Spring Break!!

For the next week Joe, Dad, Patricia, and I will be seeing the sights of Miami from beaches to swamps to city life. I am going to give them a whirlwind trip of South Florida. I had to promise Sam that I would keep Joe away from the spring break scene on Miami Beach. Otherwise he was not allowed to go by himself. I decided instead to take to the 'Glades and Keys where he will likely be eaten by a shark or gator. I guess that is better than taking him to South Beach and have Sam kill him later.

Stay tuned for photos. Jason, this is a preview of what you and co. can be doing!

Engagement Story

Pictures: Patricia, Elder Brenchley, and I at the church. Elder is one of the Elders that taught Patricia (other was Elder May).

Sunrise photos from Miami Beach

The news is finally completely out and entirely official: Patricia and I are engaged. I know that this does not come as a shock to most of you or all of you for quite some time, but nonetheless it is official. Actually it was official with a ring on the 22^nd of February, but I just took some time to post an update on my blog.

Engagement Story

As a continuation from the previous entry about how we met, I’ll talk about how we got engaged. When we started dating, we both had no intentions of talking about marriage or getting married so early in our relationship. We discussed marriage from an intellectual point of view (i.e. what we thought about marriage). However, as we spent all day together, we had a long time to talk. Over a long period of dating, our conversations about marriage very slowly evolved from an intellectual discussion on the relative merits of the institution of marriage to about the possibility of us getting married. This was a long drawn out process of many long discussions over an enormous time period of serious dating … well actually one month.

I know that that it sounds really quick. I was always rather disgusted by those you start talking about marriage so quickly and loved to make fun of them. Well I guess things change when you find the right one.

We discussed how we were going to go about getting married over the next two months when we realized that we better start planning something if we wanted anything to happen. We decided to get married at the end of the year before the sealing, but we did not feel this was right or possible because of school. Miguel, Patricia’s father, did not wanted Patricia to get married so soon. He was not so sure about the idea of his little girl marrying someone that he did not know, from another country, and so soon. Well we still felt that we should get married in the summer, even though that looked impossible. I asked him for permission to marry his daughter, and we had a long talk about marriage and life. I really like her father. He is definitely a good man. After our talk he was a lot more comfortable about the idea of the marriage and said that we could get married in the summer if we were so inclined. That was exactly what we wanted to hear, so planning went from a December wedding to a July wedding.

Now that wedding planning was in full swing, here came the 1001 wedding plans. The wedding was going to be in Brazil, but we did not know if that was possible, so it was moved to the US. The wedding location changed from Yuma to San Diego to Salt Lake where it stayed temporarily. Then finally back to Brazil after we figured out how to bypass the whole legal mess called Brazilian bureaucracy. With that solved thanks to both Joe and Miguel, we finally settled on a Brazilian wedding in Patricia’s hometown Botucatu. This meant that we needed to find a place and talk to the branch president down there and everything.

Of course, you are all probably wondering why I am already talking about all the wedding plans, though I have yet to talk about how we got engaged officially. Well, there is a good reason for that - it had not happened yet! Patricia does not like to sit still taking it easy, so she was in full swing in the wedding planning though we were not officially engaged. I was willing to take things easy for a little while longer. Of course after I talked to her dad, Patricia got really antsy about getting her ring. She told me one day, “You need to get me my ring because I am getting rather compulsive. The first thing that I think about when I wake up is my ring, I think about my ring all day long, and it is the last thing that I think about when I sleep. I cannot stop thinking about my ring!” At that point I figured I better go get one. Patricia wanted me to go pick the ring, and she said that she would like anything that I bought for her. In other words, she would like whatever I got for her because I, of course, would pick exactly what she wanted, even though what she likes leaves an extremely narrow list of possibilities. Yeah right. I was not about to fall in that trap. I dragged her along with me to look at rings. Of course, she loved every second of it and tried on every ring in the store. By the end of the night, I had a good idea of what she wanted. So the next day, I went out and found a ring.

She always said that she wanted a surprise (hence the reason why she wanted me to pick the ring.) I was buying her ring at the same time that she was buying her dress. She called me up to tell me the wonderful news, and she had the sneaky hunch from the noise in the background that I was in a store buying her ring. Of course, when I saw her later that day she pestered me for several hours to know if I bought her ring. I would not tell because I wanted to make it a surprise. Finally she said over and over that she does not want a surprise, but all she wanted was to know if I got her ring. Finally I gave in and told her that I indeed bought her ring but could not pick it up till the next week. Now she began counting down the days until the day when I would give her the ring. Now she knew that the ring would soon be on her finger, but she then told me that of course I had to make it a surprise because she still wanted a surprise. How on earth was I now supposed to make it a surprise when she knew that I would pick it up Friday night and she would get it that weekend? I told her that the possibility of a surprise was over. She was so sad because she really wanted a surprise. You can’t have your cake and eat it too as the old saying goes. I told her that I was going fishing Saturday instead of helping plan part of the wedding. She was rather upset at my apparent lack of interest in our wedding. I then told that she could fishing with me in the morning. Instead of fishing we went to the beach and watched the sunrise at the same spot where we went on our first real date. As the sun was coming over the horizon, I proposed to her. She loved it. She told all the men in her family that night that they needed to take lessons on how to be romantic from me. Oh boy, I would hate to see these pathetic fools if they can learn how to be romantic from me.

Now everyone at school and church know about our engagement, and some people have given quite impressive responses. Patricia’s good friend nearly hyperventilated from shock as they walked down the street. She screamed when she later saw the ring right as a professor was introducing a visiting professor before his talk. I must say this is quite unexpected for most people at work. Of course, the news did not spread as juicy news normally would at work because this news is too correct and above board. Had I cheated on Patricia or if we had a huge break-up than the news would be out as soon as it happened. Good news is just not as interesting as scandalous news.