When serolynne and I set off to travel together in May, we committed to each other that we would stay together trying out a fully intertwined life at least through Burning Man.

Clearly the experiment has been a success. We fit together, incredibly and amazingly well.

The highlight of Burning Man this year was us taking our relationship and commitment to the next level, in a private ceremony between the two of us on Thursday night - with the Man as our witness.

We've now set our sights on a much further horizon, and we are officially considering each other "unionized" life partners. We plan to renew this commitment and our intentions every prime numbered year here on out - 1,2,3,5,7 years, etc... (What else do you expect from two geeks?)

While the ceremony was just between the two of us, we did get some pictures:

Before we left Florida, Cherie's father gave me a genuine Krewe of Zeus Mardi Gras captain's outfit to wear at Burning Man. We passed it on to the talented seamstress mladypain, along with Cherie's old wedding dress. Laura did an amazing job adding el-wire to both outfits for us. As Burning Man approached and Cherie and I started to contemplate a ceremony, we realized that we had the perfect outfits for our Unionization already waiting for us. Thank you Laura!


We managed to manifest a photographer to capture the moment for us. Just moments later the rebuilt Man's green neon re-lit.

I love you Cherie. I look forward to the many years of adventure ahead of us.

One year ago today serolynne replied to a post I made in LiveJournal's Toyota Prius community about giving up my Prius for a Jeep to enable my nomadic journeys.

That was our first contact.

I never would have imagined then that year later we would be living together - camped for the moment just ten feet from the bubbling Arkansas River in Coaldale, CO.

Since our lives have grown so intertwined, it makes sense that our blogging efforts should as well. To that end, this seems like a fitting day to introduce technomadia.com - our new joint home on the web.

There is not much there other than a placeholder page at the moment, but soon technomadia.com will be the place where we will be jointly posting travel journal entries and photos. (For all other things, we will still have our separate individual blogs...)

Cherie put her design skills to good use this week, and made us a new joint calling card and logo:


Nice, huh?

I've always had the hardest time staying close with my Sacramento sweetie Lindsay. We connect wonderfully when we are together in person, but she doesn't communicate well via IM or email (my favorites) at all, and we both hate the phone.

And though we both do SMS, it is sure hard to maintain a relationship 160 character at a time.

But when Lindsay got her new MacBook a few months ago - everything changed. Now we both had built in zero-hassle video chat capability - and suddenly we were communicating from afar wonderfully using iChat. Yay!

I had been wondering how well video chatting with iChat would work over EVDO while mobile, and I just found out. Lindsay and I just had a great chat - while Cherie and I are cruising through Kentucky at 65MPH!

Geek point - score!


Cherie and I chatting with Lindsay. This screen grab is not from tonight on the road, but from a few weeks ago...

As of 7:20'ish this morning, it is over between Cherie and I.

Our third date that is.

When I arrived in Florida on December 2nd to kick-off our third date, we both knew it was going to be a rather epic-length rendezvous - with a planned week long cruise and a potential east coast road trip keeping us together at least through New Years. We asked each other - "how will we know when the date is over?"

The answer we came up with was that the date would be "over" when we manage to go 24hrs without seeing each other.

This weekend I am off visiting family in Baltimore while Cherie stays home working to prepare her house for sale. So after four months and twenty days - as of this morning we have been apart for twenty four hours and our third date has officially ended.

But wow, what an amazing third date it has been!

It is sure going to be hard to top...

But with a cross country road trip coming up - I think we might actually be able to! *grin*

Yesterday Cherie and I nailed a few things to the calendar.

We've decided to hit the road full-time together as of May 10th, 2007.

The first phase of the journey will have us working our way westward towards California, taking a month to do it. There are weddings to attend to in June in the Bay Area, and of course Burning Man in August. The rest of the details remain an intentionally blank slate.

When I left my own physical home behind a year ago (April 1st will be the one-year mark), I did not expect to find a partner along the way who was just as excited by the thought of technomadic living as I was.

But I have. And now Cherie is jumping in fully, actually putting her house up for sale and reinventing her entire life to join me.

As serolynne put it in her post yesterday: "This is the day that I will leave the foundation of having a physical home and become nomadic."

There is a LOT to get done in the next month. Cherie has a house to get on the market and a mountain of belongings to purge and sort. I have to get the Tab's electrical system upgraded, and caught up on my own mountain of projects.

Going nomadic together has been a theoretical possibility since the beginning - we actually started talking about it speculatively on our first date back in October.

But having a date set suddenly makes the speculative seem a lot more real.

I feel both nervous and excited at the prospect.

It is going to be a busy month!

I've been researching the booming "Social Networking" arena the last few weeks, and in the process I've probably joined a dozen or more sites - including at last giving in and getting a MySpace page (ugh!) for research purposes.

Spread the word: "Friends don't let friends use MySpace."

One of the other rather interesting sites I've been checking out is Multiply.com. Multiply is rather unique in that it lets you label your relationships for what they are - you can be a "parent", "co-worker", "online buddy", and so on...

I was amused to get this email from Multiply the other day:

Cherie is requesting a change in the way your relationship is identified on Multiply - from Boyfriend to Life Partner. Please visit your Home page to either accept or reject Cherie's request. If you reject, then we will continue to recognize your relationship with Cherie as Boyfriend.

*laugh*

Of course I agreed.

We may still only be on our third date, but yesterday that third date had its three month anniversary. And this uber-third-date shows no signs of ending any time soon.

*love*

UPDATE: To clarify some confusion - there has been no "change in status" in my relationship with serolynne other than in how it is described on Multiply. But seeing as how we have been making extensive life, business, and travel plans together lately - the "life partners" label certainly fits us better than the "boyfriend / girlfriend" alternative.

It was three months ago today that serolynne and I met in person for the first time.

Clearly we hit it off - better than either of us could have imagined.

And as a result, I now find myself hanging out in Florida - on the opposite coast of the continent and three time-zones away from that starting point.

We've been on our third date for over six weeks now, with no end in site.


A few recent pictures: Christmas in Baltimore, a sunset along the Chesapeake Bay, and an evening out in Saint Augustine...

Later today we are heading north for ten days camping at Faver-Dykes State Park and Tomoka State Park. This trip is an experiment to see how well we manage living/working together for an extended period of time in the little Tab.

If all goes well, some extremely extended Tab camping may be in our future.

I love you Cherie. Happy three months. I look forward to where the next three take us!

Way back in June I posted a message into the Toyota Prius LiveJournal forum that I occasionally lurked on, saying farewell to my beloved Bryd - and sharing the story of how my Prius had served me as an aircraft carrier.

I got this reply to that post from serolynne:
We sure share quite a few common folks on our friend's lists, and I thought I recognized you from other's journals! Small world. Xara (2006 Barcelona Red) and I may be doing BM together this year, along with some of our mutual friends.. we shall see if it works out that way.

My reply:
Yeah - I've heard good things about you from some of our mutual friends. *grin* Jeep and I will be at BM this year, it will be a pleasure to meet you!

And thus began my slowly escalating email and IM dialog with Cherie...

When her Burning Man plans fell through, we instead scheduled an in person "first date" during her visit to the Bay Area in October. To our delight, we proved to be just as compatible in person as online.



Even better - Cherie has some of the same technomadic dreams and aspirations to combine work and travel that I do. She demonstrated her aptitude by accomplishing a full day's work while camped with me along the shores of Treasure Island - with the San Francisco skyline as our office view. The solar panel was a bit unhappy trying to satisfy two hungry laptops, but overall the experiment was a resounding success - and made for one awesome first date.

Our second date was last week's rendezvous in Colorado:



And in a few weeks I will be meeting her on her home turf in Florida for our third date - a week long Disney Cruise to Mexico.

After that... We are already starting to ponder the possibilities of doing some extended nomadic adventuring together. And maybe even saving the world along the way...

It seems like we have known each other for years already. No wonder my jaw hit the floor in disbelief when Cherie noted yesterday that it was just now our one-month anniversary of meeting in person.

Egads!

I have no idea where this relationship will be a year from now - particularly if this pace continues. But it certainly seems to have the potential to be significantly significant for both of us.

But no matter what - I am delighted to have discovered a great new friend and co-conspirator that I expect will be close for a long time to come.

It is amazing what you find when you are not looking. In a Prius forum of all places?!? *grin*

*sigh*

Rachael came to the realization a few weeks ago that she really needed her own space completely separate from mine. This past weekend, she found a nice new apartment - literally a block away from where she works.

She will be moving out the weekend of July 10th.

The next month is going to be a tough one - we are both tender and living in limbo land until the move happens. Afterwards, I trust that we will be able to build a solid connection once again. But right now it is tough.

Most of the people who read this journal probably know this already (who actually reads this thing, anyway?) - but about a month and a half ago Rachael and I decided to no longer consider each other primary partners. We didn't make a big public deal out of this - and intentionally kept it quiet until after my brother's wedding to avoid our relationship status being any sort of distraction there...

It also is still tough to get used to.

We are still apartment mates, and we both are hoping to avoid any changes there. We love living together. We love each other. But we've mutually decided that we are not a "couple" anymore, and that this next step feels like the right path for us.

The reasons are complicated - I may share more of them at some point as I dig deeper into myself.

It is hard to convey that this is a good thing when the assumption in so many minds is that a couple de-coupling must be bad. But though there is of course hurt and sadness - I am also finding through this more love and appreciation for Rachael than ever before.

So this past weekend Rachael moved in to my place.

We have been looking around to get a two bedroom apartment together for a while, and we expected to have nailed down a place by now.... But unfortunately we haven't yet found a place and she had to be out of hers this past weekend, so for the time being we are crammed into tight quarters. (Not that that is such a bad thing, mind you...)

It would be easier if we weren't so particular about what we want.

Right now we are looking to find a good-sized two bedroom apartment with a good layout and enough space so that we both can have our own space and our own privacy, but also a great common area for entertaining.

Lots of sunlight is mandatory, and a view is highly desired.

We need easy pub-trans access to the Civic Center for Rachael and the South Bay (Caltrain) for me.

Garage parking is also a must - I hate the idea of leaving a new car out of the SF city streets!

Dishwasher is apparently a mandatory convenience. Washer and dryer are big pluses too.

And so on...

Right now we are looking in the Mission / Noe Valley / Dolores park area - somewhere in the band between the J Church and Bart. We've also just started to get excited about the SOMA, South Beach, South Park area. Being so close to Caltrain will be extremely nice.

Leads and advice appreciated.

- chris