Chris and Grete met at Grinnell College in the spring semester of 2002. Chris was a third-year living on south campus in the dorm Cleveland and Grete was a first-year living on north campus in Norris. Chris had his eye on Grete early on and drew a pink heart around her picture in the New Faces book. They eventually met through mutual friends, Cassandra (Grete's friend) and her friend Natalia, that lived down the hall from Chris. Memories are cloudy but Chris and Grete think they started dating officially the last few weeks of the semester.
That summer Chris visited Grete at her parents' place in Southern Illinois and Grete visited Chris at his parents' place in Iowa City. Unfortunately, they would spend the next semester apart, as Chris spent Fall 2002 at the University of Queensland in Australia. They talked on the phone almost everyday but it was still difficult to be so far apart. Chris canceled his trip to New Zealand and bumped up his flight so he could get back to see Grete as soon as his finals were over.
Chris graduated from Grinnell the next semester, while Grete still had two more years.
The summer after Chris graduated, Grete got a puppy named Bernie, much to the disapproval of Chris. He was very worried Bernie would not get along with his cat Mayo. As you know, it worked out well and Bernie and Mayo became close friends after about 6 months. Mayo disappeared one fourth of July but Bernie is still with them. Chris now admits that Grete was right and Bernie turned out to be the best dog ever! :)
The end of that summer, Chris took a research position in Martine Dunnwald's lab at the University of Iowa and held that position for the next two years while Grete finished up at Grinnell. They saw each other only on weekends for those 2 years, alternating between Iowa City and Grinnell.
Grete graduated from Grinnell in spring 2005. Chris was accepted to a PhD program in Cancer Biology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. They decided to move to Madison in 2005. After seeing a crazy variety of places one fateful morning, they found a little grocery store (Jenny Street) and bought a picnic lunch to eat at this little park (Orton) near the next place they planned to see. When they walked into the first-floor flat on Orton Court, on Lake Monona, they immediately looked at each other and thought "this is definitely the place!". They couldn't believe their good fortune in finding such a great place and stayed there for 2 years. Grete worked at a biotechnology company, Promega, calibrating equipment, while Chris started his graduate program.
On Christmas Day 2006, Chris and Grete lost a dear friend, Grete's grandfather Robert ("Da"). Da was an agronomy professor at UW and still lived on the near-west side, in the home Grete's mother grew up in. Chris and Grete moved into this wonderful home ("3809") in the summer of 2007, just before Grete started her own graduate program in epidemiology at UW's Department of Population Health Sciences.
There are both still working on their PhDs... (just by the way, unless you're their mentor, good things never come from asking a graduate student "when are you going to be done?"!)
