At the beginning of the summer of 2007, Shannon and Tyson both started out single. It would not end that way...
Shannon: I planned on spending Memorial Day weekend with my good friend Cathy Du, who I knew from college at Iowa State. She had an internship in my wonderful home state of Minnesota, and we were going to make a girl's weekend out of it.
Tyson: I also had an internship in the "wonderful" state of Minnesota. I was in Rochester (south of the Twin Cities) working for IBM. I also knew Cathy from Iowa State. Since we both had internships in Minnesota, she had given me an open invitation to come hang out with her. Before Memorial Day, I called her and asked her to hang out.
Shannon: Imagine my surprise when Cathy called to inform me that her friend "Tyson" would be hanging out with us over Memorial Day as well. So much for girl's weekend. All I could think was, "He better not be lame..."
Tyson: When I arrived at Cathy's apartment complex, she was grocery shopping with a friend. So to pass the time, I sat outside with my laptop and connected to someone's unsecured wireless network.
Shannon: Go figure that the first time that I ever saw Tyson, he was on a computer. Surprise, surprise. Anyway, introductions were made (I do remember that I talked to Tyson first) and we got dressed up to go out to dinner. I walked out into the living room after changing and saw Tyson give me the once-over.
Tyson: I noticed her...she looked good. As usual, I did not remember Shannon's name when I met her. At dinner, I continued to notice her and made a point to figure out and remember her name. Then, when she made a comment about not liking girls, I knew that we would be good together.
Shannon: We spent the rest of the evening at Cathy's watching movies and hanging out. Cathy later told me that she felt like the third wheel on a date. The next day we went to the Science Museum of Minnesota, where Tyson continually followed me around to each exhibit.
Tyson: When it came time to go our separate ways, I asked Shannon for her phone number.
Shannon: Which I did not give him. C'mon, he had to do SOME work. He was not going to get my phone number that easily.
Tyson: Which prompted me the next morning, to join Facebook, which was something I had been resisting. My first two friend requests went out to Shannon and Cathy, and my first Facebook friend was Shannon. Now that Shannon and I were Facebook-official friends, I extracted her phone number from her profile. That night I called Cathy to ask if I had left something at her apartment. The conversation shifted when I said, "So, Shannon's pretty cool, huh?"
Three weeks later, Tyson and Shannon were officially a couple.
The End...of the beginning.
(Big) Chippewa Lake 2008
(Big) Chippewa Lake 2009
This was just last weekend. Everyone was there for Shannon's graduation from ISU.
My shirt is from my (previous) undergraduate university and Tyler's shirt is from his (future) undergraduate university. He is going to Kent State for musical theater.
