The Proposal

I feel like a secret agent who has had his secret iden­tity revealed. As if a weight has been lifted and I am able to finally reveal the Jason Bourne-style secrets to the top secret mis­sion which I have been work­ing on for the past sev­eral weeks. So I apol­o­gize if I’ve been dis­tracted for the past week or so when we’ve inter­acted, I’ve been think­ing about this a great deal. I had to make sure that this went off with­out a hitch, and I think I can say “Mis­sion accomplished.”

Yes­ter­day I took Katie on a whirl­wind sur­prise day going across Orlando to do new and excit­ing things; cul­mi­nat­ing in our sur­prise wed­ding pro­posal (com­plete with Magic trick) and her say­ing YES!

So now, allow me to share the story with you.

It began over two months ago as I decided that I was indeed going to join my life with Katie’s, and so began the plan. Because dear friends, if you know me, you know that I wouldn’t set­tle for any­thing less than awe­some. Also with this plan I knew secrecy was of the utmost impor­tance. Katie, like most women, has a sixth sense com­bined with eyes in the back of her head and a wicked abil­ity to guess when and with what I’m going to sur­prise her. I tend to default to the unplanned improv it strat­egy but if I have to plan some­thing, I’ll plan it, over­plan it, re-plan it, and map the pos­si­bil­i­ties for suc­cess and failure.

My first plan was chock full of awe­some, but was also rid­dled with holes where things could go wrong and ruin the whole affair. I’ll spare you all the details but let me just say that it required five other peo­ple, all musi­cians, to be involved with it. And after some con­sid­er­a­tion I gave up on that idea and turned to another equally awe­some but less risky possibility.

Three weeks ago I told her to block yes­ter­day off her cal­en­dar. It was going to be a sur­prise day.

First step to awe­some­ness: do the unex­pected. I kept her guess­ing by drop­ping false hints as we approached the day. Katie is very skilled at guess­ing what I have planned, and so I had to be extremely care­ful around her. I almost had to get Snape to teach me legili­mancy just so I could pro­tect this secret from her.

Then this morn­ing when she woke up, the day began and I was all set for awe­some­ness. First we headed out to break­fast at Christo’s on Edge­wa­ter. A great lit­tle restau­rant that came very highly rec­om­mended. We enjoyed a nice meal and then went off to Leu Gardens.

Leu Gar­dens is a botan­i­cal gar­den here in Orlando, spread over 50 acres it has beau­ti­ful plants and lots of trees. Since Katie hadn’t gone before and I hadn’t been there in over a decade, we enjoyed it a great deal. Unfor­tu­nately though it was quite hot. We decided not to see the whole prop­erty but we enjoyed what we did see.

As we were leav­ing Leu Gar­dens we dis­cov­ered that the Enz­ian The­ater had a mati­nee of Indi­ana Jones and the Tem­ple of Doom. Katie and I love to visit the Enz­ian the­ater for a movie. They have a great the­ater and their food is excel­lent, and when we go it’s always for a top-notch movie. We enjoyed the movie and after leav­ing we headed to the Orlando Sci­ence Cen­ter. Now nor­mally this wouldn’t excite most peo­ple but I had two aces in my sleeve. First, they had an exhibit about Mr. Potato Head, which Katie col­lects. Then sec­ond was that Katie had not been to the Sci­ence Cen­ter since it moved to its new loca­tion which was prob­a­bly fif­teen years ago. Two recipes that nearly guar­an­tee a win.

Thank­ful that I had those two aces, because the Sci­ence Cen­ter was a bit of a let down. It was with­out AC (which had appar­ently been that way for two months) and the Potato Head Exhibit was for three year olds and noth­ing for the adults. But we enjoyed our­selves none-the-less. We played with the exhibits and then left, head­ing home for a brief inter­mis­sion. We walked Mat­tie, cleaned up after sweat­ing some in the heat, and then headed back out. Then we decided to grab an early-ish din­ner at Bento which is a great sushi pan-asian restau­rant on Orange ave.

As we went down for din­ner I grabbed my man-purse from the car, car­ry­ing it with me as we went. Katie didn’t think any­thing of it, think­ing it had my lap­top in it, lit­tle did she know what it actu­ally held. [insert evil laugh here]

After din­ner I casu­ally sug­gested that we go enjoy a walk around Lake Eola. So we made our way down there and began walk­ing around the lake. Chit chat­ting as we went and after going about half-way around we came to the Chi­nese pagoda-esque gazebo. So I put on my smooth talker per­sona and said, “hey baby, it’s hot, let’s sit down for a bit.” Now, after sit­ting for a few min­utes, I casu­ally said, “So, I want to try this magic trick out on you…” Katie knew I have been work­ing on my card tricks so she agreed and I pulled a deck of cards out of my man purse (this may have been odd for other peo­ple, but I carry a deck of cards for just this rea­son. And NO I won’t promise to do Magic next time I see you.)

I rif­fle the deck and ask her to pick a card, she pulls it out, looks at it, and then I have her slip it back into the deck. I could have sold it bet­ter but instead I just said, “Alright, so now reach into my bag and there’s a zipped pocket in the back. Open it.” She expected me to have the card planted there, or some­thing sim­i­lar. But what she found was a ring box. I took it from her when she pulled it out, I opened it and asked her, “Will you marry me?”

Katie was in total shock. She couldn’t quite process it. Mis­sion accom­plished, I had com­pletely blind­sided her. “Yes. Of course!” I smiled and kissed her, then pulled back and said, “Now, for the sake of com­plete­ness…” Yes I actu­ally said this. “There’s a piece of paper rolled up inside the ring in the box, pull it out and see what it says. “Q [poorly drawn heart]” — Her brain is fried it’s short-circuiting every­where. She didn’t under­stand what it meant. “Your card, it was the Queen of Hearts.” I explained help­fully. And yes, it was her card.

Now she was com­pletely blown away. Her world was rocked. She was astounded. It was my crown­ing achieve­ment. My Muhammed Ali one-two punch for the world cham­pi­onship. My per­fectly exe­cuted play as the clock winded down to hit the win­ning shot.

In truth my biggest point of stress wasn’t whether she would say yes or not, it was whether I would screw up the magic trick in my ner­vous­ness. It wasn’t a com­plex trick, but I still wor­ried I’d screw it up, and obvi­ously the effect was earth shattering.

We kissed, hugged, and called fam­ily. Lots of phone calls. I called my dad, my sib­lings, my grand­mom, and a few close friends. Then I tweeted the news and watched our phones blow up as we got well wishes and excited responses from our friends and family.

After about 30 min­utes of phone calls and sit­ting we gath­ered up and made our way back to the car. Once there I didn’t let Katie sit down yet, I got in and turned it on, put on the iPod and cranked it to play Ste­vie Wonder’s ‘For Once in my Life’ to which we danced there next to the car in the park­ing lot. We held each other, laughed, got teary eyed, and swayed with the music. The song is only two and a half min­utes long, but it’s such a great song. Once it ended, we kissed and got in the car to head to SAK.

We went to SAK, told and retold this story, con­vinced peo­ple it wasn’t a prank (a side effect of com­edy clubs, peo­ple are wary of prac­ti­cal jokes) and we hugged a lot of friends who were excited for us. We watched part of the show but by this time we were both begin­ning to wind down and feel the exhaus­tion set­ting in.

A few quick ques­tions to answer:

1. No we do not have a date set. It will be some­time in 2010, but we have no idea on any­thing more spe­cific than that.
2. Please don’t start ask­ing us about kids. We took nearly three years to get to this step. We won’t be rushed, we’re going to do it on our own time.
3. No I won’t explain the magic trick to you.
4. Yes I am avail­able for con­sult­ing on your pro­posal planning.

Yes­ter­day was our long, awe­some, amaz­ing, mag­i­cal, stress­ful, won­der­ful, unbe­liev­able, dream­like, everything-I-could-hope-for day.