Need that party RSVP tracked down? I'm your woman.

(A disclaimer: all names of friends below have been changed. This post is part of a series of coincidence-related posts that I've written. For related stories, read: this one, these two, this one, this one, or this other one, and a flashback one.)

Rosie will be turning 11 next week and we're planning her party. She gave me her guest list and I sent out the Evite, like a good mom/party planner. There was one guest that I've had trouble reaching in the past, so I felt determined to make sure I had the right contact information for her this time! Rosie had requested play dates with "Emily" in the past and her mom, "Cheryl," didn't respond to emails; also, to add to my frustration, their phone number listed in the school directory didn't have voicemail and nobody's ever answered calls I've made to it.

Rosie had visited Emily's house only once before, six months ago, and it was a pretty odd situation: a precociously professional 10-year-old Emily had phoned me to give the time, address, and other details necessary for the play date. When I dropped Rosie off, nobody answered the door or the phone, but several girls including Emily were playing in the yard. I had errands to run, so I left Rosie to play with the (possibly feral) girls. When I returned to pick Rosie up, the girls were in the street, running around or on scooters. No one was harmed, but I never did see a single parent.

On the trail.

Next steps: I checked the cc line in Rosie's classroom email that went out to all parents at the beginning of the school year. You'd think that would be accurate, right? The email did list Cheryl with the email addy that I have, but the ID gave a last name different from Emily's: a clue! I did a quick search on Facebook for mutual friends with kids in Rosie's grade to see if "Cheryl Jones" was in any Facebook circles. Facebook was a bust.

As an Internet search for anyone named Jones would obviously be fruitless, my next tactic was to Google that email address. Nothing. I get TONS of hits with my email address, so, kind of shocking, right? By a bizarre coincidence, that morning I had taken a phone-photo of the school directory to get the contact info for one of Dash's friends, with an "L" last name; Emily's last name starts with "M" so her details were on the same page. I googled their street address and managed a few hits.

Closing in...

There was an LLC business license registered with that address in 2003, with Cheryl listed as the CEO. I did a search on the business name "ABC Associates, LLC" and got several random hits with similarly named businesses across the United States. I narrowed it down to Virginia-only and found a LinkedIn profile with the correct business name, and someone named Cheryl, but her last name was "James." An honest mistake by the teacher? Maybe.

A quick recap: so far, I've had one wrong phone number and two wrong last names for this person. Should I give up? Nope, I clicked over to her LinkedIn profile.

Found her, complete with freaky coincidences!

I quickly scrolled down the profile to see that the details on the LLC were accurate to the online registry. Yep. I scrolled up slowly, curious to see where she'd job-hopped since then. When I got to the top it took a double-take before I realized that Cheryl James and I work for the same tiny, little 100-employee company. Seriously. I've been arm's length from the person that I haven't been able to contact for months. We have actually emailed each other on work projects!

I pulled up my company's intranet and found her email address and phone number, completely different from any other that I had before. I called the number listed for her. She answered.

Contact.

After establishing that I was a colleague, I ventured into the odd coincidences that our girls were not only in the same school, but the same grade and in the same class. When we exchanged work details, it turns out that she is working on the same contract that my old company used to have (and I worked), in a location that I worked in 2010. She's on site with people that I used to work with. I think we were both a little baffled by it all and the fact that as far as I know, we have never met.

I'll meet her at Rosie's party.

More of the weird and random...

A few years ago, I blogged about how some of my friends are connected to each other in bizarre, coincidental ways. I had a similar experience last night that made my head spin. I've written about how I met my husband, Monkeyrotica, through a personals ad, but not about why I was looking at personals ads in the first place. That's a tale that I was reminded of last night while I found myself face-to-face with the wife of my ex-boyfriend. Here's that story, from the very beginning.

I first met Andy when I was home for the summer after my freshman year of college. I was in a new place, didn't know anyone, so I was hanging out with my sister and her high school pals. He was nearby with a group of friends not in their clique; I have no memory of why we started talking, but we did and exchanged phone numbers. We had similar taste in music and in movies, but that's as far as it went. He was crazy for antique cars, performed in karate competitions, and talked up his experiences as the star of his HS distance cycling team. He was charming, charismatic, and came from new money; his father had built a local empire and his son got the spoils. There were certain personality issues that made it a summer romance and not a long-term one, in my mind: he was extremely anti-social, for one thing. He discouraged hanging out with his friends (bunch of "jerks") and had no interest in meeting the few I had—didn't want to "share me" on our dates. He never introduced me to his parents (we entered through his "wing" of his house without disturbing anyone) and when he came to take me on a date, he would honk from the driveway rather than make small talk with mine. This drove my parents to dislike him intensely.

Anyway, when I left for college after break I'd forget about him while busy with academics; when I returned for the summer he would start phoning again. I'd ignore his calls for a while, but once the boredom set in, I'd call back and we'd start up again. After I graduated from college and came home to stay, he was elated at first. He excitedly talked about having more time with me and started planning for a relationship. I played along for a little while, but really knew it was going nowhere—we had too little in common. My dad started taking an interest, negatively, and I found pages of personals ads left on the dining table after I came home from dates, with red circles drawn on good prospects. After a "disagreement" between Andy and me, I picked up the personals and seriously considered them. I chose Monkeyrotica's ad—not one that my dad had circled. I listened to the message on his phone box (pre-Internet in 1992) phoned and left my own.

Back to today: twenty years later, Monkey and I are about to celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary and have two lovely children. Yesterday, I was out with Dash, the adorable six-year-old, at his karate practice. There was one other mom also watching her son and between poking on our iPhones, we started chatting. Her son was one of the two Jacks—the light-haired one, not the dark-haired one—an eight-year-old with a yellow belt. We'd smile at each other when one of our kids screwed up and got yelled at by the sensei. I learned Jack was an only child, but was born in the same year/month as Rosie, my gorgeous and talented older child. She lived nearby and had been in the DC area for a while, but was from Connecticut (where my family is originally from).

Our sons were paired up to spar together and I heard the sensei call out Jack's last name. Same as Andy's. I hadn't thought of him in forever, but my brain made the connection anyway. I asked, "Is there an Andrew in your family?"

"My husband," she answered. I followed up with questions about his family in case there was more than one person with that name in town, got affirmatives to all. I must have been noticeably freaking out, because she asked me, "Are you having a 'moment'?" I looked at her more closely, noticing her brown hair, brown eyes and that she was the same height and complexion as me.

I can't keep my mouth shut sometimes. I told her I used to date her husband. I asked when they first met and found that it was about 6 months after Andy and I broke up. She was my rebound? They married five years later, in the same month and year that Monkey and I were married.

Okay, so for those who are keeping track of coincidences here:
1. we both met our spouses within 6 months of breaking it off.
2. we were married the same month and year.
3. our oldest children were born the same month and year.
4. she is the same height, and has the same complexion, hair and eye color as me.
5. she and I are both originally from Connecticut, but settled in the DC area after living in other cities.

Inevitably, Andy and I are bound to cross paths at the karate studio. Perhaps we have already and I had no clue, without any context. I'm not looking forward to it, to tell the truth. I have no idea what I'd say as we didn't split on friendly terms. I needed to document this story, though—coincidences are very intriguing to me. Is there a reason that our paths are crossing again after all this time?

More on how odd the universe is...

We met our friends Tif and Nick through Kelly, but it was a few years before we put together the quirky connections. I caught right away that their wedding anniversary was within 2 months of ours (it'll be ten years for them this year, too!) but, it wasn't till much later that AJS and Nick realized that not only did they both go to University of Maryland at the same time, they had back-to-back shifts at the college radio station. AJS had even told me stories about the anonymous guy with the shift before his: he called the genre "grind-core" and recalled that the play list announcements went something like (in a low voice), "that was Faust, playing Faust, from his first album, Faust." And we were friends with that guy and didn't know it! It was like meeting the subject of a novel. Here's a photo of Don holding Nick and Tif's daughter Izzie:

More recently, another unexpected connection was with Susan and Don. Kelly had gone to grad school with Sue and they both worked together after college. I met them about 3 years ago, but it wasn't until about six months after that I realized that I knew Don. At a party (at Tif and Nick's, coincidentally), Sue was wistfully hoping out loud that she wanted their daughter Lila's hair to look like Don's. (Lila is on the far right in the photo with Thea and Emma.) My initial thought was, what's special about Don's hair? and in a flash, I remembered a Don I knew in art school who had fabulously beautiful, long, wavy, strawberry-blond hair. We both volunteered as monitors in the art school computer lab and I'd had a bit of a crush on him. After a couple pointed questions, "are you from the Midwest?" and "did you go to University of Michigan?" I discovered that he was the same person. Wierd, huh?

Kelly and Todd, Sue and Don, Tif and Nick, and AJS and I all have an older girl and a younger boy (Tif and Nick are expecting a boy, imminently).

Coincidence? Um, yeah! What were you thinking?

Past weirdnesses

Andrea commented on my weirdness blog entry from a few days ago and reminded me of the odd way in which we met. It was maybe 1996 or 1997, soon after AJS and I had moved from Capitol Hill to Mount Pleasant, when our friend Mel told us we should really meet the fabulous person who'd moved into our old apartment! She was so interesting and had the cutest dog, named Zeke!

We met at Polly's Cafe on U Street and had a great conversation, when I found out that she worked for the Smithsonian. Which part, I asked? NMAI, she answered. Oh, I said, NMAI just moved into the office space that I used to work in. Where's your office?

In the spirit of weirdness, if you haven't guessed already, of course she was working in my old office as well as living in my old apartment. A year or two later, we bought a house a few blocks from Polly's. At the housewarming, the delightful and always entertaining Andrea looked around a bit, then quipped, "I think I'll like it here!"

At that same party, I'd invited a few of some new friends that I'd made recently, including Kelly and her sister Heather. Kelly discovered that she and Andrea had both gone to the same University in Phoenix, and the connections continued...

Weirdness abounds

I took Rosie to our neighbor's birthday party a couple weekends ago. Maggie was turning four, and we had seen her a couple of times around the neighborhood; which is not much at all, considering that she lives down the street from us and we have gone out for walks, bike rides and local parks pretty often over the past 3.5 years.

I'd met Maggie's mom before and I'd encountered her posts on DC urban moms. One from over a year ago had irked me, so I didn't go out of my way to befriend her: she was starting a fiction writer's group, but for only "serious writers" no romantic fiction or science fiction writers need apply. Now, I'm not a writer, but I almost made an attempt to get a sci-fi story going (my fave genre!) so I could go to the meeting and start a fight.

Anyway, that's where my head was, but Maggie was a cutie (coincidentally, with the same birthday as mine!) and Rosie really wanted to go to her party. We went and here's where it started to get wierd. Heather's husband, Jose, is Phillipino, which gives them a very similar racial makeup to AJS and me; that kind of thing intrigues me, usually. I started chatting with Heather and mentioned that AJS was a writer (knowing that she had started a "serious writer's" group, heh) and she jumped all over it, telling me that Jose was a writer, too. This led to a rambling conversation with Jose where he latched on to our last name. "String? Is your husband from DC?" "I knew some Strings, but they went to Gonzaga & Notre Dame HS in DC."

Wierdness: Jose went to high school with AJS's brother and sister. I just did a websearch for Jose and his writing and found this blog profile:

http://www.blogger.com/profile/09735288367103253311

Check out the photo: it is taken at Black Cat's Red Room Bar and he looks very strangely like AJS...

Weirdness at the office

Okay, this one isn't about the kids. Yesterday, I was almost the only one in the office and picked up a phone call in a co-worker's cubicle. While I was talking (to the cube's inhabitor), I glanced up and saw a pin stuck in the carpeted wall with a lion's head on it that looked familiar. I pulled it out and saw that it was a logo design that I created ELEVEN YEARS ago!!! The FBI is still using my artwork after eleven years? I'm keeping the pin; I don't think I had saved anything from that project, because I never felt that it was portfolio-worthy work. Anyway, here is my art that I found online, that the pin was based on:

Heh. 1995, staring at me.