Mawwiage!

It happened! We're married!

It's wonderful. Look how cute he is! I love him. :)

Five days, five days!

Five more days and I'll be married to that guy! 

The Sights of Springville

So, this post won't have any actual sights of Springville... well, that's not true. There's one semi-distant photo of the museum! Ready yourselves for that.

My ex-roommate/current friend Jenna came to visit ex-fake-roommate/current friend Sarah Singleton and myself in "the Ville" {as Sarah calls it} and we showed her all of Springville's wonders!

In the museum. Dunno what Jenna's doin.

Jenna... doing her thing. 

Sarah... doing a leprechaun dance? It WAS an exciting
tour of Springville's finest. 

This is probably clear by now, but we went to the museum.
See? There it is! Behind them! 

Jenna in her tourist hat, on her way to see more
exciting things!

And we didn't stop at the art museum! We also dined at the Trolley, which is one of the only restaurants around here, and it was way better than I even remembered. So tasty! But, I have sad news. They changed their menu! I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing, except that they don't have my favorite thing anymore. I haven't tried the new things so I'm sure it's still wonderful.

We also enjoyed lounging on my front yard for like... an hour. That's sort of a Springville specialty, I guess. And we saw Sarah's kajillion cats, which is definitely an oddity that you won't find anywhere else.

All in all, I'm fairly sure Jenna is convinced of all the amazing things Springville has to offer. If I remember right, she mentioned something about moving here after school, because she just couldn't stay away. Right, Jenna? Right?

The One Post

Alright, alright. The time has come for the post you have all been anxiously waiting for... The Engagement Post! Yay!

It all began in the sleepy town of Los Angeles. My family and Joe had gone to visit my cousins, primarily to attend a wedding, but also to enjoy a delightful vacation away from the chilly winter weather of Utah. Also, Joe wanted to propose {spoiler alert}, but I didn't know that yet so pretend I didn't tell you.

Waiting outside the temple

Stealing flowers from the trees to give to me 

The Sunday after the wedding, Joe, my family, and I went to Santa Monica Pier to wander around and look at the ferris wheel that was too expensive to ride and stare at the waves that were too cold to enter.

Stud muffin on the pier

Still unsuspecting of what was to come...
Me, that is. Pretty sure Joe probably had an idea.

We wandered around the sand and under the pier for a bit. My family was, at this point, keeping conspicuously distant. I had suspected the whole weekend that a proposal might be coming, as Joe likes to do special things in unique places so as to add a romantic flair. But no one brought any purses or other receptacles to the beach, and I noticed no suspicious trade-off of cargo between anyone {aka ring box}, and ALSO I had helped Joe pack all his stuff and never saw any evidence of ringage, so by this point I had pretty much given up on the whole getting proposed to thing. Ergo I didn't really notice my family's weird distance-keeping.

And now, please forgive me as I regale you with sunset-y beach photos.

Cutie

Under the pier

Artistic scene photo

Da boys

Spencer's model photo.
Note the scruffly beard. 

Cue oo-ing and ahh-ing

After wandering about for a bit and getting quite chilly, I decided to be cheesy and suggested we write our initials in a sand heart. I'm pretty sure that's kind of a necessity when you're at a beach with someone you like a lot.

Cheesy beach heart

Another fancy photo. I'm sorry. 

Joe....minutes before IT happened!

Then, I ran away. The ocean air was brisk and my family was huddled about 100 feet up the beach being anti-social {I thought}, so I went to join them. Joe didn't follow. I became mildly suspicious. But not entirely {see reasons above}. He waved me back over and I sort of sprinted, which I don't think he was expecting, because when I got there he only had "M" and "A" written into the sand. 

In my usual awkward way, I stood and silently stared expectantly as he completed the words, as if I didn't understand what letters were... but it was kind of obvious at that point, and I'm not completely oblivious. Usually. 

And then...tah dah! 

The finished message. Gasp!

Yes. They said "Marry Me?" Quite shocking and unexpected for everyone reading these suspenseful words.

What happened next is pretty fuzzy. He got down on one knee, said some things that were possibly quite lovely and eloquent about me being his wife, and opened the ring box {which he had sneakily concealed in the pocket of his shorts}. Inside was a ring made of twine. My memory of the event clarifies at that point.

"What is that?" I said, polite as ever.

"It's a ring!" he said.

 Yes, it was a ring. A twine ring. I asked repeatedly if he was serious. Like this: "Are you serious? Are you really serious?" But not in a squealy, surprised way. No. In an 'I mean business' type of way, as though I actually doubted his sincerity. Finally he said, "Yes I'm serious, dang it!" and right about then I remembered I was supposed to say yes and be cute and loving. So I did those things.

Another sunset picture, so that you don't have
to read too many words all in one giant paragraph. 

I forgot to mention that sometime before he proposed, a giant swarm of photographers came swooping in on us. They were there taking pictures for an LA Photo Walk with some big name HDR guy. That's irrelevant now, but it's of some minor significance later in the tale.  

We hugged. My parents, who of course knew about the whole thing, took pictures of us being cute from afar, so that was nice.

Us being cute and engaged

 Once we had finished up with the lovey dovey stuff, we ran back to my family {for realsies this time} and since we were all giddy and smiley--and engaged, of course--my mom took a bunch of pictures, and I like them.

Showing off the fancy shmancy ring. Which
I loved, by the way.  He even tied it in a bow. :)

Blue-eyed babes

My ring! I wore it for days, before switching to
another temporary one that wouldn't dissolve. 

All the photographers on the beach

One of the many photographers came over and asked if he could take a picture of us against the sunset. We agreed. Free awesome photography? Yes, please. He ended up taking what is still one of my favorite pictures of the two of us with an amazing sunset in the background. Perfect, since Joe had waited until sunset to propose just so it could look as amazing as it did in that picture*. Thank you, Ed! 

*You can see that picture in the "Something Kinda Cool Happened" post that I did about getting engaged. If you're curious. 

The next couple of pictures have nothing to do with getting engaged, except that I guess we took them during our engagement. They're just cute and I like them, so here they are.

At the temple on a snowy evening. We had quite an
adventure that night, but that's a different story.
Forgive my scary demon eyes.
 But look, I have a (real) ring!
Close-ups to follow.  

My soon-to-be husband, the piper

The getting of the ring was a crazy, long, and mostly frustrating process. But after two months, it is finally upon my digit! Joe custom designed it, with my preferences in mind and a little bit of inspiration from a ring I tried at Zales, and I LOVE it. Love it love it love it. 

Top view. Sigh. Love it.

Side! I love the details.

And that's it! We are getting married in less than two weeks. Plans are coming together nicely, and it's almost done. I'm almost married! Let the official countdown begin.

P.S. In case you're wondering, we have this nice, classy "wed-site" that includes more stuff about us, like pictures, our falling in love story, and also our registries {hint hint. haha. joke.} It is creatively titled taraya-joe.nearlyweds.com. So if you have a thing for stalking people's love lives {don't worry, I'm one of you}, I heartily encourage you to go there and bask in our cuteness.

An Update Which is None Too Exciting

A new post will be coming soon! That is all. It will involve a lot of engagement things so ready yourselves.

Something kinda cool happened

So, I feel like I should probably mention that I got engaged last month...! I planned on waiting to make a post about it until I could bang out something amazing, complete with pictures of the beach where he proposed, the ring with which he proposed, the ring which was the real ring, our engagement pictures, and all kinds of plans that we had already figured out because we're just that on top of things.

That wasn't happening, and it turns out there's a lot of random things to plan and we haven't gotten around to most of them yet. BUT. These facts remain: I am engaged to Joe Galloway! We are awesome. He is superb and I love him. Our wedding day is May 26th, and everyone who ever reads this should be there.

{And here's our favorite engagement picture, just for good measure :) }

Whoosh!

We snowboarded!

Life Update

That's right, get excited folks. You have been missing out on the thrilling details of my day-to-day existence for too long. And what is a blog for if not to regale my readers with information all about me? So let's just jump right in, shall we?*

*if you are bored by reading all kinds of strung together words, skip the next bit. I've suited the preferences of all possible readers by also including pictures to summarize my activities! You lucky ducks, you.

Job: My current job situation is AWE-some. I work at Fold3 (fold3.com) doing work for their website. They are a smaller company that belongs to Ancestry.com, if that helps you wrap your head around the obscureness of my company. I have two jobs with Fold3. One of them is less exciting, but it is the lovely little low-paying job that introduced me to my favorite job ever, which I will tell you about momentarily. Just hold on to your hats for a second, we'll get there. The title of my less exciting job is "Quality Assurance Editor," which sounds kinda fancy but really I just look at scanned images of old documents and make sure they match up with the typed-out version of the same page. In essence, we make sure that when you search for something in fold3, we can pull up documents that actually have what you searched for on the page.
The second job I have with them has another fancy title that I can't even remember. Specialty Content Editor or something. But in order to do this job I must.... write articles about history!! It's amazing! Yes, yes, I'm sure it sounds boring to the majority of.. humans... but I love it. I sit at home on my computer, I look up cool/weird/random military history stories, and then I write spotlights on them for the main website page. Go to the website. Go on, do it. See that "spotlights" section on the right? I write those! Well, some of them. There are three of us slaving away to make sure people are vaguely interested in what our website can provide. It's quite fun. I really do love it.
Also I clean the office where my mom works. I do not like this job.

School: This section is easy, because it doesn't exist. I graduated. In history. Over a year ago (sigh.) I am saddened beyond all expression about this reality. I want to go back to school, but alas... money. But hopefully I will be back in again soon, learning more about english, writing, languages... ya know, all the good stuff.

Boys: Ok this section is the most fun, because... well because it is. And because I have pictures! Oh yeah. Blog-stalkers dream come true. Hopefully this particular young man won't mind that I'm throwing around his image for everyone to see. I doubt he will, I'm sure he'd love to be oogled and oggled by all my admiring blog-fans.

Anyway my boy of the now is Mr. Joseph Robert Galloway, more commonly known as Joe. This is him!

I like him. I think I'll keep him.

He looks unenthused because he's very tired. I keep him up 'til all hours with my girlfriendish neediness. Although I guess "all hours" now means like 11:30, because we're old and employed and go to bed earlier these days. But he is nice and lets me cuddle him and watch tv and chat 'til we can barely keep our eyes open. I think he likes me too. :) He even takes random pictures with me. Aww.

Yay cheesiness...ok moving on.

Joe got a job this week!! Really exciting. He works at Tycon Systems Inc., doing accounting stuff and some other random things. So far he likes it, it's kind of what he's been wanting for years, this job. So if you're reading this, give a robust thumbs up to the chap for making his way in the working world.

In other news:

{July} Family reunion in Washington state!

{August} I went to Robber's Roost for hiking purposes. Highly recommended. Plus Joe finally kissed me there, so... bonus.

I... have no picture for this event. I'm sorry.

Also I became a True Aggie, with the help of Joe. You can see the magical "A" behind us. He thought it was ridiculous (it was) but came along anyway, cause he's nice.

{October} Joe 'n' I dressed up for Halloween. He is clearly a pirate. I am, not so clearly, a jester.

{December} We picked out our Christmas tree and drove it home. It was very huge and pokey. Possibly the best Christmas tree ever.

My beau took me to the Nutcracker in SLC for Christmas. We are so classy!

{January} I took my brother (or rather, he took my dad, Joe, and myself) snowboarding! It was Spencer's first time. He LOVED it.

I think that gets us about caught up. We have fun times. Coming up...ice skating tonight (maybe)! Snowboarding again on the 15th! Road trip to California for my cousin's wedding! The good times never cease. They really don't. Life's pretty awesome.

I feel like I should keep some continuity in my posts by putting a quote at the end like I used to. Let me go find one....

...alright, this suits my nerdy obsession that Joe and I share. 100 points to whoever can name what movie this is from. It's obscure, so I'll even give you three. My favorites :) 119342498290 points to anyone who can name the characters that say the quotes.

"Sometimes people have feelings. I'm referrin' here to people."

"I am a leaf on the wind. Watch me soar."

"This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then --- explode."

Good luck :)

Love, me.