Serious?! I Sure Hope So!

So for those unaware as of Thursday January 27, 2005 I have been dating Lisa for four years. We went to eat at our local Johnny Carino's (btw thank you to the Johnny Carino's folks for sending me the coupon for half off an entree the day after our lovely dinner, but it ends up being a moot point, I digress...). We sat there ordered our food, ate bread with olive oil, garlic and black pepper. When her lasagna arrived Lisa took one bite and said, "It has sausage in it..." She does not like sausage, or any kind of processed meat for that matter. So I summoned our waiter and told them about the sausage and her not mixing so he takes it away and brings her a menu, turns out there was no sausage, it was the seasoning in that meat sauce that was also used in most Italian sausages. She orders something else and asks specifically for the marinara sauce instead of meat sauce and is brought the dish with meat sauce. She manages to eat the pasta (ravioli) without eating much of the sauce. The whole time I'm sitting there thinking how she's gonna remember things like this...

So they take away our plates, and we order canolli, neither of us had ever tried it and decided to do so that night. After the waiter leaves I stick my shoe out of the booth that we were sitting in and say, "Look, my shoe's untied." So I step out of the booth and kneel down to tie my shoe. While I'm kneeling down on one knee I say to Lisa, "By the way, I wanted to ask you something, " and I reach inside my jacket pocket and pull out a ring box and open it to show her the diamond ring inside of it. At that point she immediatly loses it and just starts bawling, and sobbing.

See I had known since the Christmas Holidays that this was going to happen, because that's when I got the ring. (My mom gave me the diamond that my dad gave her, after they got divorced, she had it put on a pendant and decided to give it to me for just this purpose.) She on the other hand had no idea, I had been saying long before the break that I wasn't sure about marriage at this point and was just wanting to graduate and get a job before we did anything serioius. Upon returning from the Christmas break I kinda played this stuff up a bit, saying how I couldn't afford a diamond ring and all that jazz, just wanting to furthur surprise her for the moment in which we last left off.

So after she just starts bawling, the entire staff of Johnny Carino's starts to notice something, and amidst the sobbing she looks at me and says, "Are you serious?" My usual smart ass response to such a question had evaded me at the moment, and I said simply, "Yes." Then as she is putting the ring on she says, "I never said yes," I reply, "Well I never got to ask..." since she had started bawling as soon as she set eyes upon her brand new "shiny thing" as she so puts it. So I ask her, "Will you marry me?" and then she said yes and our canolli came, I was only able to eat about two bites and she was hardly able to eat one, mainly because it was so rich and secondly because her stomach was doing acrobatic stunts at the moment.

While we sit there with our partially eaten canolli we have every member of the wait staff passing by congratulating us. Our waiter returns and questions why we've hardly touched the canolli. We explain and he offers to bring us another dessert if we wish, but Lisa having already felt guilty about the lasagna does not want to inconvience this man further, so we end up taking it home. Upon his return with our boxed up canolli he informs us that our dinner it on the house. At that point I have a reaction similar (minus the sobbing and tears) to the one Lisa had when I whipped out the ring just a few minutes earlier. We thank him, I leave him a tip and we head on home. We've been phoning friends and relatives informing them of the news ever since...