this is funnier and more touching than anything I could ever write, so I hope mike and alex don’t mind me sharing their account of their engagement:

“Yes, the rumors are true! As of this past weekend, I am no longer on the market (to the collective sighs of women around the world.) I asked Alex to marry me while we were vacationing on the Caribbean
island of Vieques for her birthday, and she said yes. (Actually, her exact word was “Sure”, but I think that counts.) Not that the whole thing didn’t go off without a hitch… For the night, which was also her birthday
night, I thought I had planned the perfect evening. First, we went on a kayaking tour of one of Vieques’ unique “bioluminescent bay”, one of the only places in the world where phosphorescent plankton live in such abundance that when you swim in the water, your whole body glows and looks like it’s covered with tiny little stars….Unfortunately, the romance was tempered a bit when Alex got stung by a jellyfish and had to paddle back with a sore arm. Hoping to bounce back, I told her that I had a special surprise for her, and drove her down dirt roads to a secluded beach where earlier in the day I had stashed all the makings for a romantic picnic. Of course, I forgot that Alex is an arachnophobe, and so she took some coaxing to get out of the car, convinced that there would be spiders on the beach at night. But I cavalierly told her that there wouldn’t be any spiders once we got past the palm trees, and after crashing around in the brambles for a few minutes to find the stuff I left, we made our way down to the surf. There I laid out a spread with all the fixings – a tablecloth, a spread of gourmet food, a bouquet of roses, a candle in a hurricane lamp – and popped a bottle of red I’d brought from home. We sat and talked, captivated by the crashing of waves in our secluded cove, and the full moon rising over the hill behind us. Alex even started to relax, as I nervously rehearsed in my mind the speech I’d been practicing all day, ready to give her the ring. Then….caught in mid-sentence, Alex suddenly let loose the most blood-curdling scream I’d ever heard in my life. She leapt up and ran down the beach into the water, screaming that she saw a spider. Of course, I thought it was just a shadow or something until I looked at the top of the cooler and saw, I’m not kidding, an spindly eight-legged freak the size of my palm, who had apparently wanted to have a sip of wine himself. Needless to say, it took some time before I was able to calm Alex down, get her back to the car, pack up all the stuff, ensure it was all spider-free (I trapped our friend in an over-turned wineglass and left it on the beach just to make sure!), and drive back the way we came. My next thought was to try and get her back to our hotel room which had a beautiful balcony overlooking the beach, but Alex wanted to go to the restaurant we had been to the night before to try and salvage her birthday dinner. I agreed reluctantly but told her that I had another birthday surprise for her later, so we couldn’t drink too much. But we found that wasn’t an option, since the restaurant had stopped serving food by the time we got there, though they did let us have a drink at the bar and a banana-split on the house. Finally we got back to our hotel room, where, dejected, Alex plopped down on the bed ready to go to sleep as I stood panicked about how the hell I was going to propose. Bad luck be damned, I threw a nightstand onto the balcony, put what was left of our feast onto it, and lined up two oversized wicker chairs facing it (of course the chairs wouldn’t fit on the balcony). Telling her I still had a bottle of champagne for her birthday, I coaxed her to sit with me and we picked up our conversation and finished the food and the wine. Then I told her that I had another surprise for her, and brought out a small package wrapped in birthday wrapping paper, and stood with her on the balcony while she unwrapped it. Finally, everything seemed just right – the moon had risen over the ocean below us, and a warm breeze was blowing through the palm trees. Before she opened the box, I started in on my speech, and I think I got through about 2/3 of it before my mind blanked (which is more than I expected to get through), and I simply asked her if she would marry me. She said “sure” and opened the box…. at which point the ring fell out and for a very scary moment we thought it had gone over the balcony. But thankfully we found it under the nightstand, I
put it on her finger and we popped the champagne! To my relief, Alex loves the ring – a 1920’s-era platinum ring with a tourmaline (her favorite gemstone) surrounded by tiny diamonds. As for me, I just figure that after the proposal, the actual marriage should be a piece of cake! For now, we haven’t set a date – we are still basking in the glow of commitment.”

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