Our First Date 

Written by Kristin 

August 2021 

We met online (as one does in a pandemic), and after texting for a few weeks, scheduled dinner at Rosso Pizzeria. No pizza was eaten that night, but we ate well, walked around for hours, talked for even more. Along the lookout to the river valley, Graham made the first move, and asked to kiss me while we were admiring the view from a bench above the iconic Walterdale Bridge. And that was even before I convinced him to get ice cream at Yelo'd, too! 🥰 

The Proposal

Schemed, planned, dictated, and typed by Graham.

After about a year and a bit of dating, I was already certain that I wanted to propose. In early 2024, Kristin and I decided we should go ahead and have a proper vacation, and we decided on Las Vegas as the destination. 

In planning our first out of country vacation, Kristin left most of the planning to me, with one exception: she wanted to visit an indie bookstore. How fitting it was that the Writer's Block, an independant book store and artificial bird sanctuary, also happened to be across from the Paradise Wedding Chapel with drive-thru and Elvis packages available from $279.99. A bargain!  (They're not paying me for this, I just recognize a good product when I see it.) 

After smuggling the Ring across the border and through TSA in a shoe, it stayed thankfully out of sight until The Day. Early in the afternoon, sweaty from walking an unexpected mile because of a mixup with an Uber, we stepped into the Writer's Block. 

While Kristin was perusing the shelves, I went looking for an addition to the Ring for my proposal. I intended to find a bookmark, but instead chose one of the adoptable birds in the store: a partridge named Mikaela seemed the perfect companion for the task at hand. I paid for her, and borrowed a Sharpie to write a shoddy, messy, and ultimately barely legible "wIlL YOu mArRy Me?" in the margin of Mikaela's name/Autobirdography tag. With the assistance of a wonderful staff member to take some photos, I found Kris back in the stacks and handed her the partridge with the nervously scrawled query.