So, I got engaged this week...

Full Disclosure: This is a backdated post. I wrote it after the blog was created, but have written it in the style of an in-progress blog so that anyone reading from the beginning will get a more sensible narrative than time-jumping like Marty McFly through our wedding planning.

Over five years ago, my girlfriend and I moved from Knoxville, TN to Seattle, WA so that I could take a job as a game designer at Wizards of the Coast. It was a risky move; at the time, we had only been dating for about six months, and we'd be making a move across the country, thousands of miles from every friend or family member either of us have. We've been through some rough times, and some great times, and the years have seen us do a lot of fun things, undergo changes in careers, and even saw my girlfriend start and lead her own Girl Scout troop (which is why I have dubbed her Girl Scout Girlfriend, so as to protect her true identity from those supervillains who might be reading this blog).

We'd talked about getting married in the past, but the time never seemed right. Both of us wanted to come into the marriage in a good, stable financial place, and earlier this year that became true for both of us. So, after some sneaky trickeration in which I obtained an engagement ring from Marc Williams Goldsmith, a jeweler in her home state of Pennsylvania that she has wanted her engagement ring from since she was a child, I popped the question to Girl Scout Girlfriend this week. Luckily, she said yes. I guess now she's Girl Scout Fiancée!

It was really tough for me to pick out a time and place to propose to her. We didn't really have any places in Seattle that were super special to us; we'd already been dating when we moved here, and neither of us get terribly emotionally invested in dates or other events. With Thanksgiving coming up, I knew we would have a house full of friends (we host Thanksgiving at our house every year for the many, many friends of ours who, like us, moved to Seattle from elsewhere and have no family here) and I knew that Girl Scout Fiancée would want to show off her new engagement ring to our friends. Plus, what better chance for a bride-to-be to be the center of attention than a day when all of our friends are going to be at our house, eating her delicious cooking?

I spent a few months dealing with the awesome folks at Marc Williams and was able to order an engagement ring and have it delivered the week before Thanksgiving. Given that GSF had been none-too-subtly hinting that she wanted a ring from Marc Williams for years, this seemed like a no-brainer. Picking a time and place to ask her was trickier, since we had no special places in Seattle. Worse, Seattle weather in November is not always conducive to romantic outdoor proposals, and I didn't want to do the proposal in anything less than a beautiful, private place.

In the end, I decided on the Lake Wilderness Arboretum, which was conveniently on the way to the town of Black Diamond where we'd be driving to pick up our delicious smoked turkey for Thanksgiving. I fed her a line about wanting to take some photos to send to our grandparents, something we do occasionally to help them keep up with our lives, and, in a quaint little gazebo all decorated with Christmas lights in the middle of a wooded area of the arboretum, I asked, and the rest is history.