Huh okay so Sarah grew up spending most summers playing ultimate Frisbee with friends at a park by the church she grew up at. (Psst this is Joel, I have hacked my way in, will update as we progress) Every once in a while some strangers would join in, some where friends of friends and some were just random people who were in the park that day and wanted to join. So technically when Joel joined he was a friend of a friend of a friend who heard we did Frisbee every week and was like "heck yeah Frisbee!" (Thats true) And it was love at first sight! Just kidding they didn't talk to each other for like the first quarter of the summer. (Blame Sarah, she's quiet until she's comfortable then she is a chattery sass-hole) then Joel being kinda ok (extremely good) at Frisbee started to get cocky and then Sarah took that personally and tried to put him in his place (And failed, her efforts only fed my ego). Que the smack talking sass and banter back and forth. Then one week Joel didn't show up to Frisbee (Shockingly I occasionally had other things to do) so having got his number from somebody Sarah texted him "too scared to show up to Frisbee?" And then they kept texting and then texting turned to coffee dates and hiking and then that turned into, eventually, a proposal yay! (Wow we really chose to skip like 90% of our relationship)

Well I guess it's up to me to finish the story then. Sarah really decided to dip on telling the story as soon as we hit our actual relationship. (you are the talker in the relationship) Well, over the next couple months we went out, kept texting, figured out how to keep hanging out after frisbee ended. We started hanging out all together. Then one night I was driving Sarah home through the dark parts of East Hill Kent. And she kinda out of nowhere asked: "What are we?" (surprise!) I was somewhat caught off guard and definitely missed a few turns (so many turns). Which turned out to work out fine as we got some more time to talk. But I think she wasn't expecting me to simply say "I'd like to be your boyfriend" She wasn't quite ready for that. So I perfectly happy to wait. Eventually she came around From there we enjoyed dating. I went from being unemployed post COVID to moving out of a tiny apartment to renting a house with friends to helping Sarah buy a house. She went from working nights to working somewhat more normal hours (nights are perfectly normal thank you). We went to Denmark, we've gone to see my family in Idaho, we've gone to see hers in California. Life's changed a lot but there is no one I wanted to face it with more than her. (aww that's cute) We'd talked a few times about marriage. The timeline we talked about was 2-5 years. Originally I was intending much closer to the 2 years, but it's closer to 5 now. We'll be getting married just a few weeks before we'll have been together for 5 years. So our original timeline is still here. (Too long i wanted closer to 3 years but okay) At the beginning of last summer we talked through it again and determined we were definitely heading that way but weren't quite ready. And then Sarah changed her mind and decided she'd like to be married now (I'm pretty sure I was ready last summer). So that then I started seriously and properly ring hunting. Which took a couple months. Then I had to start planning on how I wanted to propose. She wanted to be surprised so that required some serious planner. She's much too sluethy for someone who likes surprises. (I need to know all the things) But eventually I was able to make a plan that was the right mix of chaotic, planned and improvised so she was mostly surprised. And so I proposed at a pumpkin patch in October.

And it was very cute and he definitely surprised me (I'm back baby!). He took me to a pumpkin patch, I really love pumpkins and we had been planning to go for a while. We got dressed up and I was ready to leave the house because I wanted to go before it got to dark and he kept dragging his feet to get out the door (I had to buy time for our photographers). When we got there we got apple cider and checked out some of the other things they were selling before heading into the pumpkin patch itself. When we finally got inside we picked out lots of the smaller pumpkins (I was very smoothly buying time still) and then went on the search for our big carving pumpkins. I found mine pretty quickly but Joel was being super picky, no pumpkin was ever quite right (I was juggling trying to get Sarah in a good spot for photos, trying to get down on one knee without her noticing and actually find a pumpkin I liked). I was very unaware of the fact that he was trying to get me to a reasonable distance to Alex and Jordan who where dressed up as old people to catch the proposal (Exactly, I feel like I did great here). So I kept running off looking for the perfect pumpkin for him. He had told me originally that he wanted to look were no one would have gone yet and I took that a little too seriously and was wondering off quite far. He did finally get me to come back and got on one knee while I was again looking at a pumpkin, haha. He asked me to marry him and I, of course said yes! (A win is a win)