OK…This was my plan for the engagement on 1/25/08. Everything happened the way that I planned except for a few road blocks that had to be overcome. We will get to the road blocks shortly.

A few days before the engagement I reserved a room at the local Westin hotel and put in the order for a ½ dozen chocolate covered strawberries. I had already planned on taking the 25th off to “take care of some things around the house”. Jackie had a job interview early that morning and then was going to go into work after the interview was over. The night before the interview, she drops this nugget on me – “I think I am going to take off tomorrow and just go to the interview”. I was thinking to myself “sweet….this is exactly what I don’t need right now” but I told her that would be fine with a great big smile J.

The main part of the proposal was centered around a digital photo frame I got for her. While at work the two weeks before the proposal, I typed out what I wanted to say. Knowing that I was going to get choked up trying to say it, I decided to enlarge the font on what I wanted to say, print it out, take pictures of the print outs and upload them to the digital frame. I have never used one of these before so instead of having the whole day to work on it while she was at the interview and at work, I had to learn how to use it and make it work while she was at her interview. I was panicking to say the least. So when she went to the interview, I hopped on the computer to print out the “speech” and read the manual on the digital frame. I learned that you can put music on the digital frame so I decided to put our song, “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, as the frame scrolled through my “speech”. The problem was, the frame only plays MP3’s and iTunes saves song files under a different format. After I uploaded my “speech” I had to find a way to convert the music file to a MP3. I was able to find what I needed and uploaded the song to the frame. Once that was completed, I put the picture frame in a gift bag and loaded up my truck with the necessary items needed for that night. Once I was finished with that, Jackie came back from her interview, and the road blocks started popping up faster than chicken pox.

Luckily for me, Jackie’s interview lasted for just under 4 hours. I had a hair cut scheduled for 4pm that day and I still needed to check into the hotel no sooner than 3pm. When she got home, we hung out a bit and I told her that I got a call from my stylist saying that she had a cancellation and that I could get my haircut at 2:30pm (total lie, and she bit on it, hook, line and sinker). After a while, I decided to go out and grab some lunch for us. While I was out getting lunch, I had to pick up the chocolate covered strawberries. (It was January, so I didn’t have to worry about the chocolate melting in my truck).

After lunch, I had a bunch of time to kill before the 2:30 fake appointment. She mentioned that we could “hang out all day and go to the movies or go bowling”. I quickly squashed those ideas because of the fake appointment. Fast forward to the fake appointment. I left and hauled ass to the hotel to check in and set up for later. The hotel was a bit further away than expected so I need something for an alibi, coming back to the house without my hair cut. So I went to pick up the dry cleaning. By the time I got home, she wondered why it took over 45 minutes for me to not get my hair cut (that was only 10 minutes away). Fantastic fake story on my part. I told her that the original lady that canceled her 2:30 appointment ended up showing up and that I would keep my original appointment at 4pm. I then told her that when I got to the dry cleaners, there was a few people ahead of me, one person working and the fact that the one person was having problems with trying to find the other peoples clothes (the perfect storm). I could tell she had some reservations on how true my story was, but I sold it to her in a way that she just had to take it.

So 4pm rolls around. I go get my haircut (for real this time) and come back to take a shower. We planned on going to sushi that night and she was begging me to go see some “dress” movie at the theater that night. I said, lets see how long dinner takes us and, if there is time, we would try to go.

Fast forward to dinner. I wasn’t nervous at all for some reason. The two beers really calmed my nerves. It was out of my hands now and I just had to roll with any other road blocks that were going to come my way. Luckily, there weren’t any more. After dinner, I told her as we were going to the movie (so she thinks), I told her that I needed to make a couple quick stops before the theater. We had time so she was cool with it.

We arrived at the house and I told her to stay in the car. I had planned on using our dog, Jack, with the proposal so I had to pick him up. I was going to tie the ring onto his collar but I forgot the ribbon at home. She kept asking me “Why do we have the dog when we are going to the movies?” I told her that we were going to drop him off some where and then go to the movies. Once we pulled up to the Westin, I made up another fake story about how I wanted to do something nice for her because I thought she was going to get an offer at the interview she went to that day. She thought it was a nice gesture and that we would drop the dog off at the hotel and go to the movies.

Once we got in the room, she saw the gift and was very surprised. I kept telling her “I really thought you were going to get that job”. She opened up the gift and was happy that she now had one of those digital frames. She then went to use the restroom before we left to go to the movies. While she was in the restroom, I pulled out the digital frame and set it up for her and got the ring in my pocket. When she came out, I was encouraging her to check out how cool the frame was and the quality of the pictures. When she turned it on, the music came on and the slides of my “speech” began to play. I picked up Jack and watched her reactions to the slides. The slides read (each line was a different slide):

After meeting you
I never knew what I was getting into.
As it turns out,
It’s been the best 5 years of my life.
You make me a better man.
You make me want to be a better person.
We have the best time together,
And I can honestly say,
I want to spend the rest of my life
With you and only you.
To me, you are perfect.
And I hope you will do me the honor
Of being my wife.
Jacolyn Fellows,
Will you marry me?

She started immediately crying and I, still holding Jack and getting very dusty myself, got down on one knee and pulled the ring out. I am pretty sure she said “yes” more than once.

Its not the most elaborate proposal on the planet (Google Seal and Heidi Klum proposal) but it wasn’t a bad one either. The whole day was a roller coaster of emotions for me and she didn’t know anything about it. I always thought she would figure things out and bust me out on it. But she never had a clue. And to this day, I still have not seen that “dress” movie, thank God.