Okay, here are some more details.

On Monday evening, I asked Lori to marry me. It had been one year that we had been officially dating. We had always said that 17th of each month was our N month anniversary.

It wasn't a complete surprise, because we both new by around mid-February of last year that we were going to get married, but I still had to "make it official" and get an engagement ring and propose. She's been waiting quite a while for this. My intention, at first, was to get back on better financial ground after last year's adjunct teaching deal before buying the ring, but I haven't been making up ground on that as quickly as I thought I would, so after the holidays, I decided I couldn't wait any longer, and as it turned out we were quickly coming up on the 1 year anniversary of our dating, so I thought I'd do it near that date.

As the date approached, I realized that it was also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and that kids would have the day off from school. Sadly, RIT has classes in normal session, but that's how RIT is, so we couldn't all take the day off and spend it together... But it did work out to get together that evening since Zach (her son's) scout meeting was a shortened review-board type-thingy.

So our plan was to go out and use these Gift Certificates that Lori had gotten some time ago and we were planning to go to Mario's Via Abruzzi (sp?). Unfortunately, when we got there, we found out that they had closed early due to the bad weather. But at least Zach and I had gone inside to check this out which gave me time to hand off the ring to him. (He was in on the plan, you see -- actually, he knew about it since Saturday afternoon)...

So after the discovery that the restaurant was closed, we decided to go somewhere else... and Lori was like "Let's just go home and have pizza by candle-light" or something... And Zach and I were like... "Nah... let's keep trying to go out somewhere."... So we saw that Plum Garden was open. Yay. So we went there for dinner.

After eating (I had a hard time eating... I get that way when I'm kind of anxious), I said to Zach... "You know, Your mom and I have been dating for a whole year now... Isn't that pretty awesome (the code word)?..." So, Zach reaches in his pocket and says "Yeah, so why don't you do something about it?" and puts the ring box down on the table in front of Lori...

Lori's like: "What? Right now?" I'm like "Yup."... So I did the knee thing and I have no idea what exactly I said, but I asked her to marry me and gave her a cut-out red paper that says "Marry Me, Lori? Love, Andy" (This matches a similar red piece of paper that I gave her when I first told her that I loved her that says "Andy Loves Lori"). So she said "Yes".

And that's pretty much the story. She's been having a great time telling everyone about it... Although most people are like "Finally!" But still, now we're off to planning the wedding... We have a tentative date, but we aren't going to announce it until we know if we can get an appropriate location. But we're aiming for sometime in the first half of this year. Don't hold me to it, just yet, though.

As for who knew about it ahead of time... Pretty much only our direct families (I had called her parents on Sunday evening) & Zach. A couple of other people had hints that things were happening soon, but for the most part... Very few people were in the know.

Okay, back to course prep. Did I miss any details? Anything else you want to know?

Posted by Andrew at 02:31 PM | Comments (11)