Here’s a not-so-secret secret: my wife and I met online. That’s a fairly common thing these days, I guess. The twist in Julia’s and my story is that once we met in person, we found out that we actually grew up in the same county in Indiana, about twenty miles away from each other. Now counties are a big deal in Indiana. In fact, the state’s license plate number system used to be based on the county you lived in. The prefix for each tag started with the numerical equivalent of the first letter of the name of your county, in alphabetical order. So Elkhart county plates started with the number 20 because Elkhart was twentieth on an alphabetical list of Indiana counties. You could always tell when auslanders were driving around your territory by the number on their tags. At any rate, when Julia and I feel like having a little fun with folks, we tell them that we met at the Twin Cities Chapter of the Elkhart County Lonely Hearts Club, and that we were the only two people there, so we figured we should get married. And now the club’s disbanded. Read more here.

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