Erin And I Are Engaged!

A glimpse of the future?

I know what you’re thinking.  Seth, you just met this girl, don’t you think you should slow down a bit?  Maybe take some time to get to know her before jumping into this?

Well, I decided to throw caution to the wind and propose to Erin.  She accepted, so we’re engaged!  We’re taking a month-long moratorium on any talk of wedding plans, so we don’t have any who/what/when/where/why details (well, maybe the “why”).  But for now, we’re just really, really happy and in love.

That’s why I haven’t been pizza blogging much this week, and starting today I’m leading a group of incoming freshmen from my high school on a 9 day backpacking trip in northeastern New Mexico.  Since I will be unplugged from electricity and pizza, this blog will be temporarily unplugged as well.

Erin wrote an email to her family telling the story of our engagement from her perspective, you can read it after the jump if you want to get your mushy on.  See y’all in a couple weeks.

Seth proposed on Friday night and caught me completely by surprise. I worked the closing shift that night, so I didn’t leave the grocery store until almost 11 pm. It was the end of a very long, very mundane day. I checked my cell phone and saw that he had left a message, saying he hadn’t eaten dinner yet. He wanted to know if he should wait for me to get home or if he should just go and grab a slice of pizza or a taco or something. I called him back and told him that I would grab something to eat with him, and we decided to figure out the rest when I got home (really, he just wanted to know exactly when I was going to be pulling into the parking lot). When I came in the door, I was surprised to find that he was freshly showered and in the process of shaving, which he doesn’t do all that often (shave, that is…ha ha). I asked him why he was shaving and he told me his stubble was starting to get itchy, so I didn’t give it a second thought.

We talked about where to go for dinner, and he said he would like to get a slice of pizza. I was surprised that he chose pizza, since he literally had eaten it for the last 4 out of 6 days as a result of his prize for being the champion of the Hand on an Eggplant Sub contest last November. When I asked why, he said that he would miss it while he was away leading the annual backpacking trip for the freshman class of his high school (he was leaving town on Sunday). That seemed reasonable, so I was happy to oblige even though I was leaning toward tacos. I changed out of my work clothes and we headed out the door.

Seth said he wanted to go the back way since he had a load of laundry that he needed to put in the dryer at the laundry room next door (he later told me he hoped that I hadn’t noticed his full laundry hamper in the closet, since it was a ruse to get me to the spot he had picked out). As we were walking toward the laundry room, we passed a little grassy area on the motel grounds that has a swing and a garden. Seth was walking slightly ahead of me and he pointed out some candles arranged in a semi circle in front of the swing, saying “Hey, that’s cool. Let’s go check it out.” I, being the ever cautious one, told him that it was probably something romantic that someone was planning for someone, and that we shouldn’t disturb it. It took a little convincing, but he finally got me to go sit down on the swing “just for a minute.”

As we walked closer, I noticed that two of the candles looked suspiciously similar to candles we have in our apartment. I just sat down on the swing as I started to say that thought out loud, and by the time the words left my lips he was down on one knee. At first, I didn’t believe him and thought it was a joke. Then he started telling me how much he loved me, that he wanted us to spend the rest of our lives together and raise a family, and he asked me to marry him. I was crying lots of happy tears at this point and of course said yes, yes, yes. Then he reached behind the swing where we were sitting and pulled out a hidden bag that had two cupcakes from our favorite neighborhood bakery and a really nice bottle of wine from the cafe/wine bar up the street. He also took a little bowl from his pocket, saying “I know you’ve told me that you don’t want an engagement ring, but I wanted to give you something” and he pulled out a big green olive that he had painstakingly hollowed out until it would fit on his finger, which guaranteed that it would fit on mine. He shared that it had taken him 4 or 5 tries before he found one that wouldn’t break, and that he had been forced to eat the rejects. As you all know by now, we both share a love of all things quirky, and I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect “engagement ring”. I gently coaxed it on to my finger and we snapped a few photos. We opened the wine, shared the cupcakes and spent the next hour or two basking in the glow as he recounted the afternoon’s pitfalls (it was apparently pouring rain up until about two hours before I got home, which would have totally foiled his plans) and good fortune (the clerk at the bakery gave him the cupcakes for free, and the guy at the wine bar gave him a discount on the wine, saying he would like someone to propose to him with this bottle of wine).

Up until this point, Seth had been running on nerves, but it was now 1:30 am and he still hadn’t eaten dinner so we set up the camera’s auto timer to take a few final pictures and then headed out to get some real food.  No one at the cafe or the taco truck said anything about the olive on my finger, but I have a hard time imagining that they missed it since it was so big that it fit over my knuckle. I thought about eating it, but we eventually decided that it should keep the eggplant sub company in the freezer so that now we can both go get Glamour Shots with our preserved food items. 🙂

We spent the following day hand in hand, eating delicious meals at special restaurants (and making new friends) that are normally a little out of our budget, dancing at crazy parties and just being in love. We made a pact not to discuss anything wedding related for 3 or 4 weeks, and instead focus on how awesome it feels to be engaged.