Amazon has now gone over $4 million in donations for it's disaster relief fund.

Now that time has passed that Sarah has sufficiently distorted what happened on the night I popped the question, I think it's time that I tell the story before I distort it too much. For those of you that don't care, just skip this entry.

To provide some background to the whole story, I'm going to start back at the beginning of the month. Because, if you're going to understand Sarah's reaction, you need to know what I'd been doing leading up to the whole event.

I'd been saving for the ring for several months, knowing that I wanted to pay for it outright and not have to worry about another payment on top of my student loans. Sarah and I had gone ring shopping once, mainly so I could find out what size ring she wears, but also an idea of what she really liked.

On December 3rd, having asked off for the following Friday to make some errands, I went ring shopping. Not expecting to buy, I ended up doing so anyway. With Sarah coming into town that weekend, I knew it was a perfect time to lift Al's, her father, cell phone number off of her cell.

The following week I setup lunch with Al and went on my merry way of confusing Sarah about the chances of our engagement. Our lunch went well and with the blessing received I then started to figure out how exactly I would pop the question.

While, we had talked about getting married regularly for months, I wanted the engagement ring and everything associated with it to be a total surprise. This required me to keep Sarah a little off balance on the subject. And I do think I probably enjoyed this a little too much. At one point she thought it wouldn't be for another few months at least.

Due to the distance between us, we have a limited amount of time we spend with each other every week. And as those weekends are often planned out one way or another in advance, an easy opportunity other than right around Christmas was not apparent. Christmas had the up-side of her thinking that I would never propose around this time of year (though I had only promised it would never be given in lieu of a gift).

The question was, how do I do it? Being the uncreative type, the only thing that came to mind was the stocking. The ring box would easily fit inside it and I could pile all of the other items on top of it. For the first time I was thankful that I hadn't protested doing stockings at Christmas.

Since I still didn't trust myself fully with the idea, I ran it by a couple of people, mainly my friend Jessica and my sister, to see if I was completely insane to do it this way. With the validation, I went ahead with my plan all the while continuing to make Sarah feel like there wasn't a chance it would happen anytime soon. (Yeah, I know I'm mean.)

So, finally we get to the day it happens. Luck would have it that Louisville got hit with 6-10 inches of snow the day and night before and I had been stuck in my home since Tuesday the 21st. After spending more than an hour digging my car out of the snow I made my way cautiously to Lexington for dinner with Sarah's family that night at her house. After putting everything into the stocking in a back room, I hung it up and waited, and waited, and waited.

Due to the weather Sarah and I had agreed to open our gifts and stockings that night so we could leave early in the morning to make the trek to my parents (a 3 hour drive in normal conditions). Her parents seemed to stay there forever. All the patience I had over the previous weeks had been exhausted and I wanted her to get the ring.

After several comments by her mom that seemed to be hints that she was waiting for it to happen to, her family headed home to Somerset. After going through the presents and my stocking we got to her stocking.

She went through each item, put on the lip balm I got her and took her time until she finally got to the last item. When she pulled out the box she had this little look on her face and said, “Oooh, what’s this?” As she opened it up she had a look of shock on her face, tears welled up and her first comment upon seeing the ring was, “Are you kidding?”

After asking her to marry me it took a few minutes to get through her tears and say yes. I wasn’t worried at any point until that very instance when it took her a bit to get it out. She didn’t even remember me asking or putting on the ring for the longest time. I’m not sure if it’s still completely sunk in to either of us.

Michele over at A Small Victory has a list of places that you can donate to in order to help out with the relief effort of the victims of the earthquake/tsunami in countries along the Indian Ocean.

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. May you feel the joy of the season.

I proposed to Sarah this evening and she said yes. I'm engaged. More details later.

UPDATE (12/28) - I've written about the whole deal here.

Well, I'm starting to wish I had braved the weather today and gotten out for a bit as I'm getting bored with being at home and I've run out of things to do (other than work related) that allow me to avoid finishing up things like wrapping Christmas presents, finishing laundry that I'll need for the weekend, and various other must do items. So, I'm guessing I'll probably end up staying up until 2am tonight instead and doing what I need to do.

Starting tomorrow, assuming the weather holds, I'll be all over the state the next few days. Repeating the pattern that we did for Thanksgiving, Sarah and I'll be in Lexington tomorrow then to my parents and then her parents... Fortunately, this time it doesn't look like we'll be traveling to another state though.

I'm still a bit behind for Christmas this year. I guess working a full-time job will do that. This is the first Christmas since I finished course-work for my degrees and it's a bit different. Normally I would have been off for about a week now. As it stands, I'm likely only going to take off Friday in any real sense and continue to work tomorrow for at least part of the day. I actually find a sense of peace in work anymore and I hope I don't lose that anytime soon.

I should probably give an update on Sarah's friend. She's doing fine and spent the last week at Sarah's after getting out of the hospital. She's pretty much back to normal, though I'd debate if it was a good thing that she's back to that point. She ended up finishing her classes for the semester and hopefully, she'll be ok in the future. If she can be kept in your prayers, for those of you that pray, it would be appreciated.

Spent some time today updating the website. Finally got the plugins up-to-date and upgraded to the latest MT to deal with the insane amount of comment spam that even this site gets everyday.

A friend of Sarah's, and by extension mine, tried to cause serious harm to herself last night. I ask everyone that comes across that to pray for this young lady that she might find peace and be healed.

It's been quite some time since I've posted anything and I felt I needed to get something up here for the whole ten of you that actually read this site.

In the past month I've been completely swamped with work. I've made one trip to D.C. to meet with people at the Weather Service to discuss one project I'm working on. In addition to being on the road for business, I've spent a lot of time traveling around the state with Sarah visiting family and friends (particularly over the holidays) and I'm getting ready to make another round this weekend.

In addition to work there was some bad news to deal with over this time. Sarah and my dog, Shiloh, developed cancer over the past month. What started as a little lump quickly grew to something massive. Despite only having her since August of this year we ended up having to put her to sleep. Though our attachment levels hadn't completely developed with her, it'll probably be quite some time before we get another dog.

So, between all of this it's been hard to find time to do anything with this site. Though with the new projects I'm working on I hope to be able to put more time into it once again. This has been an outlet for me over the past two and a half years and I hope to continue to use it as one. I didn't even get time to write about the election results. Well, just know I'm happy that we won. More later...