A Really Nice Surprise

A week ago a card arrived in the post, addressed to us. On the envelope was written "Not to be opened until 7th April", which is today.

The postmark was "Stevenage" in Hertfordshire in England, but neither of us could think of who this could be from.

What made this even more curious was that the envelope seemed to have a CD or DVD inside.

What on earth could it be?

This morning, as it's 7th April, the day that we get married, we opened the card...

Roll Back Two Months...

I have been looking for people that I went to university with for years, and despite the fact that I took a degree in Computer Science, I have found almost no traces of anyone I graduated with, despite many searches.

For some reason one morning, I had gone onto Linked In to check some profile updates, and just thought to try and find some of the people that went to my university.

I was really pleased to find one friend of mine from there, linked to them, and a short time later they linked back.

Several hours later my cell phone rang, and it was my old friend Jeff calling. Well that was a huge surprise out of the blue. We had a quick chat about old times, the others we had been in contact with, how our jobs were going etc, and then exchanged a few emails afterwards.

I happened to remind Jeff that when we were at University in 1977, he had brought an LP that turned out to not be what it was supposed to be, and that I still have a copy of it on cassette.

Roll Back 33 Years...

One day in 1977, our final years at University, Jeff had brought a an album by "The Cars", and a group of us gathered in his dorm room to listen to it. We thought the music sounded a lot different to the single "They Shoot Horses Don't They", and on inspection it seems that the music shop had inserted the wrong album into the sleeve. Instead of us listening to "The Cars", we were in fact listening to the "Ozark Mountain Daredevils" and their album "It'll Shine When It Shines".

None of us had heard of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils before, but we did sort of like the music that we were listening to, and so before Jeff took the record back to the store, a few of us got copies of it recorded onto cassettes (the media of the day of course).

I grew to really like this album, and played it a lot over the years, and still have the cassette that I recorded back in 1977 in my collection, although I don't play cassettes any more of course.

Roll Forward Again To Today...

Remember the mystery card that we had received a week ago in the post?

Well since today is our wedding day, we opened it, and by now of course you will no doubt have realised that the card was from my friend Jeff from my University days.

There was indeed a CD in the envelope, in fact two CD's, copies of two Ozark Mountain Daredevil albums, one of which is the album that we listened to way back in 1977 at University.

The music still sounds great today, especially slow ballads like "It Couldn't Be Better" and "What's Happened Along In My Life", both of which were very fitting for a wedding day.

I think you will agree that this was a really nice surprise for a special day.