Shukie and I spent the weekend in Alpharetta GA a bit ago for a visit with Dear Old Dad and Leslie. We took the CNN tour (didn’t see anyone famous – Anderson Cooper must have been hiding from me) and went to one of my favorite places to eat in Atlanta, Café Intermezzo. We went up to Athens and got a tour of the UGA campus from Lee, Leslie’s daughter. We finished off with a meal at a great tapas place in town. Reminds me of when we went to Spain on a family vacation and Kerri wanted to take us to her favorite tapas place. Dad eventually just had to know why it was Kerri wanted to take her family to a topless bar! Check out the pics from our trip.

Another home trashed through craigslist ad…

What the hell…people, get a grip. click here for the story on Salon.

There are many out there who now have a Save the Date card for our wedding, but don’t know much about how we got there. I’ll start with a little about each of us.Shukie grew up in Chennai, India which is on the southeast coast; it is one of the largest cities in India. Shukie is one of five kids and was brought up by his mother and older sisters. He went to school at the India Institute of Technology for his masters degree…well, the first masters degree - he is pursuing his MBA now at Babson College. Shukie came to Boston in 2000 and has worked in software development and in mergers/acquisitions.

Amy grew up in Connecticut, the youngest of three kids. After going to school in Delaware, she spent a few years in Atlanta. She is finding it very strange to write about herself in the third person. She is going to stop doing it now. I moved to the Boston area in 2000 for a job at a pharmaceutical company. I bought a house in the western suburbs and settled in with my dogs.

There are a couple of stories about how we met, only one is true.

We bumped into each other, at Starbucks.

I know - not as exciting as some stories, but that’s just how it is. Shukie says I picked him up; I say he hit on me. In either case, we went on our first date in on the coldest night of the year in February of 2007. After a couple of dates where we both made some mistakes (trying to steal a restaurant pager; leaving someone to walk a mile or two home on the 2nd coldest night of the year), we made it to date numbers 3, 4, 5 and so on…

We spent the summer doing lots of fun things: climbing mountains, Shukie met my family at my cousin’s wedding, a weekend trip to Maine, and lots of falling in love. On my birthday, Shukie took me out to our restaurant, a tiny place in the North End. He threw me off the scent by saying during dinner “I don’t know why anyone would want to ever get married anyway.” I was shocked and appalled, but, he knew that about an hour later he’d be proposing. He did it on the waterfront, and gave me a ring with my birthstone in it. We later took my mother’s engagement ring and had the stone re-set into a beautiful and simple ring. The rest is still unwritten….