Today at sunset I’m asking Rebecca to be my wife!
If you don't read any further, at a minimum read this: There's a possiblilty you're reading this before the plan goes down, so please wait until Sunday if you'd like to call us, just in case. Thanks :)
As I post this, I’m about to surprise her with a trip to our favorite beach resort, Villas Del Pacifico. We’ll leave school right at 2:30, and when I miss the turn for home, I’m going to have to ask her to just stop asking questions. The plan is this, in a perfect vision:
At sunset we go for a walk on the beach, and when we return to the stretch of black sand near our resort, she finds an uncommonly large and beautiful shell on the beach. Curiosity gets the better of her, and when she picks it up, it will has a five-foot long string leading to a small, shallowly buried treasure chest. I’m still collected enough to be playing dumb as she opens the chest to find a titanium and cubic zirconium tension mount ring that she can wear in Guatemala. Inscribed on the inside are the words "Yesod, Nuestro Año, Our Eternal Love". "Yesod" is Hebrew for "foundation", referring to our families and the time before we met. "Nuestro Año" is Spanish for "Our Year".
When I take a knee, I insist on placing this on her right ring finger. Mid-protest I retrieve our real engagement ring from my pocket and tell her that this one is for back home. We’ll leave it in Chicago over winter break.
When we return to the resort, she finds a few of our close friends waiting for us with smiles, drinks, and hugs, and she discovers that they video taped the proposal with us in front of the sunset. I’m really excited! I hope everything comes together, it’s sort of a complicated plan.
She has no idea, in fact I’ve taken great care to make her think I’m broke, and that I feel like we haven’t spent enough time with each other’s family and friends, and "the timing is just off". About a month ago we were having a really great moment and she jokingly begged "When are we going to get engaged?" I got to ham it up as the commitment-fearing bachelor and cite all my reasons again... :) It’s been hard to maintain this charade, but I know that she wants to be surprised more than anything else. I have an entire page written for her about how-in-the-world I’ve been hiding this since May, how/when I got a chance to ask her parents and email our moms pictures of the ring, and a few close calls when she almost caught my chicanery.
We’ve been dating for a year and a half. I couldn’t have asked for more in a companion, a love, a wife. She means the world to me and I've never been happier.
Since I’m teaching multimedia, I used this as an excuse to practice macro photography. Here are the rings.
Thanks to all our friends and family for your love and support!
Nov 20 - Sat, 4PM. Expedition begins at Soledad (8,530 ft) with 15 people from school. We reach base camp 3hr 20min later and camp overnight.
Sun, 3AM. Seven of us wake up and climb 45 degree grade by headlamp and moonlight. Nothing is more frustrating than climbing loose volcanic scree in the dark in very thin air.
5:30 AM. Summit Reached. The following picture was taken with a 15 second shutter, which is why the lava, stars, and sunrise appear this way. Temperatue est. to be -15 degF; we could only bear it long enough to catch sunrise at 6AM.
I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.
No wonder it's on their mind - it's been COLD here this week, quite the snap frost. It would be so brazenly [US] American of me to be insensitive and apply my standards of "cold". I got emails forwarded to me about clothing drives and the need for coats. The students are wearing scarves in class. Rebecca's kindergartners come to school in overstuffed down coats, mittens, wool hats, arctic boots.
The coldest day was Monday, it hit 66 degF in the Morning. Brrrrrrrrrrr. I wore long sleeves.
