Why Her? Part 1: How I know...

I have a woman friend (not girlfriend) in England. I have written about her before and called her "N". She was always interested in how my analytic attitudes toward relationships would turn out. Maybe part of her curiousity was because I had declined to enter into a relationship with her on several past occasions, although she was smart, attractive, and in demand.

When I told N of my engagement with Jenny, her first email was, "You could get almost anybody: entrepreneur, scientist, or supermodel. Why her?"

It wasn't said in a mean or petty way nor to flatter. N is very rational: a published mathematics lecturer on logics and has even written a somewhat popular layman book on computing. She truly was curious.

And it was a good question.

So this post will try to answer that.

Obligatory warning: because this post is about a woman I love, it could be painfully saccharine to my dear readers. I won't mind if you move on. Really. But I will also cover some of what I have been doing over the past year, and where.

How I Know Her
"Wherever you go, go with all your heart."

First off, I know Jenny better than most people, despite having first met only 15 months ago. That's because I have spent about five out of the last ten months traveling with her.

Now when I say traveling with her, I mean serious travel: we spent every hour together, 24 hours per day (with only a few exceptions noted parenthetically as "non 24x7 days" in the list that follows:)

Where	# weeks	non 24x7 days	Fantasies fulfilled	Notes
Bhutan	1	0	1	It's not the cold, it's the lack of air...
Patagonia	1	0	1	That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
Henan Province	1	0	0	Spectacular sculpture garden of God
Tahiti	1	0	2	Exclusively by boat
NYC & driving New England	1	1	1	King of the hill, top of the heap...
Dubai, Barcelona, Mexico	2.5	1	1	Hottest, hotter, hot
Paris, Iceland, London, Canadian Rockies	3	2	3	A photo of us kissing at a trendy club in Paris showed up on an Internet paparazzi site!
Bintan, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur	3	2	1	Rode the Orient Express. I mean the train.
Bali, Maldives, Sri Lanka	3	0	2	Our first big outing.
Misc. Asia travel	3	~	2	Variety of scattered 2 to 3 day trips. (Macau is nearly as tacky as Vegas.)

It's a lot of vacationing. By the end of the year, I may have vacationed more in a year than I have over the previous decade.

Not all of it was luxury travel, by the way. That actually does get boring after a while. (I will try to blog on some of this extensive travel elsewhere, to be announced later.)

The list above does not include all the time we spent together at Jenny's place or mine. Even some of these were notable, for example the four-day in-city mini-vacation we just finished last week, wherein we hit a few shows, she hired a small set of fireworks over the river to celebrate our engagement, and she arranged a costume party that fulfilled a few more fantasies.

In short, we have come to know each other quite well through concentrated doses of time spent together.

In November we will visit Canada and Hawaii, and then maybe Tahiti and Australia before the end of the year, depending on family schedules.

Recently Jenny's ability to travel is being curtailed by her startup activities, but as I've mentioned before, in Asia a lot of work is done through delegates. Over the last year her startup had several delays due to things like permitting for construction, business and finance, as well as school schedules. But these delays permitted a lot of the travel listed above. Finally, I am able to profit from senseless bureaucracy! I always suspected that somebody profited from stupid government rules, but never thought it would be me!

Meanwhile, my businesses have taken off even though I have spent little time with them. Hmm... that tells me... um... well, it tells me something. Let me get back to you on exactly what.

So let's leave at this: we know each other fairly well. Not perfectly by any stretch, but more than the 15 months might otherwise indicate.

Now let's get back to the "Why her?" question in Part 2...