Well, it has been almost two years, but the day has finally come.  This is post 100!  You would think most people would want to franticly get a milestone post completed.  If you have a personal site, we all know you are tracking the number of posts, users and comments waiting to hit milestones.  So why did I delay?  I would guess over the last two years I have probably worked on about 30 different posts in an effort to get post 100 competed.  The problem was, in my head I created such huge expectations that my 100th post needed to be something special.  Everything I tried to put together just did not cut it.  As the time frame from post 99 grew bigger, it got harder to put together a post that was not just a giant synopsis of what has been going on and that did not seem very special.  I needed something big and something current.

So what topic did I finally come up with for post 100?  Today marks 6 months until the wedding.  If you didn’t know, Cece and I are getting married on October 13th, 2012.  Or as Sandy likes to puts it… “We’re becoming a family!”  We are pretty deep in the planning process but Cece has almost all the details set and we are mostly just finalizing things at this point.  As if planning a wedding wasn’t enough work, we are also planning to put the house on the market next week in an effort to upgrade to a bigger house.  We are going to try and build this time around so if the house sells, we will probably all be packed in to a small apartment for the summer while we are preparing for the wedding and the new house.  This is going to be an interesting summer!

Cece's Engagement Ring

Last spring, Cece and I made a couple window shopping trips to look to for engagement rings.  Being the kind of person that knows what he wants… I wanted to make sure Cece was getting what she wanted.  Luckily, she fell in love with the setting pretty much as soon as she saw it.  Step one, complete!  After that, we went back and looked at the diamond options.  Picking out a diamond is a very difficult task since the price range is so broad and well, most of the flaws are not even noticeable to the human eye.  Luckily, Cece fell in love with a specific cut that actually is pretty rare.  This gave me enough time to go back and compare some of the options on my own.  When it was all said and done, I was pretty sure she wanted the rare cut.  Step two, complete!  Then all I had to do was come up with a way to propose and we all know I don’t like drawing attention to myself so the typical “propose in front of people” idea was definitely out.  Kent and Laurie had just had their wedding at the Sunken Gardens in mid-October and everything was still pretty at the time.  John and Chelsea offered to have Sandy come over to practice soccer for the evening on a Friday (October 28th, 2011).  Luckily, I had a new camera lens arrive that week from Amazon… which wrapped my whole story up in to a neat little package.  The plan was drop Sandy off and then head to Sunken Gardens to test out my new lens and then go out for dinner.  Step three, complete!  We had to be quick and stay on schedule since the sun was setting so early.  I didn’t plan for Boo at the Zoo, so there was a major delay to get to the Sunken Gardens by kids running around in Halloween costumes.  We sat on the three block stretch in front of the Zoo for about 10 minutes watching the sun fall lower and lower in the sky.  We finally made it to the Sunken Gardens with just enough light to get a few shots and that was about it.  As we walked up, I was a bit in awe because all the beautiful flowers had been ripped out for the winter.  At this point I figured the ring had fallen out of my pocket or something because nothing was going as planned.  We walked around a bit and then I had Cece sit down on the bench to take some pictures.  Once she was all posed, I walked up with the ring in hand… and completely fumbled through what I was planning to say.  Honestly, I do not remember everything I actually said… but it must have been good because she said yes and she was actually completely surprised.  I assumed when I was the one to find a sitter for Sandy that I was giving away a giant clue, but it all worked out in the end.

This brings post 100 to a close.  Obviously the rest of the year is going to give me a lot of content to write about… hopefully I can find time to post it.