Nonsense was spoken and thought with gusto last weekend when Rock and I met Kelly and Eric in 100 Mile House. We played 10,000 and the baby die was jinxed. By dint of our lackadaisicalness we didn’t really do much, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Mom’s cat, FluffTerror, killed about 12 mice and 9 birds while I was there. That cat is a death machine. She also purrs a lot, purrs of death. We had champagne to celebrate our engagement. Champagne is a sparkling Dr.Pepper-like beverage that comes from a city in Germany called Cologne.

I lost and found both my watch and my wallet this week. The universe briefly teetered on the brink of explosion, but doom was narrowly and unceremoniously averted, once again. Poor doom, he’s always frustrated. I also finished my courses on educational policy and special needs in education (well, I just have one paper left). The policy course was useful because it was mostly about how teachers work within the larger field of education, and I plan to have a non-teaching job in the education field some (probably distant) day, so that stuff interests me. One of the books I am to read for next term costs 90 dollars in the bookstore. Happily, however, I stuck it to the man by ordering it online for 23 cents (really!). After tax it came to CDN $6.72. Granted, it’s used and not the correct edition, but still. School doesn’t restart until September fifth, so I‘ll be up in Prince George for most of the time between now and then. Hooray! I love PG.

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Fian--say what?!

It's officially official, Rock and I are engaged. We will be married in Prince George on 26 July 2008. That's the last Saturday in July. If I understand how name exchanges work, I will soon be Mr. Rock, and my future students will assume I am an ex-Navy Seal.

We were engaged last Saturday, our 2nd dating anniversary. Dann, Tanya, Mike and Tae were camping out near Canim lake, so we went out to visit them in the afternoon. Then we went a bit further out to Canim/Mahood Falls. Rock is the sharpest tool in the toolbox, so I had to use all of my CSIS training to keep the subterfuge under wraps. Unfortunately there were no laptops to be lost, so I "pretended" I couldn't find the falls for about 45 minutes. When we arrived, the waterfalls were quite wonderfully sublime and fairly big. In fact, if you've never seen any larger water falls, they'd be the largest waterfalls you've ever see. Plus, they're rated at 9.1 on the International Proposal Appropriateness Scale.

Rock wouldn't let me get closer than 15 feet to the edge (probably an ominous sign of her not letting me imperil my life in the future), but it was still a pretty neat place to be. I'm ecstatic about being engaged to Roxanne, because I love her. I'm even getting used to the word fiancée. I didn't really think it would be strange, so I'm not really surprised that it all feels so normal. It's better than normal though: it's like an M&Ms Blizzard that makes you smarter, defeats world poverty and solves global warming.

Here are 4 more pictures

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