin says that we didn’t meet until the annual math department awards banquet in Spring 2014. We were in a few classes together the next year and would talk over pizza during math club, but didn’t become friends until we both started hanging out in the math lounge in Spring 2015. During our last year at Cal Poly we became good friends as we spent many hours studying in the math lounge and made good on our pact to get Pizza Solo once a week during our last quarter. It was during this time that Erin started to think about how good we’d be as a couple... but she’d have to wait a couple years for that to be a reality.

After graduation we stayed in touch, sending the occasional text and meeting up at Pizza Solo a couple of times when Erin was visiting from grad school. Then in Summer 2018, our dear friend Kate was getting married. We decided that it would be fun to meet up and drive to the wedding together. At dinner that night we happened to sit next to a lovely woman named Catharine who kept commenting on how beautiful we were as a couple, though we’d tried to make it clear that we were just friends. After dinner Erin was of course out on the dance floor when Catharine grabbed Marty’s hand, brought him to the dance floor and put his hand in Erin’s. After a couple dances, continued conversation, a long car ride, and a walk hand in hand, our fate was sealed.

Marty’s family has attended Camp Sacramento in Twin Bridges, CA every summer since it was founded in 1920. When it was cancelled due to COVID last summer, they booked a small cabin in Lake Tahoe for a socially distanced weekend of hiking and dominoes. On July 22, 2020, we drove up to the cabin. We were running late and it was getting dark, but Marty convinced Erin to take a quick detour at Camp Sacramento along the way, to take a look at camp and let Ricci run around in the field for a minute. After we pulled over, Marty wanted to walk up the path a little further, to get a better view of camp. Erin again pointed out that it was getting dark and that she was getting cold, but couldn’t say no to walking just a little further. Crossing the bridge to get to camp, Marty paused to look out over the river. Erin, trying to corral a terrified Ricci, had walked back off the bridge already. Noticing Marty wasn’t following, she went back and wrapped her arm around him. He dropped down on one knee looked Erin in the eyes, and asked her to marry him.