“What?! Are you f-ing kidding me?”

It was a very eventful weekend to say the least. The boy and I had planned to hit up the Grove to say good bye to his mom who is going to the motherland for a month, and after a hard days rockin’ (at work), I was pretty much exhausted by the time we pulled out of the driveway.

I kept getting more and more tired as the trip progressed. One thing the boy loves to do is talk, and I sort of picked up on it a little that he was talking more than usual. In his boy-code, he only talks a lot if he is a) hyper, b) a little drunk, and c) nervous about something.

“Hey, we’re going to go to Edmonton before we hit up the Grove, ok? I gotta pick something up.”

“Mnhmm…whatever dude. What do you have to get?”

“Oh, it’s a surprise.”

So we pull up beside the Ledge, and I’m so so damned tired at this point.

“Hey, wanna go for a walk while we’re here?”

Ahhh motherfucker….

“Ok.”

So we walk, and it’s actually pretty nice, because there’s a wicked storm brewing to the west with lots of sheet lightning. It’s a little cool, but we warm up as we get going. I want to walk by the wading pools (they magnetize me) and he instead insists on going down to where the maple trees form a corridor. We’d once sat there for a few hours catcalling some frisbee tossers, and he considered this a very memorable bonding moment.

So we’re standing there, and he stops and looks at me intently, and I yawn and rub my eyes sheepishly.

He gets down on one knee.

Waitaminute, what the fuck?

“Girl [1], will you marry me?”

“Shit-fuck- what? Really? Shit…Crap, sorry, I’m ruining the moment!”

“Uhh…yeah, I would really like it if you said yes.”

“Well, of course I’ll marry you!”

So that is how the famed moment went down. The ring is beautiful (I was really really surprised by the ring and his ability to be so sneaky about it). I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because on one hand, it does seem really soon, but on the other, we’re living together, and it’s been going seamlessly and we still have a good time most of the time we spend so close together. He’s got his quirks certainly, but so have I, and I figure that’s just part of the deal. Plus, history, alongside the present, tells me that the Boy is awesome, and he doesn’t even have to try (“I try really hard though,” he always says) at all. Since this, we both agreed on some things that both of us have to do prior to setting an actual date (the first week of October is what we’re thinking, of 2009), in the name of personal development (ie- I have to quit smoking, for real-reals, not for play-play)

So, just when you think the grand story of my long weekend is over, we had some minor drama yesterday. We’ve both been trying to exercise more (for my boy and I, we are hefty), and so yesterday was a beautiful opportunity to go out on my bike and rollerblades. I started out on the bike, him on rollerblades, and then we switched because he wouldn’t stop complaining about the piss-poor construction of them. He’s on the bike, I’m on the blades, I make him pull me a lot of the way on the shitty pavement but do get some quality exercise in there. On the way back, I had just let go of the bike over some particularly tenuous pavement, and he flew on ahead of me, bouncing on the bike-shocks to see how well they worked. My bike lock was in a bad place on the frame, and when he pushed the shocks in particularly far, while going sort of fast, the padlock lodged itself between the tire and the brakes and brought him to a dead stop–in theory. Physics tells us that a 230 lb weight, travelling about 10 km/h being brought to an abrupt halt has a lot of inertia, so over the handlebars he went.

I thought he landed on his face with the bike on top of him, but it turns out his hand sort of broke the fall [2] along with, well, the rest of his body and the side of his face. He didn’t knock himself out, but he got some bumps and scrapes, and was utterly convinced that he’d broken his metacarpel bone in his hand (read: the “heel” part of your hand–that bone). So, I checked him out and did what little first aid I could (not a lot was necessary) and he decided we should call 911 for his broken hand.

“This is 911, what is your emergency?”

“Uhhh…my fiance fell off his bike. We think his hand is broken.”

“Where are you?”

“Good question…I see some grain elevators and a wheat field.”

We finally got the emergency crews to arrive, and they took care of him [3] and brought him to the hospital. After 3 X-rays, more sitting around, and an awesome callously delivered tetanus shot (“Watch the birdy! Bam!”), we get the doctor to take a look. He squeezes the Boy’s hand a bunch, which makes him go rather white, and scrutinizes the x-rays and says, “you just banged it really hard, it’s not broken.” And the stupid thing is, he’s right, it’s not broken. The boy and I peer at the x-ray, and there’s not a break to be seen, not even a nick, even though he doubles over in pain whenever it gets touched. I felt bad, because the nurses gave him a hard time (as did I), but essentially it boiled down to a very low pain tolerance. So, we decided he should take a sick day (timely, because he just got his brother’s PS3 and X-Box 360) and that he’s allergic to exercise (he thinks, but I disagree).

[1] He did use my name, not some weird boy-band sounding line.

[2] No, we weren’t wearing helmets. I counted four “you should have worn a helmet lectures” in the remainder of the evening.

[3] Gave him a blanket and stood around and shot the shit with the Boy about radio junk until the ambulance arrived, 40 minutes later, by which time I’d gotten home and then back to pick up the trashed bike. He is quite a comedian, and was a pretty good sport through the whole thing.