All in all, it was a good way to finish up the “first” day.  We didn’t get to bed until about 9am Seattle time, but it served the dual purpose of (1) resetting our clocks to Tokyo time, and (2) allowing me to sing “Jack and Diane” in what was apparently the same karaoke spot where this happened:

So that’s good.

The next morning, we had this for breakfast at Yoshinoya:

Only $4. Yes, please.

That got us some good mojo for heading to Tokyu Hands, only to discover that it didn’t open until 10am.  So we hung out at Starbucks for a few minutes (featuring a surprisingly unhorrible vanilla latte) while we waited for the store to open.  Lots of foreigners there.  Shocking, I know.

After a relatively reserved Tokyu Hands shopping spree (no one wanted to carry around a bunch of purchases for the rest of the day), we decided to head to Akihabara.  But again, since we didn’t want to make a bunch of purchases and then have to carry them around for the rest of the day, we mostly did some window shopping.  We were on the lookout for a cat cafe, but after finally tracking one down, the available cats didn’t look nearly as adorable and excited as the ones advertised at the one we had seen in Shinjuku the night before.

And speaking of adorable and excited, Virginia wanted our next trip to be to a maid cafe.  Seems like Akihabara would be a good place for that, right?  Let me tell you that 30 minutes in one of those places is enough to last a lifetime.  I think my ears are still ringing from the shouting and the arm-waving and the heart-making-with-hands.  They seemed a little disappointed that we only got one beer each before getting the hell out of there, but I imagine they’ll get over it.

On our way back to the station, we saw a huge Left 4 Dead 2 setup, with a line snaking around a little miniature warehouse.  Turns out that EA Japan was doing a promotion where you could play the game for a few minutes, then get a cell phone charm and T-shirt.  Apparently Left 4 Dead is crazy popular in Japan — when we looked, it was the #6 best-selling game on the charts for the week, and the only Xbox 360 game on that list.  Turns out that Japan likes zombies.  Who knew?  Other than Capcom, I mean.

Soon after, we met up with two of Scott’s old friends and headed to Shibuya — our first time there this trip.  We had some drinks at an Irish pub (featuring some dangerously delicious La Fin du Monde), followed by a nice walk through a surprisingly vertical stretch of Shibuya.  Just an awesome area.  We puttered around at Loft for an hour or so, where I fell in love with about twenty clocks — turns out Japan has got this whole “technology” thing figured out.

After that, it was dinner at Gonpachi.  Easily the best meal I’ve had this trip, and maybe better than everything last time, including a surprisingly awesome Caesar Salad.  Who knew?

The ladies were ready for bed by then, so the four guys headed for Shinjuku and some potentially great game-friendly bars.  Unfortunately, both 8-bit Cafe and 16 Shots were unavailable — the former due to a private party and the latter due to it being almost as tiny (and just as busy) than our eventual destination.

I had been to Rock Bar Mother the last time I was in Tokyo, but this time was simply transcendent.  For those who don’t know, it’s a tiny-ass basement bar that only seats about 10 people comfortably.  When you order your drink, you also get to pick the song you want to hear, from a rather huge collection — there are shelves full of CD’s covering the entire back wall.

This time, my musical mojo was in full effect.  Since it’s Rock Bar Mother and not Indie Bar Mother, I started off with a blast from the past:

Ah, good times.  From there, it was a steady parade of awesome, featuring Faith No More, Skid Row (!), Anthrax, and many others that I don’t really remember because there was a lot of Chimay and shots and the like.

By the time we staggered up the stairs and out of the bar, it was almost 2 in the morning.  Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but it was only when I got into the elevator of the hotel that I realized that I had no room key — and that Virginia had been asleep for hours.

After ten minutes or so of fruitlessly ringing the doorbell (which apparently sounds like a pleasant, yet distant elevator bell) and lightly knocking so as to not wake neighbors, I steeled myself enough to travel to the front desk to ask for another key.

I suppose I could have started with “sumimasen… eigo ga wakarimasu ka?”, but it was late, and it never occurred to me to do anything but hope that my Japanese synapses were firing correctly enough to get a new room key without getting arrested.  So drunk, sweaty, and exhausted, I stammered enough “heya” and “motte imasen” and “arigato gozaimasu” to get two new ones without incident.  Success!

So day 2 went pretty well.  I’m writing this during a break in the action of day 3, so hopefully by this time tomorrow you can read about our traumatic time at The Lockup.  Unless I have a heart attack while I’m eating my asparagus.  For now, VA and I are headed (sans escort!) to a local drugstore before dinner.

またね！

Update: One thing I forgot to mention — after I chose “777″ by Danzig (and unfortunately left before it was played), the bartendress at Rock Bar Mother started shaping her hair into a Misfits devil horn.

This picture was far too difficult to find.

So awesome.

And man, that is a long-ass flight. 10 1/2 hours from Seattle to Tokyo. Luckily, we brought enough electronic devices to keep ourselves busy for three flights.

The only setback thus far has been the gentleman who sat two seats in front of us, sporting what appeared to be a custom-made satin jacket with Pepe Le Pew on the back, the words “The Real Stinker” under the exaggeratedly French skunk.

Assuming the odors present aboard the plane were coming from where I thought they were coming from, it was the most honest satin jacket to feature an obsolete Parisian anthropomorphized cartoon rodent that I’ve ever encountered. But the trip is young, I suppose.

Soon, we shall deplane and then begin phase two of the trip -making our way through Customs, acquiring our Japan Rail Passes, taking the train to Shinjuku, checking in to our hotel, and undertaking the first of what I assume will be many trips to an izakaya in the next eleven days.

またね！

Even with the disappointment of my greatest work never seeing the light of day (except for being a significant part of the portfolio I show off when I’m between jobs), it was a magical few weeks.  Hearing professional actors act out the scenes I wrote was more satisfying than I had even thought possible.

However, there were also several out-of-studio moments that were memorable.  Going out for drinks with Troy Baker and Yuri Lowenthal was definitely a highlight.  They were as great outside of the studio as they were in it — and having someone with a résumé like Yuri’s say unprompted how great my script was stuck with me long after the sting of leaving GPG faded.

Anyway, meeting the voice actors was definitely a good time – but it wasn’t just limited to chatting up the people who were reading for Space Siege.  Occasionally, I got to talk to some other actors as well.  One guy in particular was at PCB reading for one of the Command & Conquer games, doing a thick Russian accent just like the one he did for years on Six Feet Under: Ed O’Ross.

The man himself. This was taken at the premiere of Curious George, apparently.

This was definitely one of the high points of the trip for me.  Ed went out for a smoke break after his session and I joined him for a bit.  He obviously had no idea who I was, but the reverse was definitely not true; I was having trouble restraining myself from quoting lines from Six Feet Under and Lethal Weapon at him.  Somehow, I managed.  Which was a good thing, because over the next 15 minutes, Ed exemplified the old, salty character actor in a way that I can’t recreate.

He talked for a while about how messed up Hollywood was, and about how he was happy to be doing what he was doing, and so on.  It made me wish that I had a tape recorder so I could be his biographer.  He was such a classy guy, with a hint of “I just don’t give a shit, I’m making a living” attitude.  Awesome.

The kicker, though, was when he talked about what he was doing lately.  Obviously doing lines for a forgettable RTS isn’t where everyone dreams they’ll end up, but the real kicker was what he’d turned down in order to have more time to do it.

It seems that he was offered a role on Heroes a few months prior, but only if he would do a thick Russian accent for the role.  I guess the casting director had seen Ed do his thing as “Nikolai” on Six Feet Under, and figured he’d be perfect for a minor part in that horrible, horrible show.  Ed turned it down for reasons that he shared with me in confidence — and if you met him in person, you’d honor his wishes, too.

At the time, I thought that while Ed had certainly earned the right to turn down whatever he wanted, he had made a mistake turning down a role on Heroes.  After all, a slight misstep aside in the first season’s finale, Heroes was one of the  shows that brought NBC back from the dead.  Little did I know that two years later, the show would be as bad as anything on TV.  Well played, Ed!

Anyway, I don’t really have a point to this story — I only bring it up because I came home tonight from hanging out with friends and found the lovely Virginia watching an old episode of Six Feet Under, with Ed featured prominently.  It caused all these memories to come flooding back, and I thought I’d share them with you.

Plus, who doesn’t love Lethal Weapon references?

Incidentally, sorry I haven’t been very active here lately.  Generally, if I have something to share with the world, it’s reduced to either 140 characters (http://twitter.com/gkr), 160 (http://facebook.com/grant.k.roberts), or, well, a lot more (http://games.grantroberts.com).

I always thought she was kinda hot, if a little mannish. I was in the minority.

But you know as well as I do that sometimes, commercials can be brilliant.  This Volkswagen ad from a few years ago, for instance — featuring 24’s Nina Myers!  Everyone remembers this one.  It was especially fascinating for me because I thought I was the only person who always watched out for things like turn signals and windshield wipers syncing up with whatever I was listening to in the car.  In my life, it’s only happened twice.

Anyway, it’s with a conflicted heart that I bring up a recent ad for Toyota’s Prius.  On the surface, I love it — a visually striking ad that encourages people to buy hybrids.  Yes, please.

However, it’s the text at the bottom of the screen that I’m wondering about:

“Dramatization.”

Only in Japan, as they say.

Oh, really?  This scene doesn’t actually happen when I’m driving my Prius around the world?  There aren’t thousands of people dressed like the incredibly creepy Tingle from the Zelda series shadowing me wherever I drive?  This isn’t real life?  Great, thanks for clearing that up.

I’ve often wondered what necessitates these little warnings at the bottom of the screen during advertisements.  Sure, most of them are there so kids won’t try crashing through a wall like the Kool-Aid man, or drivers won’t try to take their suburban curves at 130mph.  But things like “dramatization”?  Where does that come from?  Did someone, somewhere get sued for painting a picture of something glorious in a commercial that never panned out?  Like, did Timmy starve a rabbit to death instead of feeding it his Trix cereal?  Did scores of first-time Macintosh buyers expect the wrong thing after seeing the classic “1984″ ad?

Just curious.

In the RSS reader I use (FeedDemon), there are occasionally small contextual ads placed at the bottom of posts. For instance, if Newt Gingrich is mentioned in the story (as is far too often the case lately) , then I’ll get a lovely image of his smiling visage with the message “FREE NEWT!”, imploring me to subscribe to his weekly newsletter.

I have to say that I would rather have my ass kicked by a gorilla than read more than a sentence of said newsletter.  But I trigress.

One of the other sites I subscribe to is former civil rights litigator Glenn Greenwald, whose essays are always well-written, well-researched, and incredibly long — so long that it usually takes me three or four visits to reasonably finish them.  That means that the Google ad that appears at the bottom of the post will rotate each time.

A few weeks ago, I saw a logo in the ad at the bottom of Greenwald’s post that was so incredibly amateurish, so misguided, that I was rendered speechless.  I wanted to post it for your viewing pleasure, but by the time I had the spare moments to grab an image of it, the ad had changed — and I didn’t see it again.

Until this morning.

Ladies and gentlemen (well, probably “lady and gentleman” at this point, with how infrequently I’ve updated), I give you… the TEXAS BAR WATCH.

The best part is that this image appears nowhere on the (pretty professional) web site that it’s advertising. I picture a ruddy-faced Texas lawyer with a cowboy hat and a bolo tie, waiting for his phone to ring, idly noodling around in his copy of Photoshop 3… until four weeks later, the logo for the Texas Bar Watch is born.

Although honestly, it looks better than my web site, so maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

This is mostly because most of my free time has either been spent doing pro bono work for web sites, or playing several entertaining video games.

For the most part, my writings, such as they are, can be found on Facebook or Twitter.

I’ve also fallen in hate with the general look of my web site (grey, orange, blue, and green — what could possibly go wrong?), and am going to redo it now that I’m done with the bulk of work on other people’s web sites.

I’ll be back soon.

However, no matter who I’m playing, when I’m playing my family I know that I have a pretty good chance of being competitive. This has had an unfortunate side effect of boosting my Scrabble ego to the point where I feel like I’m invincible. Whenever I play against pretty much anyone, I think that I’m going to win, and more often than not, I do.

I’m certainly not bragging about this. Just because I’m good at coming up with words that I can make from the current combination of seven letters in front of me, doesn’t make me some kind of genius. On the contrary — my lack of common sense in some crucial areas is enough to knock me down a few pegs whenever I’m feeling particularly witty.

Anyway, when I picked up Scrabble for my PSP the other day, I was feeling pretty confident. I figured I’d be able select a difficulty level and have it range from Jason to Dave. Three hundred points, here I come! Triple word score, you’re all mine!

So I tried it on medium difficulty at first, thinking that that would be a pretty easy path to victory while refreshing my Scrabble skills. I breezed to a win pretty easily — but I noticed that even on medium difficulty, the computer used a lot of what I call “Scrabble words” — by which I mean words that only exist in the world of Scrabble. Dave is a big proponent of Scrabble words, and usually uses them to achieve victory.

We’re talking words like “AA”, “UT”, “QUA”, and others like it. I was naïve enough to think that I had encountered most of them, but I was in for a rather rude awakening when I started on the higher difficulty levels.

The last game I played was against three computer opponents, each of which I set to the highest difficulty. I was encouraged when the first computer player turned in his tiles and lost a turn when he was first up — this was going to be easy! I was up next and used “LITHE” — not bad, considering my choices. For this I received a paltry 18 points, but at least I used my “H”.

The next computer player put me firmly in my place. He spelled the word “HOMINIAN”, which I imagine I’m not alone in saying I’ve never heard of. He received a “bingo” for this which, if you’re not familiar with Scrabble, is a term for the 50 point bonus you get when you use all seven letters in one turn. My “H” felt like it had been abused. I believe that he received 76 points for this, although without the atrocity in front of me I can’t be too sure.

I didn’t have much time to be shocked, because the next computer player quickly followed up. He used the word “IONIUMS” which, combined with his own “bingo” and the triple word score that he somehow was able to utilize on the third turn of the game, scored him something like 86 points. The next computer player was more gentle, only putting up 30 points to my 18. At this point, I was ready to call it a day.

I guess I’m grateful that I don’t have any biophysicists or nuclear engineers in my family, or I’d be pretty demoralized by the time I left my grandparents’ house in December.

For now, I think I’m going to just stick to playing Scrabble against people I know — or, more precisely, people who don’t use the words “ionium” or “hominian” in everyday conversation.

——

Now, as an aside, I know that I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while. This is especially embarrassing after I just wrote a blog post a few months ago saying how I was going to write a lot more blog posts in the near future. My excuses this time are just as valid as they were last time, if a little different. So what made me write one today? Well, we have a new toy in our apartment. The lovely Virginia is getting the ball rolling on her business, and has taken the additional step of pledging to write a book on the subject.

In order to make writing this book easier, we picked up some voice transcription software. I gave it a test drive yesterday, and was quite pleased with the results — especially once I started training it to recognize when I was using profanity.  (Which I never do, Mom, I swear.)

So after my Scrabble disaster, Virginia suggested that I blog about it. That didn’t seem like the kind of thing that I would ordinarily blog about — I’m usually much more concerned with showing how smart I am in some other way (generally without much success). But I’m sure I’m not the only one who, when presented with a new toy, has to use it as often as possible before growing bored and discarding it. Hence, my first-ever blog post written entirely through voice transcription software.  Enjoy!

I’m tempted to just post this without correcting anything, but even the most advanced voice transcription software doesn’t know how to spell “hominian” or “ioniums” the first time around. Although, to its credit, it did figure them both out after the first two attempts.

So that’s it for now. Look for new blog posts in the immediate future about what kind of sandwich I had for lunch, or how long it took me to drive home from Issaquah to Seattle. Everything is more interesting when it’s run through a speech-to-text filter.

* Cf.

The problem with visiting Southcenter is that we always seem to end up at Outback Steakhouse.  I know, I don’t really understand it either.  We live in Seattle, one of the great centers of cuisine in the country.  Within reasonable walking distance of our apartment, there are probably 50 awesome restaurants.  And yet, every time we get near the airport, we end up sitting in this dismal place, listening to horrible pop music and overhearing couples having breakup fights.

But I’m not here to talk about our attempt at the Bloomin’ Onion diet, alth –

Okay, I have to digress here.  I actually debated mentioning Coldplay in the previous paragraph, because we always end up hearing one of their lesser¹ works during the meal.  But I decided against it — why beat up on Coldplay?  Well, sure enough, as soon as I started typing² the next sentence, this is what I hear.

So anyway.  The Bloomin’ Onion diet.  It’s working out great, let me tell you.  And… okay, that moment’s gone.

In the middle of our meal, a table forms up to the side of us with what looks like a family and their patriarch.  The older gentleman was late arriving to the party, since the wheelchair-accessible ramp was apparently placed oddly in this restaurant.  So he was hard to miss once he made his entrance.  His hair was a bit disheveled, but he generally looked like he was in pretty good shape.

However, a few minutes later, my eyes went to him again, and traveled a few feet down to the back of his wheelchair… to this logo:

It could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

Now, again, I’m not exactly mining new territory when I call into question the naming of companies or their products.  I’m sure one could spend days on the internet being passably entertained by nothing but examples of the phenomenon.  But I’m honestly stumped by the decision to name your company after what is now sort of universally accepted as a pejorative³ for a certain segment of people.  Or at least to keep it that name in this day and age.

Naturally, my mind started to wander to other names they could have possibly chosen, and to the logos I could create in Photoshop.  Fortunately, Virginia talked me out of it.  But once you’ve got a name like “INVACARE”, it’s just a matter of degrees, right?

Then again, maybe there are other, more pressing examples of this situation to rectify first.  One at a time, I guess.

¹ I was going to make another joke about “lesser” being redundant, but when this guy is married to this girl, maybe I should just quit while I’m “ahead”.

² Yes, I brought my laptop with me to Outback.  It was supposed to be so VA and I could work on her new business venture while we waited for our food.

³ Ever have one of those realizations that you’ve been spelling a word wrong for years?  …me neither.

Back at the beginning of 1998, I had just been laid off from my position as a web designer at Erol’s Internet in Springfield, VA.  My relationship with alarm clocks had not yet fully developed at that point in my life, so my second occurrence of tardiness had resulted in termination.

However, I wasn’t on the canvas for long.  I don’t quite remember how I did it, but after a while, I landed a job at Bethesda Softworks as their web designer.

Now, to be honest, I was never really a good web designer in the first place.  I was very good at taking someone else’s idea and making it show up on their web site, but I had (and still have) problems with starting from scratch.  So I supposed I was doomed from the start at Bethesda.

But I didn’t know that yet on my first day there.  It seemed like a pretty cool place — so cool that they immediately put me in the “XL Translab” part of the building.  XL Translab was Bethesda Softworks’ sister company, which mostly did CG.  This meant that there were a bunch of artists, and one fraud of a web designer.

(I did meet Eka for the first time while I was there, although neither of us remembered that until a year after we re-met at Gas Powered Games in ‘06.)

Gleaming the cube

I was already feeling a little intimidated.  My experience as a web guy in the past had basically been “cut up these images and put them in tables so they line up properly”.  And they stuck me with people who are capable of stuff like this?

Come on now.

So one of the first things they did was show me the kind of site they wanted bethsoft.com to be.  Back then, web sites were still trying to find their sea legs, so a lot of companies were trying a lot of things — but the example they showed me was the site for a little game you may have heard of called Unreal.

I wish the Wayback Machine would cooperate and let me show you the horror that awaited visitors to the Unreal.com site in 1998.  But alas, they don’t archive everything.  I can try to approximate it by linking you to these two sites:

http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/1855/cube.html
http://www.tstonramp.com/~gvan/3d/cube.htm

That’s right, they wanted a NAVIGATION CUBE.

(And by the way, I think the fact that the first Google search result for “navigation cube” takes you to a Geocities page tells you all you need to know.)

So why do I bring this up?

Because LG is BRINGING IT BACK, BABY!

…yeah.

One more reason that I don’t miss LG and Verizon.

Now if only my iPhone’s WiFi would start working again…

So as you might imagine, when I realized that I wanted to take the plunge and propose to Virginia, my girlfriend of 2½ years, I knew I had to do something special to live up to the expectations I’d set for myself.  Plus, I knew I had a reputation to live up to when it came to being clever.

With that in mind, what was I to do?  Should I rush the stage at a concert and  shove an undernourished, scraggle-bearded indie rocker to the floor, grabbing his microphone and declaring my love to a few dozen Seattle hipsters?  How about programming a custom proposal-based Flash game for Virginia to play?  Or perhaps aim my projector at the wall of the eight-story hotel on the other side of I-5 and let an army of commuters in on the moment?

I did think about all of these ideas for a while — some more than others, admittedly.  But ultimately, I wanted the moment to be drawn out as long as possible, so we both could enjoy it and have a story to tell to our friends, family, and eventual children.  I wanted it to be fun for me to do and fun for her to experience.

So I came up with the idea of a multi-part proposal process.  It would begin with an innocent note in a mailbox, and close with an unforgettable ending.

I knew that I wanted the first step to be for Virginia to discover that the game was afoot via a message in our mail.  Originally, I had wanted to actually mail a letter, with a stamp and everything.  That would at least keep the surprise going for a while, right?  Well, I quickly ran into a snag with that idea.  If it actually went through the postal system, then how was I supposed to control when it would actually arrive, and be prepared accordingly?  Too dangerous.  So I downsized to a note in an envelope.  I had a feeling that Virginia would probably know what was up as soon as she read the note, but at least I could do it on my own terms.  So that was step one: the mailbox.

Now, what else?  Well, I love the fact that the car stereo in her Scion displays a customized message when you turn on the ignition.  It only gives you about 16 characters to work with, but I knew that would be enough for my purposes.  The problem was, I had to make sure if I programmed the stereo at night, that Virginia would take the bus to work the next morning.  It wouldn’t be very romantic if she saw some cryptic message in her car two days early and ruined everything.  But I’d worry about that when the time came.  For now, the second step was complete: the car.

While coming up with this plan, our cat (Trumpet) was always around, meowing at me to feed him and pay attention to him.  So much so that I knew I had to get him back by involving him in the process somehow.  I looked around our apartment for an appropriate method, and found one: a leftover gold-trimmed ribbon from a Christmas present a few weeks prior.  Excellent!  Step three: the cat: complete.

We’ve got a projector in our apartment.  Some of you may have seen one before, but for those who haven’t, it’s a pretty simple system.  The north wall of our apartment is completely blank, so as to act as a screen.  The projector itself sits about fifteen feet south on top of a bookshelf, and throws the projected image on the north wall.  This creates an image that’s literally ten feet wide.  It takes football and video games to a whole other level, but it turns out to also be useful for being step four in the process.  So I marked it down as something to use.

But how was I to close the deal?  I needed to go out with a bang.  Something that was unique — something that really said “Grant”.  Hmm.  Well, I knew that Virginia had said in the past that she was planning on taking my last name if we ever got married.  And I knew she already had her own web site at VirginiaCuller.com.  So what if I took it a step further?  A quick Google search confirmed that VirginiaRoberts.com was available, so I jumped into action.  At ten dollars to grab the domain before someone else did, it was quite a steal.

So the stage was set.  I had the five steps nailed down.  But I wasn’t done — I didn’t want to have one of the most memorable scenes in either of our lives look wrong.  So I wanted to get dressed up.  But in order to have time to get into a suit, I needed to make sure Virginia was out of the apartment for as long as possible during the proposal process.  Since our apartment is on the fourth floor of our building, it would take her some time to get from one step to another.  So I switched up the steps a bit — first, the mailbox.  Second, the kitty.  Third, her car.  Fourth, the projector, and finally, her laptop, with a web browser pointing at VirginiaRoberts.com.

The engagement ring I used was inherited from my late grandmother, Natalie.  She was never a large woman even in her younger years, and by the time she had passed the ring to me, it was not only tiny but also sporting an additional guard to keep it from slipping off her finger.  So the ring needed to be resized.  I started the process almost as soon as we returned home from Christmas vacation, successfully keeping the trip to the jewelers a secret from the ring’s eventual target.

The difficult part was getting it picked up.  The jeweler that resized the ring for me (Alexandra Rosoff) was only open until 5:30 during the week — and if I did it on the weekend, I would have needed a reason why I was going to downtown Seattle without alerting Virginia.  So I stealthily took the day off on Wednesday, walked down to the jeweler, and picked up the ring — all without her suspecting a thing.

Only now, Virginia wouldn’t cooperate!  She usually takes the bus to work, but every day that could have worked for the proposal extravaganza, she drove her car!  This just wouldn’t do.  Wednesday came and went.  Thursday, we both went to Industry Night at a local bar.  Friday, she drove to work again!

Then, Saturday rolled around.  We were already booked to go to a friend’s karaoke birthday party that night, so I really didn’t want to do it Saturday day.  I mean, “Hey, will you marry me?  Cool, now let’s hurry up and get ready for the party” isn’t the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.  I almost reconsidered when I was on stage in front of 50 people with a microphone in my hand, about to sing “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses and “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi, but since I didn’t have the ring with me, I held off.

But that night, I made a decision — Sunday was going to be THE day.  No more delays.  We didn’t have any plans, so I could do it in the morning and give Virginia all day to enjoy the experience.  So even though we didn’t get home from karaoke until 2:00am, I sprang into action as soon as her head hit the pillow.

First: the note in the mailbox.  Here’s what it said:

“1: Mailbox (complete)”
“2: Kitty”

I put it in an envelope and addressed it to Virginia.  The kitty was up next.  I printed out a note that said:

“3: Scion”

…and put it in the drawer where I had stashed the gold ribbon.  Then, I created a Microsoft Word document that contained the following:

“5: Laptop”

…and saved it to my hard drive.  Apartment preparations: complete!

I took the envelope downstairs and put it in our mailbox, and went out to Virginia’s Scion to do the tough part.

Programming her car stereo’s text display is harder than it should be.  You have to turn on the ignition, hold a button on the stereo, and keep holding it while you turn off the ignition.  Then you have to hold a DIFFERENT button while you turn the ignition back on.  Then you press one button to scroll through the entire alphabet, plus special characters.  Oh, and if you take too long (or really just if the car is feeling fickle), then it shuts off and you have to repeat the process.

After about 15 minutes of wrestling with technology, the message was complete:

“4: Projector”

So the stage was set.  By this time, it was about 3:30am, and I was pretty worn out — which was probably the only reason I was able to fall asleep without being too nervous.

When the next morning rolled around, I woke up at about 9 — which is pretty early for me to wake up without an alarm.  I was, as you may expect, too excited and nervous to go back to sleep, so I got up, which surprised Virginia.

She wanted to use the opportunity to get some early brunch.  I agreed, of course — LITTLE DID SHE KNOW HA HA HA.

So we both went back into the bedroom to get dressed.  After about ten minutes, when she was ready to go and I was still in my boxers, she was understandably surprised.  “What’s going on here?”

“I’m still pretty tired,” I said convincingly.  “But as long as you’re up and dressed, could you do me a favor?  Could you check the mail and see if Fable II came from Gamefly?  I want to start downloading the update before we go to brunch.”

She agreed, of course, because she’s awesome.  And as soon as the front door closed, I literally sprang into action.  I grabbed the ribbon from the drawer and tied the “3: Scion” note to the kitty.  Then I ran back to the bedroom and started getting into something a little less comfortable.

I heard the front door open again, and Virginia came into the bedroom.  She tried to pretend that she didn’t find anything in the mailbox, until I closed the bathroom door in her face.  Then she let out a delighted laugh and went to find the kitty.

She found him on the dining room table, and he wasn’t particularly happy — being quite unaccustomed to having gold ribbons tied around his midsection.  She followed the note’s direction and went down to the car.  Perfect!

When I heard the door close, I went back out to the living room.  I grabbed Virginia’s laptop and every candle I could find, and turned on the projector so it could broadcast the final direction.

She took her time while she was downstairs, thinking that I had hidden something in the car.  This gave me plenty of time to light a bunch of candles in the bedroom (which turned out to not work very well at 9:30 in the morning), finish putting on my suit, and open up a web browser on her laptop to http://virginiaroberts.com/surprise.  I closed the laptop, deposited a single Zantedeschia aethiopica on top, and waited in the bathroom for her to return.

Eventually, she returned to the apartment and knocked on the bedroom door.  I told her to come in, and waited for her to click “Yes” on the page I created.  Even though it was kind of out of order, I then emerged from the bathroom, got down on one knee, and, well… the rest is history.

We celebrated by having brunch at the Library Bistro downtown, and spent most of the rest of the day looking at wedding bands, flatware, and other things that we had put off until things were more official between us.

And that’s the story!  As is the case with so many things I write, this ended up being far longer than I had anticipated.  I guess time — and words — fly when you’re having fun.

See you all at the wedding next year!