One week before we had been dating for exactly four years, I asked Stacey to marry me. But not quite so simply.

No, first, she had to run all over town in a “scavenger hunt” patterned after The Amazing Race, complete with Logan serving as cameraman with his fine Sony HD camcorder.

At each stop of the “race”, she would find a relative or friend. Three of her friends came from out of town to participate. She had to do various tasks like find a certain item inside a store, paint a picture, race a go-kart, and (my favorite) participate in a miniature NFL combine, complete with 40-yard-dash time and Wonderlic test. Perhaps the best moment is when she didn’t know what the word “gridiron” referred to, and she ended up asking people in the mall what it meant - finally getting an answer from former Oakland Raider and AFL Hall of Fame receiver Art Powell, who was signing autographs in the mall.

At the end, she found everyone waiting for her at the restaurant at which we had our first date. There, I proposed to her, she accepted (this was a foregone conclusion - she had been pretty much bugging me to hurry up the proposal for some time ), and we all enjoyed a wonderful Japanese food dinner.

Soon, we will shoot some B-roll, and take all of that film and cut it together into a TV-style broadcast, complete with dramatic soundtrack and all that fun stuff. We’ll master it to a DVD, and keep it forever.

Stacey has a more complete account of the events on her journal. I don’t have the energy to try and describe it as she did, and I was at “mission control” the whole time anyway. Needless to say, organizing and executing this plan was a LOT of work and planning, and the logistics were my biggest stressing point.

Stacey has also created a website at weddingannouncer.com where information of our wedding-to-be will be posted. She’s got some stuff up now.