Local goon acquires sparkly ring

So this crazy thing happened the other week: I got ENGAGED.

I know! I told you it was crazy. It was a complete surprise too. Well, not a complete surprise. I knew by our third date we were getting married some day. But I didn't know that, three years after said date, he was actually actively working to make it happen. Sneaky little bastard.

So here's what happened. It's Sunday, April 5, the day we planned to go on a picnic, the picnic he has been talking about all week. I wake up and it's sunny and beautiful, perfect picnic weather. But he's gone. I hear banging in the kitchen and investigate. He's there, making breakfast. There are flowers on the counter that he drove 10 minutes to steal I mean cut from some garden somewhere while I slept. I'm impressed.

"Wow," I say. "What's all this?"

"It's supposed to be breakfast in bed," he says.

I do the math in my head: The night before, he baked cookies. Later, we'll be going on a picnic. Now, he's making breakfast and stealing flowers. Yes, I'm definitely impressed. But also slightly nervous. What the hell did he do?

I decide I don't care at the moment because he's making his amazing pancakes and scrambled eggs with cheese. When they're all finished, he makes me go back to bed so it can truly be breakfast in bed. The bedside table is decorated with the fresh flowers.

We eat and talk and joke around. He seems a little off, a little on edge. Something's up, but I can't help feeling cheerful and content. He keeps asking me if I've finished eating. I vaguely wonder if he's trying to poison me. And so, my belly full of possibly poisonous pancakes, I decide to find out what's really going on.

"Did you do something bad?" I ask, already knowing that he didn't because he wouldn't.

He laughs a nervous little laugh.

"Well," he says. "I have something else for you."

"Is it cookies?" I ask.

"No," he says. "I wanted to ask you something."

There it is. Something clicks loudly in my brain, and I start to sweat a little bit. I am suddenly very aware that I am still wearing my mismatched pajamas, my hair is standing up everywhere, and I have not yet brushed my teeth. Meanwhile, he is digging around in the pocket of his jeans.

"Mandy..." he says. "Will you..."

And that's all I really hear because at that point he is holding in his long skinny fingers a beautiful sparkling ring. My brain is buzzing. My heart is pounding. I'm overwhelmed with every happy emotion possible, including relief. I can't stand to look at the ring, it's too much, and I cover his hand with mine. Something in me releases and completely escapes from the confines of my body. The proverbial floodgates open, and I bury my head in his shoulder, shaking with tears. All he can do is hold me and silently freak out.

"Oh my God Kevin," I manage to mumble through tears, "I can't believe you're doing it. I can't believe you're really doing it."

I give him kisses upon kisses all over his face. I cry and laugh and cry. He laughs and cries with me. Finally, he says, "Well...what do you think?" And I manage to say, "Of course." Then he places the ring on my finger, and we laugh and cry some more.

It's a beautiful ring, a princess cut diamond in a simple setting with a white gold band. It's my kind of ring.

"It's too bad you don't get anything, huh?" I say.

"I get you," he says.

Yeah. He's that good.

Later on, we call our families and go on that picnic. He says he was going to ask me during our picnic, but he couldn't wait. I tell him to ask me again, and he does. My answer is still the same.

Periodically, throughout the day, he says, "So whaddya think? Wanna get married?" My answer is always the same and always will be.

Today I...

- Helped my old man neighbor Joe and his smelly beagle dog Penny when he locked himself out of his house. I called the locksmith, and we all hung out in my living room while we waited for them to show up. Penny puked on my doormat.

- Decided not to apply to any jobs until tomorrow. Stupid job hunt and its lack of progress makes me feel bad about myself.

- Got a call from the county assistance office. I'm eligible for Food Stamps. It's a relief and another thing that makes me feel bad about myself.

- Finished reading "French Milk," a fun graphic novel that makes me want to go to France and learn French and eat lots and lots of French food. It also makes me want to write in short, comic-book-like sentences and research French recipes.

- Noticed that snow makes noise when it falls. It's very quiet, almost imperceptible, but it's there. It sounds a little like white noise. No pun intended.

Unexpected neighbors

I thought I moved to a city. Pittsburgh is a small city, but a city nonetheless. Cities are sprawling, have big downtown buildings, lots of people, public transportation. Pittsburgh has all that.

But it also has deer.

The first time I saw a Pittsburgh deer was just a few nights after we moved here. My brother, Kevin and I were driving on a dark, but fairly busy street when there in front of us was not one, but two deer. Just hanging out. I stopped my car, which is the customary deer greeting back home in rural Pennsylvania, four and a half hours east of here, where deer run rampant along back roads surrounded by farmland. "I come in peace," my engine purred. "Now move."

As I patiently waited for them to disperse, I suddenly remembered, I wasn't in rural Pennsylvania anymore. I was in PITTSBURGH. And there were DEER. In the middle of the STREET. "What the hell kind of place is this," my engine screeched; it also had just remembered where it was.

So the deer finally jumped out of the way, but they didn't move back the way I assumed they had come, which was the left side of the street, where there was some grass and a small patch of woods next to a retirement home. No. They moved to the right side of the street, where homes and human inhabitants stretched out for miles to the river and downtown. They moved towards civilization.

I watched them run, and then I saw who they were running to. There were three more deer, hanging out in somebody's front yard.

The next day, my brother Tim and I were driving down that same street. The deer were gone, but there was a family standing on the front porch of the house whose lawn hosted the guest herd of deer the night before.

"Look!" Tim said. "The deer evolved!"

I thought the whole thing was a fluke. I thought those five deer were rogues, rebels, doing the deer equivalent of graffiti by eating and pooping on someone's lawn.

Until two weeks ago, when I saw another deer hanging out beside another fairly busy street, eating and pooping on someone else's front lawn. Then last week, driving down that same street, I almost ran into a deer in the street, presumably working his way over to a lawn on which to eat and poop.

This is becoming a pattern, a pattern in which the deer are getting closer and closer to my car. It's only a matter of time until I hit one of them. Or they poop on my car.

It would be just my luck that I live for more than 20 years in a rural area, surrounded by farmland and woods, and never even come close to hitting a deer. But as soon as I move to an arguably urban area, I hit a damn deer.

Back home, I ran over a fully-loaded pallet of junk mail that fell off a truck into the middle of a dark and rainy highway. Pittsburgh's own Bambi is undoubtedly next.