How This All Happened

Welcome to Ryan and Katy's engagement blog. We thought it would be nice to have an easy place for our friends to keep up with our progress and planning, etc. I peremptorily vetoed use of the ubiquitous theknot.com, in favor of something more do-it-yourself, so here you are.

So that you will all have something nice to read when you come and visit our engagement blog in its early days, before any substantial planning occurs, and the wedding stress accumulates, I thought I'd tell the story, just briefly, of how the engagement itself came to be. So here goes.

It may be wrong to warn you this way, but there's very little suspense in this story. For at least a year before the "proposal" itself, Katy and I were privately talking about our wedding as a foregone conclusion. I know it's not the way that stories are canonically told, but you can't understand even the first part of all this if you think I was trying to surprise her. So I preface it this way.

Anyway, the day of my office's 2008 Christmas party, I came home from work and said that at the mall in Dallas there was a jewelry store with nicer rings than what we could find in north Louisiana, and I asked if Katy would like to go have a look. She said yes, and so in the morning we hopped in the Jetta, fueled up on Starbucks, and made the three-hour drive to the Galleria.

I could write a sizeable entry just regarding the sights and sounds of the Galleria, but for now it's enough to say that we were helped by a very nice saleswoman named Karen. Katy figured out the cut of stone that she liked the best. Karen gave us her card, and we came home to mull it over some more, and to figure out when was the right time to make the next move. Katy was very happy.

The time for the next move was Saturday, March 14, 2009. At the end of February, I had sent an email to Karen letting her know the kinds of rings we wanted to see, and arranging for a showing. Katy made a reservation at the Westin hotel attached to the Galleria. A hotel inside of the mall? Yes, this is the high life. We headed back for Dallas, this time without the coffee, because we've both been counterintuitively high-functioning since giving up caffeine for New Year's.

All the rings were beautiful, but we didn't have a lot of trouble choosing the one we liked best. After I bought it, we checked into the hotel—which was fancy, see below:


I sat there reading for a while, before we decided we could stand to do some more shopping, provided it was of the window- variety, as my pockets had all of a sudden become a good deal lighter. Because I wasn't going to leave the ring unattended in the room, Katy sat down beside me in the above-pictured window seat, and I put the ring on her finger, and we were engaged.

Is this next bit tacky? You can't all see the ring in person, at least not right now, and at least a sizeable minority of you must be chomping at the bit for it by now. I'm not feeling gaudy posting these below, because they evoke the sufficient level of irony. Katy took these the Monday after we returned from Dallas. Enjoy:



After the proposal itself, we hiked the mall some more, and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant overlooking an ice skating rink (Lap. Of. Luxury.) We ordered two glasses of red wine, whereupon the waiter informed us that because we were in a "dry area," we would have to join the restaurant's "private club" in order to be served alcohol. This, by the way, is the kind of legal reasoning that no amount of law school can prepare you for. I happily complied, jotting down my name and email address on the furnished "membership application." Two glasses of Cabernet speedily appeared.

In the morning, we took a side trip to the IKEA of North Dallas before heading back to Shreveport. I could live happily til the end of my days in the IKEA showroom. If I ever missed the outside world, I would step out on my front porch, gaze back at the below-pictured blue and yellow monstrosity, and know that I was in the right place, and then I would saunter back inside to revel in elegant, Swedish utilitarianism. We left without purchasing anything (miraculously), but with a list of the tables, chairs, dishes, and bookcases that we most coveted.


IKEA is the EPCOT of home decor, and I say this not as a hater, but as the avowed biggest fan in the world of Spaceship Earth.

So thank you for coming, and reading, and for thinking of us, and for your curiosity about how we're doing. Right now we're doing great.