we're engaged!

the ring!

eric and i got engaged on friday!

i need to preface this story with a review of our first date. on our first date, we went to see where the wild things are the imax next to campus. then we walked down to the amy's ice cream (a local ice cream place) on 6th street. after ice cream we walked to zilker park. most of the park was fenced off due to a recent music festival, so we sat on the swings by barton springs and talked for a long while. then we walked back to my house (this totaling at least 6 miles of walking for the evening) and sat in my room looking at pictures and talking until the wee hours of the morning. it was awesome.

so, fast forward to the present. friday night after work we went out to dinner. this was nothing out of the ordinary. we went to try zocalo which is a mexican restaurant on west lynn in the clarksville neighborhood of austin, continuing in our quest to try lots of restaurants in austin. after dinner we drove around the neighborhood for a few minutes to see if there were any cute looking houses for rent (we found one but it was about twice as much as either of really wanted to pay for it).

then we headed over to amy's and got ice cream (mango ice, which is non-dairy, is awesome by the way). next we drove over to zilker park and parked by barton springs. we walked into the middle of the fields and sat watching the stars (or clouds covering the stars) for a bit. it was kind of late so we decided to head back towards the car that and eric had mentioned needing to read me his poem. eric writing poetry is also not out of the ordinary. we will even text to each other in verse. on our way back to the car, we stopped by the swings on the playground and talked for awhile longer. there was a father racing up the slides with his daughter which was pretty amusing to watch. eric said again that he wanted to read me his poem and suggested we walk up to the hill. so we walked up the hill and sat on the curb in one of the parking lots underneath a street light.

i'm not sure whether it was his words or my allergies that brought tears in my eyes (i'm allergic to the grass in texas, just here, no where else, seriously), but his poem was beautiful. eric had been working on it for the last 5 months, adding to it as funny or memorable things happened. it is several pages long. at the start of the last the last stanza of the poem he pulls out a ring and the final line of the poem was, trish mcandrew, will you marry me?

side view

and of course i said yes! i have known i wanted to marry him from the first time we went out.

now here's the rather amusing part. thursday night at about 11:30p i am woken up by my phone beeping. i check my phone and eric has sent me two text messages and left me a voicemail saying that what i do i should delete the email he just sent me. of course this means i need to open my email immediately and see what he's talking about. i check my email and there are three emails from his that say in the header, delete all previous emails from me tonight! don't even both opening them! so i call eric and ask what is up because he's normally not bent out of shape like this. he explains that i just need to delete everything, that he was talking to a friend about somethings, that its time sensitive and he can tell me at the beginning of the week, but that for now, i just had to delete everything without opening. so i do. but now i'm very suspicious.

well, after eric proposes he tells me that he had been talking to his friend anamae on the phone on thursday night and had told her he'd send her a picture of the ring. he went to send the email and just typed my name in and hit send without thinking about it. realizing what he'd done, he started calling, texting and emailing me to get me to not open the email...the email had contained a picture of him holding the ring up to his webcam so anamae could see the ring. fortunately, the picture was blurry and wouldn't have shown me what it looked like specifically anyway, but i didn't even know he had a ring (though i did know he'd asked my dad for permission when we were in san francisco over spring break), so it would have kind of put a damper on the surprise. at least we could laugh about it afterward!

the ring itself is a circular diamond set in a white gold ring. if you look at it from the top, it looks like a plain shiny silver bands with a circular diamond, but if you look at it from the side, the part holding the diamond is sort of woven. its beautiful. eric has great taste. i will try to post a picture or two of it this evening.

we are planning on getting married sometime in late july or august in austin (before school starts). we have to find a location and such and then we'll start with all the other details. its going to be a crazy next few months! i'm so excited!