Catching Up

Well now that it has been exactly six months since I last posted...

Oops.

Anyway, I don't make any promises to post daily, but I'll try to get back on averaging more than twice per year. :P

So, since my last post, there have been a few events in my life. In reverse chronological order, these events include:

Easter
Our 6th (dating) anniversary
Valentine's Day
My Birthday
Carrie's Birthday
Christmas
St. Nicholas Day *
Thanksgiving
Veterans Day *
Halloween

Okay, so I skipped a couple snow days, MLK Day, and Presidents Day. But you get the idea...

Those two starred dates are of particular importance, though they may seem a bit odd to most.

On Veterans Day (November 11), Carrie had the day off work; meanwhile, I had an awful day at work. I came home to find that Carrie had not only made dinner but also made a delicious-looking peanut butter pie. That was pretty much the best ending to a day that I could have asked for. But after dinner, Carrie gave me a book that she had made for me. (Backstory: for our first anniversary, I colored a children's book-style book for Carrie called "The Story of Us", which chronicled our meeting and adventures over the first year.) The book Carrie gave me was called "The Story of Us: Part 2". She had used photos of us to illustrate the important events in our relationship in the nearly 5 years that had passed since I wrote the first book. The book ended with "Carrie realized she needed to ask Becky a very important question..."at which point Carrie pulled out a beautiful diamond and sapphire ring and asked me to marry her. Of course I said yes!

This, of course, left me with the difficult task of trying to "propose" to her in a way that was still a surprise. It's a lot harder to plan a surprise when the other person is expecting it! This did not mean that I didn't have an idea for how to propose...I just had to figure out how to make it a surprise. A couple years ago, I had shown Carrie the pattern for Sheldon, a knit turtle, and she declared him to be the cutest knitted thing she'd ever seen. Over a year ago, I bought the yarn to make him and had been planning to use him in my proposal ever since. The catch? He was definitely the most difficult project I'd ever set out to knit...and despite having purchased the yarn long ago, I hadn't started yet. And of course I couldn't work on him at home (or during my week off at Thanksgiving w/ Carrie's family), because that doesn't do much for surprises.

I ordered Carrie's ring (which I had already picked out) and set off knitting like mad on my lunch breaks, on the bus, before Carrie got home, etc. The ring arrived at the beginning of December, and I finished my turtle on the evening of December 5, just in time for...

St. Nicholas Day!!! What magic--a gift-giving occasion built in right at the time I needed one. Thanks, random eastern Wisconsin tradition! :D (For any of you unfamiliar with the holiday, perhaps Wikipedia can help). So this year, on St. Nicholas Day, Carrie unwrapped her new turtle friend, sporting some nice bling.

Meet Sparkles

And since then, we've kept very busy planning our wedding and trying to keep up with everything else going on in life. But life is good, and I'm very excited for this next chapter in it!