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I feel like I've been planning this wedding forever, and it hasn't even been 3 months yet. The only thing that could have gone wrong since last week was not getting my passport in time, and guess what?

I got home from work Friday to find a letter in the mail from the US Passport office. It seems that they need more proof of identity -- I'm me, honest! Really, I am. The most frustrating part about this is that I can't do a thing about it until Monday morning. And, for that reason, I'm not going to write about that now since I can do nothing but speculate until then, anyway. I'll just stick to the topic that I promised last week.

I thought that it had been much longer than 3 years, but it wasn't much more than that when Lee came to visit me last April. Although my guest book was lost and I had to start a new one since, I was able to find the entries in that original guest book using Google. February 10, 2000, she posted the following:

Thursday 02/10/2000 8:58:00am
Name: Lisa Vermeulen
E-Mail: lisa_vermeulen@hotmail.com (This address no longer in use.)
Referred By: Just Surfed On In
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa

Comments:
Just finished reading your "Archieves" and love the way you get everything down on "paper".
I will be checking into your webpage regularly to keep up to date!
Cheers
Lisa

I think it's funny that I only wrote 1 column since, until it was she who nagged me until I started writing again, just now. :)

About this same time, she was writing me emails asking for information for a disability awareness project she was organizing as part of her job. She can type faster than she can talk; and she wrote, as she continues to do, very long emails containing many questions. I felt compelled to answer her emails -- if not always in a timely fashion -- and I must have asked her to tell me about herself, because she had saved the email she sent me a month later (and every one since then), on March 6, 2000.

In that email, she wrote: "So you want to know a bit about me. Ok, are you sitting comfortably? I was born in England, just south of London, in an old area called Streatham. My family and I came to SA in 1976 in the middle of the Soweto riots . . . "

She told me her age, which she's now a bit sensitive about, all about her marriage and divorce, her cat, Tigger, and dog, Max; she detailed her education and job history, most notably, her last 2 jobs: Pet Sure and Hollard Insurance.

And that was just the beginning. After many such emails I felt that I was getting to know her pretty well, but she always managed to surprise me -- she still does. When I lost my host for roggeman.com, she tracked down my secondary email address and reestablished contact after I moved to New Orleans. That's when I got tired of trying to keep up with her typing skills and asked for her phone number. We didn't talk very much at $.55 per minute, but even back then, we never wanted to hang up. The second night that she was here, as I got up to get a beer, I asked "Ya know what the best part of you being here is?" Without hesitation, she answered, "We don't have to hang up."

We started out with email and then progressed to phone calls, and by the time we actually met we felt as if we had known each other for far more than only 3 years. We were very open and honest with each other from the beginning. I never in a million years thought we'd actually meet, much less be engaged to be married 3 years, 2 months and 4 days after that email.

Lee is a very positive person and collects proverbs and wise words, and she sent one of her favorites at the time: "Don't live in the past - you've already been there."

All right, then. With an eye on the future, Butch helped me go through my important documents today. I think that I've got plenty of identifying documents for the passport people. No more I can do about that until Monday, and speaking of Monday, I and Audy will be going to the Super Dome for the Monday Night Football game: New Orleans vs. Philadelphia.

So I end this week as I have so many others since moving here: soaking up the sun by the pool while waiting for my laundry to dry, enjoying a cold beverage in the company of friends.

The same thing as last year, but different, very different.