At the end of my sophomore year of college, my two best friends at college began looking on Yahoo personals for dates to keep them occupied during the summer. After a few days of hearing about their online adventures and the dates they were beginning to plan, I decided to check out the pages to make sure they weren't getting into too much trouble, never intending to actually answer an ad.

           Or at least I didn't until I read Chris's ad. I had read a number of ads before I came to one that sounded as if I could have written it, and the person who wrote it had listed similar interests to mine. Giving in to curiosity, I answered the ad. Later that evening, after posting my own ad at the insistence of my friends, I got a response from Chris, who apparently was about to respond my ad when he realized I had already responded to his.

           We exchanged emails for only four days before meeting at Shakabra Java, a local coffee shop, and rarely spent a day apart for the rest of the summer. During this time, we continued to discover uncanny similarities between our lives and even our families. To name a few of these, both of our fathers are ministers (and now they will both be officiating at our wedding), we both love cooking and photography (we soon discovered that we had exactly the same model camera), I was born on Valentine's Day and he was born on St. Patrick's Day, we both are computer geeks, and our favorite color is blue, and so are most of our possessions, including my sapphire engagement ring. However, we also have enough differences that we are able to introduce each other to new things.

           In the fall, Chris went off to live in Chicago to get his masters degree at the University of Chicago, while I stayed at home in Washington for my junior year at the University of Puget Sound. Since both of us are computer geeks, we stayed in touch with email, ICQ, and online voice and video conferencing. Still, we missed each other terribly.

           During the fall semester, Chris and I were apart the entire time, and by the time I got to go visit him for a month over Christmas break, I was terribly excited to see him. Beyond that, though, for the last month that we were apart, I was obsessed with trying to figure out if he was going to propose. Kelly, one of my bridesmaids who I was living with at the time, got to hear daily updates on my latest theory about this topic. By the time that I got to Chicago, I was pretty much sure he was going to propose on either Christmas or New Year's Eve, being the obvious choices at that time of year.

           Chris, however, managed to surprise me anyway. He proposed the night I got into Chicago on the plane, after having gone through finals week (I had pulled an all-nighter the night before and then had taken a final that morning) and having sat on the runway for over an hour once the plane got to Chicago, since I flew in during the worst snowstorm of that winter. Needless to say, I was absolutely exhausted. We got back to his apartment, he gave me the 7-step tour (it was pretty small), and soon I was falling asleep as we talked. Then, he started telling me that he had been looking at engagement rings, and we talked about it for awhile, and he finally asked me, "Will you marry me someday?" Not thinking that this was the official, once-in-a-lifetime type of proposal, I said, "Sure, I'll marry you, someday." We kissed and hugged, of course, but I soon feel entirely asleep. It wasn't until the next day, when Chris asked me when we were going to tell our parents, that I realized that we were really, truly engaged.

           We spent the next few days shopping for rings online, and ended up picking out the same ring that Chris had originally chosen, but he hadn't gotten it because he hadn't been able to subtly get me to tell him my ring size and he had wanted to be sure that I liked the ring he got me the best. Also, he wasn't sure if I would go for having a sapphire as the main stone, but I thought it was a good idea. We ordered the ring from a wonderful jeweler that we found on the internet that did custom work, and it came two days before I had to leave to go back to school. Chris went to get the mail, and came back in, went down on one knee, and held up the ring as he asked me to marry him again. Even though we had been engaged for a month, I was practically speechless because the ring was so gorgeous. The jeweler had managed to find a sapphire for the ring that changes color from a light lavender to a gray ocean blue to a deep blue.

           I visited Chris three times in Chicago, and at the end of the final visit, we rode home to Seattle together on the train with all of our stuff. We spent the past year in Tacoma while I finished up at UPS, and now we are in Seattle, getting ready for the wedding to finally happen on July 27th! After the wedding, we will be flying to Costa Rica for our honeymoon, and then Chris will return to work while I look for a job and start school at the Seattle Art Institute in their Baking and Pastry program.