A Tale of Two M's

About a year and a half ago, two people whose lives would soon be forever intertwined, made completely on their own accord two separate decisions that happened to bring them to the same place. Josh (aka BMM) was a software engineer living in Silicone Valley who had grown tired of the day to day grind of the engineering world, and dreamed of pursuing a long dormant dream of becoming a famous researcher. Winnie (aka LMM) was up in Vancouver also growing complacent in her career and longed for a chance to do some work that would be more meaningful to her. Now there must be millions of people out there that feel that they wish to chase old dreams, or improve their career. But only a small percentage of them act on this feeling. An even smaller percentage decide to apply to a school half way around the world as full time students. And an extremely small number are accepted to their first choice school, where only two of them were placed across the hall from each other on the 7th floor of Richmond Place, south wing at the University of Edinburgh postgraduate dormitory. Yes as you have no doubt guessed by now those two strangers that were placed next to each other by an uncountable number of separate and disjointed choices and events were indeed BMM and LMM!

Even after the universe conspired to bring the two together, there was still no certainty that they would become friends and more. The way the University of Edinburgh runs it postgraduate accommodations is to have blocks of students with their own private rooms, and have about 10 of them share a kitchen.

This has the effect of forcing at least some interaction between the kitchen mates. One day a few weeks after BMM arrived, he wandered into the kitchen to throw something together that might pass as a dinner, only to find LMM amongst some of the other kitchen mates discussing where they were from and what they were doing. BMM and LMM learned that they both had a lot in common: both had made their adoptive home in Canada, enjoy traveling immensely, and they also both had a distain for the local Scottish food (remember this point it is going to be important soon).

The kitchen comrades decided that they would go

out and explore Edinburgh a little bit the next day, this was LMM and BMM's second chance to really get to know each other. They all went out and saw the sites: the Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, the meadows, and quite impulsively Aurthur's seat in the middle of the night, but that is a story for another time. But out of all this discovery, the most important discovery of the day for BMM and LMM was that they rather enjoyed each other's company. Remember before I said that they both shared a complete and total distain for Scottish food? Well they decided that since they both did not like the food out there and that it would be a waste to both cook every dinner separately, they would just meet each evening and share the cooking. Over the next few weeks, they started spending a lot of time enjoying each other's company. Before they really knew it they were dating each other. Thus, the BLM adventure begins…