Building a family of two

In the first blog post, I told a story of how we fell in love. It was motivated by a narrative of being closeted. While that was a HUGE part of our story, it's not the one we tell most often. Our love was a great tumultuous adventure constructed with the tastes of wild twenty-somethings in college. I'd like to tell this story the only way that really does it justice, in the pictures we took. 

This was our first night out. It started with me being invited to tag along to a work outing to a comedy club. Everyone else pooped out at 10, I mean it was Thursday, obviously time to go out! We saw a drag show, danced the night away until the bar closed 

After we left the bar, we were still not done with our night together and made 2:30 a.m. waffles. We just seemed to not be able to get enough of each other, even that first night.  

Our second big night was Tarra's work party. I wish I could remember why we were cheering, maybe it was just the banana suit. Maybe we just couldn't seem to contain our excitement whenever we got together. 

Things moved into high friendship gear on NYE 2009. I figured we should go big going to San Francisco (for me it was the first time) to celebrate. It still is one of our greatest adventures and best stories. 

On a beer run at my first official grown up house party, the love was obvious. 

Goth night was always a great reason to get fancied up and go out.

A high school crush of a friend is also a great reason to go out in sideways rain. 

After 8 months of adventuring, it was obvious we were in love. We couldn't actually get married, but on a trip to Portland, we got Donut Married at Voodoo donuts. Because, what's more romantic than that?

Drinking and going out wasn't our only hobby. We also traveled, a LOT for busy college students. This was a snow trip just south of Yosemite. 

Berkeley was another favorite place to go. This was in the Rose Garden. We love going to that amazing truffle place, curry, Telegraph street and the option to head over to SF for awhile. 

One year we planned an epic beer tour of Northern California. We started in Humboldt visiting the land of blurry human-like dinosaurs first, obviously. 

For my grad trip we went to Peru. 

For Tarra's grad trip we went to New York. We also got married in NYC, but our "honey moon" was a road trip through the finger lakes up to Niagara. It had always been Tarra's dream. 

I was pretty stoked about this.

Yosemite trip.

Heaven on earth: Tomales Bay Oyster Company.

Death Valley

Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur

Mt. Evans in Colorado

We also had a love of gardening.

And u-picking. And food in general really. 

I felt pretty lost after college. Tarra had it made, she knew she wanted to be an engineer. I just wanted to do good in the world and didn't know what that meant. So I went to farm school.

So we started a farm: Tender Heart Farms

We had chickens.

We had turkeys.



We had all kinds of cool veggies.

Eventually we felt pretty great about being gay and being in love. We went to just about every pride event we could.

Pride always meant costumes. 

We knew we wanted to be together forever. I proposed to Tarra in the rainforest in Peru.

She proposed to me on the beach where she first knew she'd be with me forever. 

We handmade these beautiful invitations and had the best engagement party. 

We eloped (for reasons we talked about before) to New York City and had the most beautiful day and most wonderful, talented photographer. 

It was all just so magical. 

While we were growing our lives and building our family of two, we added our fur babies. This is our special cat, Lady Nubkins. 

This is The Great Catsby, our tabby dog who's super into ham,which is why her nicknames are hamster, hamela anderson, hamerella, hammer, hamburger, and so on and likewise

This is our dog son, Lord Byron Buttons. He's super great at catching rats, rabbits, and gophers at the farm. He's also got a great array of tricks he'll preform for any kind of bread, especially donuts. 

This is Señor Chang. He knows how to knock on the window to ask to come in. 

Tarra and I are also really into homesteading. We're pretty good at making bread. 

Making fancy cookies. 

Pickling, canning, preserving.

We're even trying our hands at making beer. 

We've been skydiving.

We started running, just a 5k at first. 

Then a half marathon.

We fix flat tires. 

Vandalize in the name of love. 

Dress up for cool themed parties. 

And hang out with these cool people (honestly this was only half of who showed up to my 30th birthday, I love all of you not in the picture equally!).

We're just two really cool people, that met, adventured, fell in love, got married, built an amazing chosen family, and are hoping to expand it soon.