How We Met

hello today we are talking about how we met please subscribe and hit the bell notification so you can be notified when we put up new videos hello i am tara the author of the dining on a dime cookbook where you can eat better spend less we have a new hard cover with full color pictures and over 1200 recipes and tips to help you save money on your grocery bill check it out at living on a dime dot com hello guys today mike and i are talking about how we met we have been married 26 years wow impressive that is impressive um and everybody keeps asking how we met so we thought we would as kind of part of our story tell how we met so how did we meet so i was living in a little tiny town in colorado my little mountain house that i did my video on a couple videos back and i was living there and i worked at a flower shop for a little while she went bankrupt so then i went and worked for a fudge shop in downtown esses park called fudge works yeah my i thought it was my dream job working in a chocolate factory and this was in a cute little mountain town it's like yeah estes is really cute yeah it's one of those cutesy places tourist place really a lot of people when they come to colorado probably one of the main reasons they come to colorado is to estas park because there's really there's really not a lot to do in colorado believe it or not there's either skiing or estes park yeah essence park is the gateway town to rocky mountain national park yeah so it's particularly uh summer destination these days yeah so that was like my dream city i always wanted to live there live in the mountains so i was living in the mountains and then i didn't have enough money so 300 a month was not and yes i know that's about 600 now was not paying my bills so i had to get something part-time so i worked i think it was just like two days a week at um the fudge shop so i was working with mike's sister when i started she was working there and so we kind of got to be friends and she decided to leave and moved to texas and mike came up because he was living down in fort collins so he came up and came to say have dinner with his family and say goodbye yeah mostly your sister i was i would come up anyway from the town where i lived to estes park because it was really pretty and i it was kind of a nice little way to spend days on the weekends but my sister was leaving the next day for to move back to texas where we grew up and i just came to basically say goodbye and were we gonna i guess we were probably gonna eat or something like that yeah yeah you guys were going out to dinner i think oh yeah yeah we did go to dinner now that i think about it because that's part of the story so that is how we met he came up to say goodbye i was doing ice cream and i was serving ice cream and he stood back and then when the customers left he came and started talk to me you came to talk to your sister but your sister didn't really talk to you very much yeah you started talking to me yeah kind of what happened is i i was at a stage in life where i had had some difficult experiences and i i was sort of in the i'm i'm not i'm not dating stage i'm not available i'm not looking for anyone no he didn't have the best girlfriends because you know you hadn't met me yet so you didn't know what a good girlfriend was so like so yeah so he tore off girls and wasn't you weren't looking to date at the time no in fact uh if you've seen the homeless video um i had had a lot of change in a short amount of time in my life and so i had i finally learned to get out on my own i kind of had had to really figure out the hard way fast how to support myself i had some i had some really difficult situations and then i i swore off of dating or anything like that for the time being and and so i was just coming up to see my sister just before she left because i didn't know how when i would see her again and she was moving out of state so i came and of course when i got to the fudge shop uh i thought wow i love fudge shops and it smells really good in here and man there's ice cream and everything else and i went to go see my sister and she said well i don't have time to talk to you right now you just go over there and wait i'm busy so i was looking okay well i guess she's not in a very good mood today so i went and i stood kind of on this back area well tara was back there i don't know what you were doing was working with ice cream or something like that and she she had this apron on because she had been working on candy at some point and uh and so i don't know how we started talking but it was basically like hey oh hey and pretty quickly we got into talking and i was still waiting for my sister but my sister just didn't have time for me so i so we talked for probably an hour probably an hour and um and during that time i was kind of getting all excited and didn't i wasn't really thinking i don't know i wasn't thinking dating or whatever but i just i just thought oh wow she seems really nice wow i'd be nice so maybe i could go out with somebody and uh and i thought i should ask her her phone number or something like but i was kind of afraid because i was thinking i don't know do i really am i really ready for this and so i thought well i kept talking to her and i thought i guess i could i could go think about it and then and then maybe come back and see if she's here on a different day although when i was younger i had done that before and i was always too afraid to go back and talk to somebody but do you want to do it while we were there when you left yeah and you didn't get my phone number and i was like oh man and you were like oh man well i was going to say i could tell my partner then you could tell well you tell your partner so i uh i left and then i was thinking oh man i can't believe i didn't ask her for her phone number and that seemed like that was working out really well man i just i just feel like i don't know i just kind of feel like i really shouldn't pass up this opportunity here and um and i was a baby christian and i kind of felt in that moment like god had told me this is the one that's why i was thinking well if that's true somehow this is going to work out but wow i don't know i'm really afraid i should i should go back and i should go back so i'll go back tomorrow but i wasn't really sure if she would be there tomorrow and then i went out to dinner with my family basically because my sister was leaving and i was just thinking the whole time i was thinking oh i don't know i can't believe i didn't i have to go do that i hope she works tomorrow so i wasn't really thinking about what we were there for oh i had you smitten so now you tell your part because my part's gonna go after your part i think well so then we were there and his sister was leaving and i was like oh man i don't know if i'll ever see him again so i i wrote down my phone number and i said well i said if your brother's interested here's my phone number but if he's not interested don't give him my phone number i said cause if he's not interested i don't want to look pushy or anything so so i said here's my phone number if he's interested but if he's not just you know just throw it away yeah so then after dinner i think we went back to the house uh to my parents house where we were doing some kind of thing to basically send off my sister yeah okay wait i think we need to nerd direct something right here so in the last video we were talking about mike being homeless and they had to leave his parents house so in the meantime you had gone back and apologized for your portion of of the part that happened well i did that part before i was homeless so you kind of you were on speaking terms with your parents yeah so anyway so that's yeah just so you know yeah yeah so uh we so i was at that house with them and my sister said hey what did you think about that girl at the fud shop and he said i really liked her a lot she's like well she gave me her phone number and i was like yes okay because and so i called her i can't believe i was so forward i think i called you right away like yeah and at the time so i called tara right away and did you call me from your parents house or from your well i i think i called you from my house yeah so you drove home to fort collins and then yeah so i drove home but i called as soon as i got there and we talked for a couple of hours yeah and she told me that she was uh at her little house there i didn't know anything about her house at the time but she told me she was there and that her landlady was having a party and she was supposed to be at the party and she had just come upstairs to get chairs and happen to hear the phone ring i didn't really want to go to the party it was just kind of one of those things where i was like well okay i guess i'll go show up for a little bit and then she was like well do you have any chairs okay so i went and got chairs phone rang and then we talked for a couple of hours yeah she said she said something like that at this party and so i was thinking this is going to be a short call but a couple of hours yeah and then the next day we uh well then you know i said hey do you want to go out maybe to the national park or something and so the next day early early in the morning we met to go to the national park yeah i don't know why we did so early well it must not been too early because we were able to get our subway before we went so it was probably like 10 or 11 because subway was open at like 10 or something and we got subway before and we got subway and we took it it was just early in our yeah in our early 20s 10 o'clock in the morning once early well and also i lived an hour almost an hour away from this park and entirely 20 30 minutes away in a different direction yeah so yeah and did we meet in estes i can't remember oh you mean that day yeah i think we met at my parents house i think you i think i drove up there and then i parked my car there and then you then we took my car there okay yeah because you had a big jalopy beater because we didn't want to basically we needed a place we didn't want to drive two cars and so that was a place i could park my car and no it wasn't hopefully he had a beater car and it was a beater car sorry honey but it was a nice car it was a 1973 ford torino yeah and he could barely see over the steering wheels because the seat had flattened so much right okay i it was good for me i was thankful it had previously been like so yeah so our first date we went to uh the rocky mountain national park and we drove around there's like all kinds of things you can see the olivia fan bear lake little horseshoe you can see all these really pretty things and so we ate our lunch and so that was our first date but our first date was like i don't know it was 10 o'clock in the morning when we met and it was like 10 or 11 at night before we even it was even later it was after midnight was it because i remember we were saying wow that was like the longest day ever yeah i don't know if we called it a date but anyway yeah and so that was our first date and then we started dating after that and we got married so so we dated three months and then in the meantime i had moved to my apartment in estus then the place that had water running through it and did i tell that story yeah and mike helped me kind of fix it up a little bit because i exchanged rent for fixing it up and you helped me do some did you help me do painting or whatever yeah so how much of this do we want to tell in this video well i don't know you can tell a bit more well so uh it was only a day or two after our first date day i think there was a few days that i didn't call you back and you were i was trying to not be too desperate singing so i waited a few days and then she said she called me to tell me i'd forgotten my sunglasses so i think the same day uh we went she was starting a little craft store or she had rented a space in a craft store in estes park and she so her mom came out to help her set up the space in the craft store and i thought oh hey i'll come along and i kind of went and helped with that too oh okay and so uh if we fast forward a little bit i was making dried flower arrangements on potpourri and putting them in this craft store and yeah and i don't know one time told tara but i think she i felt slightly deflated because she didn't feel the same but i told her like after we had been married a long time yeah i pretty much knew from the beginning that we were gonna get married and i think you said you weren't quite that sure but the conversation seemed to indicate she was very interested early on too and uh and it was only three months but um there when she had to leave that little apartment she needed a place to go and she was kind of wanting to get out really quick or were you already yeah i forgot how it ended up that you were supposed to leave did you decide to leave or she told you you're leaving she she put an eviction notice because she had someone else who would pay more rent than i did okay so really so she was looking for places to rent and i was kind of sitting there with her a lot of times looking at that and um and we said uh we said oh wow well here's one place that's on it's constantly listed and not taken but every place was always gone in those days and i said man i think that means there's something wrong with it there's some reason why they don't want to run it we should find out what that is and maybe we could get a deal so uh and we weren't moving in together no we were just kind of talking were we already engaged not yet but we were talking about getting married so we were thinking okay if we could get this deal then after we get married yeah yeah i was still living with my roommates in the other city but um but what we thought is maybe we could get her into a place and if we could get her a good enough price on it then she could live there until we got married and then if the price when the price went up hopefully then we would be married and then i could move in so so so i got it basically rent free for several months because we were fixing it up yeah and we had moved into it uh so we oh i said we moved into it she moved into it we when we went to look at it the lady showed it to us and it had it smelled like cats smoke it was a like 100 year old apartment building that was an okay apartment but the people previously had um basically made it it looked like it was a uh like a uh hippie fun house commune type thing because they had taken all the doors off and the doors were gone and they had all these like really sheer like 60s curtain things over the bathroom door and next to the stove and there was drips of smoke stuff all over the walls nicotine and who knows what else smokes stuff all over the walls and yeah so we didn't know how long the place had been vacant but it had been a pretty nasty skinky place that we could tell had potential so we said to the lady hey how about if we fix this up for you you pay you can pay it for the supplies and we'll do all the work and uh in exchange i think we agreed to what like no rent for three months yeah afferent for [Music] yeah that's what it was it was no rent for three months and half rent for the rest of the year after that so it was ended up being like 350 a month because her rent was 700 a month for this place which is why it wasn't rented but but it turns out that we worked together to fix it up and i'm sorry it was a little bit bumpy for us working together on that but we um that was when we weren't sure if we were gonna get married but we stripped all the floors and we got some doors and we put the doors on and we took down the sheer curtains and we cleaned all the smoke stuff off we did a whole lot of work in there to get the whole place really in in spotless condition but we really worked hard on it it only took us less than a week right yeah i was like a week or 10 days or something it wasn't very long yeah so for the amount of for working on it reasonably for that amount of time it turned out to be a great deal for her to have no rent while she was there and then for us to have half rent uh after we got married so uh that was that was a really great way to start that and that ended up being our our apartment after we got married which was really cool yeah i don't want to get too many stories because more things are coming to mind why what else is coming to your mind i was just thinking when we went on our honeymoon we spent a couple days in town at the edge of town in a mountain resort that we really wanted to go to it was uh the same one with the cabin that you guys might have seen us in that video a few years back it's a big elk yeah and got locked out then we were gonna go on this road trip and i remember we stopped at the apartment and your mom was staying there at that time so well it was a cute little place yeah and i will say so going back to when we were dating that first day i did tell him i said i'm sick and i said you know i kind of said are you sure you want to be going out with somebody who's sick he's like oh yeah no problem oh yeah no problem i was thinking well if this is what sick is that's not too bad so what he didn't understand though was like i would go out and date like i go on a date with him and then i would be in bed for hours afterwards or even days like go out every day either because i lived pretty far from home he lived an hour away and it was long distance from his house to my house and it was a little bit over an hour drive and so what he would do is he would he would he would call his parents house and his parents would forward their phone to my house so he didn't have to pay long distance to call me because back in those days it wasn't like now where pretty much everybody has the long distance included in the bill uh and it was like 25 cents a minute or something you could easily rack up hundreds of dollars in phone bills but it was local for me to my parents house and local from their house to her house and um they agreed they agreed to if i called them to forward the phone and then i would call and it would forward onto her as a local call and then they would unforward the phone because then it was a direct call and so it was a little bit it was a little bit of a backwards way to do it so i could never call you yeah but the idea was to try to make sure that we were able to do it without spending too much money yeah so that was one thing we did we so we would go out like on the weekends and then during the week you would call me um through your parents and and i did keep telling him you know but he never he never really saw me sick you know we didn't live together before he got married so it was like he only saw me when we were on dates and of course i was looking my best and even when i wasn't feeling good i was still trying to act like i was feeling good yeah and so yeah it was it he had no idea how hard it was going to be until after we got married and then it kind of hit you like a like a boulder yeah it wasn't actually here yeah so we'll save that for another one but anyway and what about the do you want to save just before we got when the our engagement all that saved that date that probably its own video yeah yeah we can talk about that on the next video i guess so so anyway that's how we met was at the fudge shop i worked at the same place with his sister and i do have to say my one of my first impressions i'm just being straight up honest here as a guy i was like oh look at her she's cute look at her she's got that apron she's making fudge and candy how perfect is that so i'm just being real folks so now you're like would you stop making fudge and candy well that's true but uh but the other thing is that we i would say almost all of our dates were going to the national park yeah and we we i i think did i have a well anyway you could get an annual pass and one of us probably me had bought an annual pass to go into the park and once you buy it it's no charge the rest of the year so we went there for pretty much every day for a long time yeah and that was one way we spent like no money well we did go out to eat on that first date we did go out to eat and it was pretty expensive i think it was like fifteen dollars tried to impress her and i was still doing my credit card thing a little bit and i uh i was really trying to impress her and neither one of us was really impressed yeah it was the newest upscale place in estes park and we were thinking well that wasn't worth it yeah it was it's cantina and it was it was okay but it wasn't anything to write home about but [Laughter] all right guys so that's how we met please visit us at living on a dime dot com and we will see you guys next time

Channel: Living On A Dime To Grow Rich

Views: 13,854

Rating: 4.9366589 out of 5

Keywords: living on a dime, living on a dime videos, saving money

Id: CcoYR9jorDA

Length: 22min 55sec (1375 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021