the number 26

As I stated in an earlier post, the number 26 is very important to my wife and me, but why is it exactly? Well it has somehow come up everywhere in our lives. It started just before we met each other. The only #26 we actually planned was our wedding day, June 26, 2010.

- I moved down to Florida to attend a 6 week film academy in 2005. On June 26, 2005 I completed a film that is still my favorite out of anything I have ever done. I have the film canisters sitting on my book case in the living room with June 26, written all over them.

-When the film academy concluded I decided to move there permanently with 2 buddies of mine. Since none of us lived in Florida, we all went home for about 10 days to pack up our stuff and make the move. After another 2 days drive I arrived on August 26, 2005 which is, incidentally, the same day my mother packed up everything I left in my room and put it in the attic. She wrote August 26, on all of the boxes.

-The three of us guys spent the next month playing video games and drinking beer all day. I finally decided to get a job in mid/late September and went for an interview at Universal Studios Orlando. I was asked to come back for a second interview on September 26th and I was hired at the end of that interview.

-My future wife had moved down to Florida by herself in the beginning of September and was working at Universal Studios already. September 26th was the day she found out she had identity fraud. While I was driving home from my second interview to celebrate getting a job she was walking home in tears after just hearing the news. And Universal Orlando just so happens to have 26 rides.

-On October 26th I was working at the Jurassic Park ride and my future wife was in the other park working at Starbucks. We had both opened that day (7am) but I was scheduled to work until 2:30 am for the Halloween event. We were short staffed that night and it just so happened that my boss was married to a coworker of my future wife’s. He asked my future wife if she wanted to help out at the ride that night and she agreed. I was the first person she saw on the ride so she stopped to ask where my boss was. After I told her I turned to check her out again and found her doing the same thing. We didn’t get to have our first date until a week later but we worked together until 2:30 am every night until then.

-On December 22, 2005 my now girlfriend was told by her grandparents that she had to move out by the end of the month (9 days notice!). She frantically searched for a place to live and came up with two options. We went out to eat with my parents, who were down for Christmas, where my mother told her she should just move in with me. We talked about it over the next couple days and she decided it was the best of her options. So on December 26th, the day after Christmas, she moved in with me.

-The next 2 #26’s were part of a sequence of events that started when I was very young…no seriously. When I was born, my parents had two cats. These cats loved me like I was their own and it started a connection to cats that I still have today. Because of this connection, when my girlfriend moved in and brought her 4 year old cat along, I had to get a kitten of my own. We started looking online and realized we needed to go in person. On June 26, 2006, again still not planning the 26 connection, we went to the local shelter in Orlando and adopted a 4 month old kitten. She was sick but I had to have that one so we waited it out. After recovering from an infection she had her spay surgery and we got to take her home finally on July 26, 2006.

-We eventually moved back up to New England where I bought my first car, my first 2 cars were gifts; this was the first one I bought with my own money, on August 26, 2007.

-I bought a condo in Rhode Island for my girlfriend and I, we closed on June 26, 2008.

-I took my girlfriend ring shopping in mid July of that year where we had a ring custom made for her. I bought it that day and while trying to figure out when I would propose I noticed July 26th was the next Saturday in July, so I took her to the beach and proposed.

-the next #26 is something I wish I did a long time ago. It was March 26 that I told my fiancée about my diaper fetish.

-The next #26 was the only one we planned. We wanted a June wedding outside near a lake, and in keeping with the accidental tradition, we decided we had to get married on a 26 so we set the date as June 26, 2010 and got married in a gazebo on a lake.

So out of 14 occurrences of the #26 only one of them was planned, kind of interesting if you ask me.