Update

It will only take looking at the date of my last blog post, the date of this post, and some rudimentary applied math skills to realize my blog has been sorely neglected. Since I lasted updated my blog I have been dating Jennifer. The time needed to allow a relationship to mature is significant and I've been happily investing it for the past four months. True, there haven't been a lot of comics produced during that period but I consider being currently engaged to an amazing woman I love more than anything well worth the hiatus. 

Our first date was on April 22. Since then we've spent almost every day together and have decided we'd like to continue doing so for the rest of our lives. We're to be wed in the Boston temple on November 18. I've never liked having a birthday or celebrating it, and this is probably the closest thing I can do to erasing it forever so many thanks for that Jennifer.

 A lot of people have asked how I proposed so in the interest of efficiency I'll be henceforth referring them to this post. I asked Jennifer to marry me this past Friday. I'd known when and where I wanted to propose for the last month or so. By where I first asked Jennifer to be my girlfriend there is a large oak tree. I bought and hung around 600 feet of Christmas lights in its lower branches, making a kind of canopy of light. I had wanted to string lights all the way up the tree originally, but after falling out of the tree once I settled on a less potentially paralyzing plan. I had the lights hooked up to a generator two hundred feet of extension cord away and a little device that would allow me to turn everything on with a clicker I kept in my pocket. 

this tree is huge. seriously. it's like 70 feet tall and the trunk is at least 5 feet thick.

 

the field where the tree is located

The evening started with a trip to the Cobleskill Sunshine Fair. Friday night was demolition derby night at the fair and I was really excited to go see cars run into each other. Jennifer said she was excited as well, but I'm pretty sure she was just saying that to make me happy. I had planned on going to the fair for an hour or so in the late afternoon and then getting to the tree at dusk, but Jennifer showing up 45 minutes early forced me to find some filler time. So we ended up walking around the fairgrounds, looking at every exhibit and then reading the placard about every exhibit. It was really boring (like they had collections of Shirley Temple memorabilia and washing machines from the 19th century on display), and most of the produce and food had spoiled and began to mold (the fair is three weeks long and Friday was the second to last day).  

Gratefully it began to darken and we left and headed for the area where the tree was. I'd been lying to Jennifer for the past month, telling her about a project for the Pumpkin Patch I'd been working on in an adjacent field. I wanted the proposal to be a surprise, but I couldn't think of a good reason I'd be driving her off into an empty field alone and in the dark other than a proposal (or maybe murder) so I rigged this whole elaborate story about some satellite pumpkin stand she needed to see.

We arrived at the tree where I had Jennifer's favorite dinner waiting in a cooler by a table I had set up earlier. I clicked on the lights and we ate by the tire swing I had hung back on the date when I asked Jennifer if she would be my girlfriend. After we had finished, I took a knee and this time asked Jennifer if she would be my wife. She accepted, and we couldn't be happier together.