now, let's celebrate!

A traditional wedding never felt like the right fit for us, and with all the covid-related uncertainty around event planning right now, we opted to elope! We dreamed of a spring wedding surrounded by greenery, so we eventually chose on March in Big Sur, on California’s Central Coast. You can contact us at brodieandmichaela [at] gmail [dot] com for more photos or information

(in cats)

Brodie and Michaela met in the fall of 2019 while they both worked at the Odegaard Writing and Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle. They hit it off during overlapping shifts and started spending time together with friends after work. Eventually, Brodie and Michaela stumbled into a lengthy first date, getting ice cream and coffee until 2 am and everything kind of fell into place from there. They started spending more time together after covid hit, which included meeting Brodie’s cat Gus, who had also come with him from Texas. Gus took a while to warm up to Michaela, but the three of them formed their own pocket of joy as the pandemic first rattled the world. While historically grumpy, Gus has been an excellent older brother to the later additions.

In the spring of 2020, after they had decided to move to California together, Michaela made the fateful mistake of showing Brodie a Facebook post about and picture of the last cat in a litter who was yet to be claimed. Brodie immediately fell in love with the tiny rascal who would join the family as Commander Data. Data’s brother and sister live in Shoreline with Michaela's aunt and uncle. Data is a huge mama's boy who loves eating and cuddles (in that order). After about a month, Data, Gus, Brodie, and Michaela moved to Riverside, CA, driving over 20 hours straight in a U-haul to start their next chapter. Michaela is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Riverside, where she studies planetary atmospheres with a focus on astrobiology.

One day in April 2021, Brodie and Michaela set out on a walk around their neighborhood when one of their neighbors popped up from behind his fence and offered them a kitten who had been abandoned and found in the road. Michaela said no, but by the time they looped back around on the walk, Brodie had convinced her to adopt the kitten, relinquishing the planned next pet, a turtle. Turtle (the cat) took a while to adjust to their home, but she is a high energy bundle of joy, who loves to see the world from a shoulder perch (preferably Brodie's). About ten days later, on a hike along the ridge behind their house, Brodie took Michaela to the single tree breaking up the ridgeline, and got down on one knee to ask Michaela to be his wife.