For those of you who don’t read liz4jc4ever‘s journal, we are now engaged. 
There have been many requests for “the story”, so here it goes:
This has been in the works since late July, which Liz knew … but didn’t know how fast it progressed because I kept her in the dark about how the shopping was going. beldurnik had put me in contact with Carl (bigdaddy00), who works at Wedding Day Diamonds in the Mall of America. I made several extra trips to visit Carl to keep her guessing as to when I might ask her. The only thing I would concede is that it would happen before Thanksgiving (U.S.).
The first trip happened the latter part of July … took a day off and went over there. We figured out basically what I wanted then, including picking out the size of the center stone. I also indicated I wanted two trillian cut sidestones. We more or less picked out a setting for the stones too. Liz didn’t really have any part in designing the ring, particularly since for fun, we had each gone to adiamondisforever.com and designed rings on our own last spring, and ended up designing rings that were very similar (hers had heart-cut side stones, mine had trillian … or vice-versa?). I figured since I managed that, I could handle shopping on my own because we had very similar thoughts. At the first visit, Carl had a nice center stone, but I can’t recall if it was quite the right size … he then had to have his boss find the stones and he would get back to me.
So, the beginning of the second week of August, Carl called me up at work and told me that they had found some stones, but if I wanted the ring on the 20th, they had to move on it “yesterday”. I made the down payment over the phone but kept making some Friday trips to the Mall just to keep Liz thinking that I was still shopping and finalizing things. Over the following two weekends, we had trips down to DeForest (where she’s from) for various reasons. Being somewhat chivalrous/traditional, on our first trip I asked her mother for permission to propose and asked her father on the second trip. They both gave their blessing.
We had been planning a trip for Canada to visit a friend of mine and relax some, which we had scheduled for the 3rd weekend in August. As things worked out, Liz had something she wanted to do that Friday morning (I had thought work … turned out to be helping a friend move). So, while she was doing that … I ran some “errands” to “finalize the order” (she knew I was shopping so this is what I told her). I went over to the Mall after helping her some in the morning … picked up the ring … then did some running around to try and find some foam because I wanted to hide it in a small round earplug container I had (so she wouldn’t suspect I had the ring on me). I couldn’t find the foam … so just had to hide the box in the bottom of my laptop pack (since I was bringing that with to Canada). The trip to Canada was fairly uneventful.
Saturday morning I took Liz out to Kekabeka Falls because I wanted to hike down to the “little falls” … which is also in the park. It’s about an hour and a half round trip hike. We got to the main falls and it was awesome … much better than the last time she saw it (at that point they apparently had some dam gates closed and there wasn’t a lot of water). We went across the bridge to the other side to the trail along the top of the canyon (which at one point connects up with the trail to the little falls) and there was a sign on the map/description board indicating that due to recent storms that downed some trees, the trail to the little falls was closed. I did a pretty good job of hiding my disappointment … said a mild bad word but not much else about it. I had planned on proposing there, but of course now I couldn’t. So, we started walking around the upper trail that makes a loop past some nice lookout spots and I debated what to do. There are several lookouts that look out over the canyon along this loop that we were on … we stopped at one and I decided to go for it.
I told Liz to sit down on the bench because I had a question for her. She sat down and I told her to close her eyes. I got down on one knee .,.. dug the box out of my pocket (which I had transferred from the laptop bag to my coat pocket when she was in another room reading a book earlier that morning). I opened the box and told her to open her eyes. She did of course … and was speechless for about 10 seconds, before reminding me that I had a question for her. I asked “Elizabeth Irene Neppl, will you marry me?”
Of course she said “yes”, so I turned the box to take the ring and put it on her finger … and noticed that I had presented the box upside down. Thank fully it didn’t make a huge difference the way the box is set up but it was still funny. I put the ring on her finger and we kissed and hugged. After walking a bit farther on the trail, she decided that any long-distance and/or roaming charges on her cell phone were worthwhile and she called her parents.
On the drive back to where we were staying, she indicated she thought her face would probably be sore by the end of the day, which of course made me happy.
There has been no date set yet because we need to talk to our pastor about it first. Be assured that it will be posted when known, but we’re shooting for July 2005.
