The Proposal

As this blog progresses, I should explain that it's pretty much going to be from my perspective. My lovely fiancee knows about and approves of this journal of our wedding preparations, but I still feel like writing personal stuff about her is kind of like talking about her behind her back, to the whole world. She may, from time to time, contribute her own thoughts here. In the meantime, my own posts will be fairly me-centric, but not because I'm discounting her part in our relationship.

We had kind of an eye-opening moment this morning, when she received a text from her dad asking for hotel recommendations for next October. We realized that we really need to start talking to hotels about reserving a block of rooms (which means really figuring out how many people we're planning on inviting). We're pretty much limited to 50 guests by the size of the Grove, the venue we've already reserved, so that helps.

Right now, we are considering three places to talk to about rooms: Red Rock Station, Santa Fe Station, and Aliante Station. Between Red Rock and Santa Fe, Red Rock is a little nicer and more upscale, but it's farther from the venue. We've never actually been to Aliante, but it's also closer to the venue.

Our plan is to get in touch with all three this week and see what they can offer, in terms of prices for the rooms, and also transportation to the Grove. We're hoping one of them will be able to offer some sort of shuttle bus as part of the package. The alternative is to try to arrange for all our local friends to ferry all our out of town friends and relatives in their cars. Not the preferred choice, since, quite honestly, planning a wedding should be more than enough without trying to coordinate an invasion of Northwest Las Vegas along with it.

So that's where we're currently at. Since we've been planning this wedding longer than I've been blogging about it, posts here will probably be a mixture of what's currently happening along with catching up on what's been done already.

Last week, I talked about how the lovely fiancee and I met. This week, we'll skip ahead a bit to the proposal.

We had only been together for a few months, but already were talking about marriage. Or, more accurately, talking around it. We talked about where we would want the ceremony to take place, what the ceremony would be like, who would we invite, whether it would it be a large or small wedding, where would we go on the honeymoon. We knew what kind of food we would serve (barbecue) and what kind of cake we would have (cupcakes). Of course, we had only been together a few months, so it was all speculation, because it was too soon to be talking about marriage.

Only it wasn't. Not really.

Don't get me wrong; we weren't going to just rush into marriage. But being together, living together, we figured we could look at things in one of three ways: either things were always going to stay just as they were (which just seemed dull); we were going to eventually break up (which seemed pessimistic); or we were eventually going to get married. So that's how we started looking at our future: if we didn't break up, we would get married. It wasn't something we planned on doing right away, but it would happen after enough time had passed.

Then, one night, she sent me a text that she had come up with the perfect date: 10/10/10. At that point, we would have been together for about two years. At that point, I think we could probably feel fairly secure that things were going to last.

I can't remember the chronology exactly, but at some point, I had decided how I was going to propose to her. We had been to Zion National Park in Springdale, UT, and really enjoyed it. I decided that on her birthday in January 2010, I would surprise her with a hot-air balloon ride over Zion, and that's when I would pop the question. I began investigating hot-air balloons in Springdale almost a year in advance, because I wanted to be sure to reserve the exact date I wanted.

And then, late one night last spring, we were eating dinner after she got home from work. We were eating cheeseburgers from Jack in the Box (sadly, a common meal for us back then; we're eating better now). And I just looked across the table at her, and I didn't want to wait nine months or whatever. So I asked her if she wanted to get married, either in October 2010, or on some yet-to-be-determined date in the future. (I said I couldn't remember the chronology, right?) And she said yes, without any hesitation. And it just felt right.

And, after that, the rest should have been easy, right? I mean, we had already figured out all the details and everything. Only that's when everything started changing.