[About Val] [About Jay] [The Proposal]

Our Stories

About Val

I could start at the very beginning. But in this case, instead of a "very good place to start", it would be a very boring place to start. Thus, I'll summarize.

I was born in Florida and lived there for about 10 years, until I completed 5th grade. Then I moved to western North Carolina and completed high school. I have fond memories of high school, particularly my participation in some top-notch women's athletic teams. I graduated in 1995 and settled on Duke University, just 4 hours east of home.

At Duke, in addition to making some amazing friends, I became one with my inner geek and majored in Computer Science. After graduating from Duke, I bummed around in Austin, TX (great food, great town, hate the weather) working for IBM for four years before deciding I wanted to go back to grad school. I looked at about 8 schools and eventually decided on Georgia Tech.

So I packed up the cat, moved to Atlanta, bought a townhouse and settled down to the independent, single-gal lifestyle. Little did I know what was lurking around the corner...

About Jay

I was born in New Mexico, but my parents sold their motorcycle shop and moved me up to Yakima WA where I was soon joined by my sister, Rebecca.

I grew up on 40 acres of land in Tampico, WA (just outside of Yakima) where we played in the creek and built forts on the hill. In High School I worked for a local ISP while running on the cross-country and track (distance) teams.

Then I received a Computer Science degree from Central Washington University where I also completed a four year course of reading and discussing the "great books of western civilization" in the DHC program.

Despite the fact that 1999 was the beginning of the dotcom boom and jobs in computer science were practically throwing themselves at graduating students, I foolishly decided to continue with my education and got a Masters degree at Oregon State University, where I learned to juggle.

After that, I flew to Atlanta with a suitcase and started working on a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech (Where I met Val).

The Proposal

After a little over a year of dating, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Valerie. But she hadn't met my family yet and I wanted her to be "fully informed" before popping the question. So I invited her over to Yakima before Christmas and waited until halfway through her visit to take her to the Japanese Garden on the Central Washington University campus.

The one thing she had told me was that she did NOT want a "giant solitaire", so of course I spent big bucks to buy the largest diamond ring (paperweight) I could find from Johnson Smith Novelty ("Things you never knew existed and others you can't live without.") and pulled it out of my pocket at the key moment. She laughed so hard tears came to her eyes... It's clearly an incredible feat to get a girl to say yes with a $20 rock.

I then grabbed her digital camera to document the moment because I hadn't thought to bring my own... After a few days of shopping together we found a really nice non-traditional engagement ring to be the "real" engagement ring. (I also borrowed my father's jewelry tools to hand-craft a silver wedding band to use in the ceremony and for traveling out of the country.)