"Oh my, this rock is expensive" - Mike's Story

So now that Meg's given her account of the proposal along with all of the details, we thought I should write about my side of the story.

Saturday morning started out with a difficult task: how do I carry the ring all day without Meg knowing and, more importantly, without losing it? Ideally, I could have left it locked up in the hotel and came back before I proposed, but I didn't know if we were going to have time to come back to the hotel, and I wasn't sure what reason I make up to get back there. So I was left with no choice (a situation I've been told to get used to) and had to carry it with me all day. I don't carry a murse and I couldn't fit the ring box into my jeans without Meg noticing, so I had to carry just the ring. When Meg went to dry her hair Saturday morning, I had my opportunity and slid the ring into my pocket.

Now all I had to do was make sure I didn't lose the ring. We had planned to see about 15 apartments all over Westwood, Brentwood, Santa Monica and West LA, so we were going to be covering a lot of ground - which meant that I had all the more opportunity to lose the thing. I thought I would keep it simple: check to make sure I had the ring whenever I got to a new apartment and when I left each apartment. That way I would know where I dropped the ring.

The apartment hunting actually started out pretty poorly. The first two places we saw were duds and our 3pm appointment called early in the morning and canceled. The apartment story isn't that interesting, so I'll sum it up by saying that we found a place that you can see here. It's the wood-paneled building behind the white car.

The interesting story is how I managed to pull off the proposal. I knew I wanted to propose on the beach at sunset and I thought that Malibu would provide us with enough privacy. I've only been to the private beaches in Malibu, so I was hoping to get in touch with my friend Taylor Shoop and use the private beach near his beach house. Unfortunately, Shoop was busy all day and I never got in touch with him. So I moved on to Plan B: find a beach isolated enough to propose. As Meg said, we passed about 10 miles worth of public beaches in Santa Monica, all too busy for my plans. We finally got into Malibu, but most of the beaches there are private. Not knowing where to go and needing to check everything out before I made my plans, I told Meg I wanted to show her Pepperdine before we headed to the beach. Just about a mile before Pepperdine, I spotted a public access beach that had promise. Not having a better idea, I rolled the dice. We walked around the beach for a while, all of it looking a little too crowded for what I imagined. I figured if I bought some time, the beach might clear out a little. I dragged Meg all the way down to the end of the beach before we found a place to sit down for a little while. I knew it would be difficult to get away from Meg for a few seconds in order to write "Will you marry me?" in the sand, so I thought I would distract her by playing tic-tac-toe in the sand. Apparently it worked, because after a few games I was able to get away for a few seconds. I went down the beach about 50 yards or so and quickly wrote out my message.

I only wish I had a camera to capture the look on Meg's face when she finally figured out what my message said. I don't remember what I said or what she said either, except that she did kinda squeal and I'm sure I fumbled my words. All I remember is that I was (and still am) extremely excited that she said yes. As she said, no plans are set yet - I'm sure we'll start to figure stuff out in the near future, especially after we get settled in LA.