The BIggest Mistake of Her Life...

It's been a little while Internet...

A great many things have happened in my life since my last blog. The most important of which is that I got engaged. Crazy right? So I'm gonna tell you how it happened whether you're interested or not.

It's not really a romantic story, but it is kind of unconventional:

My younger brother was married the weekend before Thanksgiving and my girlfriend and I flew down to Long Beach for the wedding and decided to spend the week there for the holiday. The wedding was a very happy occasion for my family. So naturally, suddenly finding myself to be the only one of the boys in my family to be unmarried, I became the focus of matrimonial speculation. I hadn't planned on being engaged for a very long time, but jokes about a future wedding started to fly like snow in a blizzard.

My girlfriend and I are both 30 years old. In the Polynesian community, as well as the Mormon community, being unmarried at that age is unheard of. We might as well have been some kind of sideshow attraction for all the peculiar looks that we received, but we both felt there was really no big rush to get married... Fastfoward three days from my little brother's wedding...

My father and I are driving somewhere, I think it might have been back from the grocery store for the traditional Thanksgiving fare, and my Dad is STILL spewing jokes like they were going out of style. Then he asks me when we are gonna get married. I say "Let's go get a ring then..." and he promptly almost crashes the car. Needless to say I am very pleased by the reaction.

By the smile that split his face, you would have thought I told him that I was going to give him $100,000,000 in cash. He tells me that he is going to come home early from work, which is a miracle in it's own right, and we will go downtown to get a ring.

For those of you who don't know, Downtown Los Angles is a shopper's paradise and my girlfriend wanted to go shopping for a few things. So my entire family, which include Both my brothers and their wives, My teenage sister, My parents, my six year old niece and 17 month old nephew, jump in the car with my girlfriend and me and happily drive downtown. At this point my girlfriend has no idea that we were going ring shopping.

We arrive at the jewelery district. My girlfriend, who had also been assaulted with the marriage talks since my brother's wedding, was happy to leave the jewelery store when she saw that my dad was looking at rings and had a crazy twinkle in his eye. So my sister and my girlfriend go looking for earrings and I pretend to go look at watches. I find a ring but quickly realize that I don't know her ring size... so I call my sister. My sister being a teenager, hatches an elaborate plan to find out my girlfriends ring size... and to my surprise pulls it off. I buy the ring and we leave. It's at this moment that it dawns on me that I have no idea when I'm going to pop the question.

At about 11 p.m. that night, my girlfriend asks me if I can take her to the store for some medicine, so we hop in the car and start driving around. I decide to do it then, but have no plan on how to execute. So I start taking her on an impromptu tour of my old hangouts. I take her to one of my favorite spots in the city, a breakwater in the Long Beach Harbor. BREAKWATER: n. structures constructed on coasts as part of coastal defence or to protect an anchorage from the effects of weather and longshore drift. We reach the end and you can see the entire city... I am standing behind her with my arms around her as she is taking in the sight. And then I just pop the box open right in front of her face. The fact that she was speechless was astounding since she always has something to say.

She turns around slowly and I drop to a knee, landing it on a sharp rock, but I remain undeterred. All I say is I love you... Marry me... and wait. Let me tell you, the 10 seconds it took her to answer seemed like an eternity. She starts to cry and says yes. She will contest that I cried first. If I did, it was because of that sharp rock that I was kneeling on. And just like that... two people, who profess that they will never marry are engaged.

This is the short version of the story.

Thanks for the vent session...