After my livejournal posts on Saturday, I spent the rest of the afternoon listening to This American Life from audio streams on their website ( http://thislife.org ). Then Jessica came home and we sat around for a bit and then packed up so we could go back down to my apartment. We stopped in Roanoke on the way down to do some Christmas shopping at Best Buy, since there are no such stores near where Jessica or I live. We had some trouble finding the store, since the directions they gave on their website were completely wrong, but I found it eventually.

When we got to my apartment, roommate Greg was still there, and he had been cleaning the place. Jessica and I ordered pizza, and we watched movie "The Dark Crystal" in the living room. After that I think we just went to sleep or something.

We slept in a bit on Sunday, but then we started getting hungry, so we went grocery shopping. We got frozen waffles and some bacon and then we went home and I cooked it all up so we could eat, which is what we did next. I'm not sure exactly what we did after that, but eventually I dyed Jessica's hair and we took a shower and then I think we took a nap or something, because we're old.

Then we went out to Super China Buffet for lunch, and since it was Sunday they had crab legs for eating. Next we went to the mall and walked around a bit, and went to the hippie store and then the arcade, where we got a bunch of tickets. But there wasn't anything worthwhile to get with the 45 or so tickets we got, so we just kept them.

Then we went and saw movie "Gothika" in the theater, and it was pretty good. There were lots of really stupid annoying people in the theater, including one couple right in front of us and another right behind us. After every event in the movie, one stupid person would turn to the other and ask what just happened, and then the other stupid person would explain the movie, often incorrectly.

When the movie was over we went to Target to do some more shopping. Jessica got some bird food for the birds around her house, and she also bought a pair of pants. And then to prove how truly awesome she is, she bought me a box of chocolate covered cherries.

It was a bit late after we got home, but not all that late. I don't know if we did anything, though. Maybe we just sat around and did stuff on internet or something.

On Monday we celebrated our anniversary. I know some of you don't believe that the one-year anniversary of having started dating someone is an important holiday, but both Jessica and I think it is, so we got each other presents and such. Unfortunately, Jessica had accidentally left one of the presents she got me at her house, and the other one was something she ordered at the last minute and it was supposed to be delivered by UPS on Monday, but then the order tracking thing said estimated delivery date was Tuesday.

I made breakfast again, bacon and waffles, and we used this swedish syrup on them that's actually pretty good, even though it is made from beets instead of trees like good american syrup is supposed to be. Then I made Jessica open the presents I got for her. The first one was a framed photo of us, which I had gotten from Ofoto.com. All you have to do is upload a digital photo and pick a frame and they send it to you. And if you search on the internet for 'ofoto coupon code' like I did you can get 20% off or something like that. The next present I got Jessica was a pair of books, the Vampire Encyclopedia and the Werewolf Encyclopedia.

And then the last present I got her was a set of four Care Bear toys. But unlike normal toys, these ones are possessed by the Devil. If you sit them in a circle and squeeze their hands, they start singing. But before they do, they actually talk to each other and recognize each other by name, and then they all sing the same song but they divide it up into parts. And they bob their heads while they sing. It is very creepy.

So after opening all those presents, Jessica loved me. And then we went for a walk. It was raining outside, so I gave her one of my white tshirts to wear. It wasn't raining very hard, though, and the rain even stopped for a while. We went to the Duck Pond on campus, and Jessica brought her camera and took photos of the ducks. Most of the ducks are mallards, but there is also a pair of white ducks. And then there is one freak duck that looks half-mallard half-white. The duck had markings in the mallard pattern, but, for example, his head was white instead of green, and he had other patches of white feathers too. Later we saw another duck like that but female, mostly brown like a mallard but with white patches. We suspected that those two ducks were the result of one of the white ducks cheating on the other with one of the mallards, but we couldn't be sure. Maybe the white ducks broke up, for example, so it wasn't actually an affair.

And then we walked over to this little neat grove thing by the duckpond that has a handy pagan altar in it. There are little steps into it, and the floor is stone and there is a stone wall with a stone bench in it all around, and then a little altar thing with a fireplace and a little chimney. It's a nice place, and I like it. So the next thing I did was ask Jessica to marry me, and I presented her with this nice flashy platinum diamond ring. She said "yes" right away, and then she scolded me on being so anti-clever. Apparently, she had already figured out that I was probably going to propose to her, even though I had given no actual hints or clues or anything. She just knows me too well, I suppose, and she's also good at reading my mind sometimes.

After that we hugged for a while and then we went shopping at some of the hippie stores in downtown blacksburg, doing some more christmas shopping. And when I say "we", I mean "Jessica". When we got back to apartment, there was a slip from UPS saying package was in the apartment office, so we went and got it. Jessica got me Mario Party 5 for our anniversary.

She is just the definition of supreme excellence. So we played it, as a team against the computers, and I'm glad we did so. If we had been playing indivually she would have beaten me horribly, since she won way more minigames than I did. I guess when I gave her the ring I also gave her my Mario Party prowess inadvertantly. Oh well. For lunch we went to Red Lobster and got a bunch of seafood and cheddar biscuits. The funny part was that right away, our waitress asked Jessica "is that an engagement ring?" because the ring is just so awesome and cool.

After eating we hung around my apartment a bit more, and then we drove up to her father's house to say hello to him. His directions were a bit vague, and all the street signs in the area were completely unreadable at night, but we eventually found his house. Jessica didn't show him the ring until we were about to leave, but then he was really impressed.

That's enough rambling, the rest of the story will have to go untold. Here's the pictures of the ring, though: