Start of an amazing race

Joanna is a fan of the show Amazing Race, and has on occasion noted that it’d be fun to be part of something like that. Though, the chances of that is pretty low, given that neither of us are fans of the camera. As such, I thought it would be nice if I set up something similar for her to go through. Nothing big, maybe a few things to find, some tasks to complete, some places to go to.

I decided to separate the Race into three components: Joanna's Toronto house, Toronto people, and Waterloo people. 

Toronto House Scavenger Hunt (Sat)
This was fairly easy to set up. I hid several items in her house, and had her search for it. Some of the more interesting items included:

• A can of Campbell soup under her computer desk - For some random minor anniversary (like 2 years and 5 months or something like that), we bought some food at the local grocery store and went over to her place, intending to cook. However, this is during that crazy November 2012 storm and power went out at her place. Luckily, we bought emergency food: a can of soup. Unluckily, the microwave and the oven didn't work because the power was out. Thus, the dinner was unmicrowaved canned soup. The only reason why I knew that wouldn't give us food poisoning is because the UWO guys did it all the time. If any of those guys happen to be reading this, I formally apologize for that one time where I renounced your practice of not using the microwave when it was just around the corner at Taylor.
• A University of Waterloo teddy bear with a shirt that says "Someone at Waterloo loves me" - A while ago, she got me a similar bear from McMaster. It seemed almost like regifting if I just got her the same thing back, so I hid it behind some other stuff animals that she has. Except for she found it randomly, way ahead of schedule. That took some quick improvising on my part.
• Fundamental Nursing - I hid a note in one of her nursing textbooks. The clue pointing to it was encoded by a shifted alphabet cypher that she figured out...of course, I proceeded to misspell the name of the textbook in the cypher. Good thing it was close enough. 

Now that I've made her run around a bit, I had planted the last clue so that she ends up calling one of her friends...

Toronto People Meeting ups (Sun to Fri)
 I met up with several of her friends, of either people she grew up with, or people she's became close with over the span of university. I was only able to include a handful (I did want to propose relatively soon, ya know) of people, but it largely involved me letting them know that Joanna will call them in some general time period, and that they should arrange to meet up in another time period, and when they do, she is to be handed some clues that leads to yet another people. 

A fair bit of running around for her. But it sounded like it was relatively interesting. This lasted two weeks, where she met up with 4 groups of people.

Waterloo Events (Sat)
I scheduled her events around two weekends that she would be back at town. She worked at Mikey's when she was younger, so we got her to clean, so that was kind of amusing. The big event here though, is a photo scavenger hunt, where she had to sift through Facebook photos. That took quite a while. 

Her family is also big into dumpling folding and board games, so I asked her sister to host such an event...then crashed it. It was her sister's birthday earlier in the week, so we thought it would be funny to show up with a cake in the middle of their party. Our insiders worked out well. 

Proposal (Sun)
After church and lunch, we started the last segment. For her to get her next clue, I told her that she had to beat me at a video game. She chose Puzzle Fighter, and proceeded to wipe the floor with me. And here I thought we'd be playing it for a while...

Her clues led her to E5, where a bottle of Green Tea Frappuccino (melted and shoved into a bottle) was waiting in a fridge in the student lounge. I had bought this on Sat, and got it into an old Sprite glass bottle I had. Unfortunately, I used her Starbucks card so she gets points, and I didn't realize that she gets alerted when she earned a new drink on my purchase. Another moment of quick thinking was needed when she asked me the next day (I rarely get Starbucks). 

While in Japan, we had joked that the Arashiyama bamboo forests would've been a perfect place to propose. If I had done it with a green tea latte (it was pretty good) in one hand and the ring in the other, and had Kobe steak afterwards, it would've been amazing engagement. 

Waterloo Park, unfortunately, was the closest forest I had available to me. Before we started dating, we had chatted at length about the idea. These chatting happened 1) in a house I no longer lived in, 2) in a parking lot, and 3) in a playground at Waterloo Park. Obviously, the most romantic location out of these is the parking lot the playground, so the clues let her to the playground. It was pretty busy there, so we eventually moved on to a soccer field. 

We chatted for a bit, and I felt that it was appropriate to remind ourselves Eph 5, so we did a bit of reading. And talked about tangential things. And tangented. It was rather nerve-wracking. When it really came down to it, I was on my knee for a good 5-10 minutes, asking her if she was ready for it. Inside the ring box was actually my Iron Ring (which we also joked about), which we laughed at for a bit before I pulled out the actual ring from my wallet. 

We went to dinner afterwards, with some of the Waterloo people that helped me pull this off, at Golf's. Not quite Kobe, but steak nevertheless. 

Oh, right. She said yes.