dear sparklet,

this is the nineth in a series of letters from daddy about how i met and married your mother.

it has been quite some time since your mother and i started living together — and for some reason daddy wasn’t smart (or brave) enough to blog about it at the time.

so, now that we’re all getting ready to move into house 3.0, it seems like a good time to flashback to the house (or two) that started it all.

when mommy and daddy met back in 2004, daddy was living unceremoniously in his boss’ basement in a place called “Glover Park.” it was in a neighborhood that was a lot like Mount Pleasant — only filled exclusively with 25 year old female interns from the midwest whose daddies were determined that their daughters would be geographically removed from anything that might possibly resemble a city.

(oh, and the 45 minute walk to the nearest metro stop, and the $30 a plate restaurants, and the whole foods, and the small children running around wearing designer toddler clothing that they would out grow in the next two weeks — other than that it was exactly like Mount Pleasant.)

mommy, on the other hand, lived about 30 feet from the (literal) wrong side of the tracks in “old town” Alexandria, Virginia.

on the rare occasion where it made sense for daddy to spend the night in Alexandria (read: we were flying out of national airport the following morning) it was a lovely experience (sweating, with no air conditioning) through the parts of the night (those without gun shots) through which we would sleep like lambs (in between freight trains).

considering that mommy had (obviously) even worse taste in living arrangements than daddy, i tried desperately to convince her to move into D.C. with me — not into my boss’ basement, somewhere else — but she’d have none of it. her love of strip malls and horrible drivers was just too strong.

the one legitimately nice thing about our living arrangement was the drive — daddy lived a couple minutes off the rock creek parkway, and mommy lived a couple minutes off the george washington parkway, a pair of beautifully scenic roads connected by the (equally stunning) memorial bridge.

so, when i came time to develop some kind of master plan for our residential future, we picked a neighborhood in Arlington (called “Rosslyn”) pretty much entirely based on the fact that it was located just off our beloved parkways, halfway between our two houses.

now, i actually remember precious little about the moves (plural, there were two houses after all) themselves. i remember that it was July, hotter than blazes, and mommy had managed to find a new job the week before and “just couldn’t take time off work to help out.”

the apartment (and the complex) was a pretty unremarkable place — probably best illustrated by the fact that we never bothered to take any pictures of it.

fortunately, the apartment complex’s website hasn’t been updated since the hoover administration and just happens to have pictures of our exact model:

so, there you go … the “house” that started it all, and the one that set us up for the first home you ever knew.

and with that, good night. ’cause daddy has to go pack. ’cause daddy is moving y’all into a new house in just 19 days.

love,
daddy