The Proposal posted by Mike on April 21st

I knew I wanted to ask Holly to marry me for a long time, and we even talked about it occasionally. I wanted it to be a surprise, but we both work at home, so we’re always together, and sneaking out to buy a ring wasn’t easy. Eventually I decided we should just look together, and after a while we ended up at Dearborn Jewelers in Plymouth. It didn’t take long to find the perfect setting there. It took a bit longer to find the right diamond, but eventually they found us a beautiful Canadian stone.

When the ring was ready I managed to sneak out and pick it up while Holly was still asleep. I didn’t really have a plan for proposing—just a bunch of scattered ideas and no way to pull any of them together without raising suspicion. (Most of them involved robots.) The next morning I snuck out again to call her father and ask for his blessing. Thankfully he said yes (though I’m sure he would have preferred to hear from me much sooner). Holly was up when I came back—she didn’t really buy my cover story that I just went for a walk, but I think I managed to convince her that I didn’t actually have the ring yet.

That night, March 28th, 2009, she told me about something called Earth Hour. Basically everyone turns off their lights for an hour to fight global warming. They kinda ruin the whole idea by encouraging everyone to blog and make videos of it though, so we decided to go all out and turn off everything. When 8:30 hit, I shut down our computers and unplugged everything. Holly lit candles and we sat down at the living room table for a game of Scrabble. Holly won, 236 to 238. Close game!

(The “I” in the bottom-left corner was Holly’s one leftover tile.)

When she went to the bathroom I snuck over to grab the ring and shoved it under the futon. After the game we were sitting together on the floor and I had my arms around her. I reached over (a bit awkwardly) to grab the ring box, opened it, and asked her to marry me.

She said, “hmm… I’ll have to think about that.” Very funny, Holly. Then she said “yes.” I took out the ring and slid it on her finger.

Then we took photos, posted about it on Twitter, and updated our Facebook status. Nerds forever ♥