www.markpude.com

So I’ve taken the plunge and am now engaged to my girlfriend (fiance now) Leslie.

It all started a couple of months ago when I decided, casually at first, to start poking around at what engagement rings went for.  It didn’t take long for me to realize I was getting in way over my head.  It took a couple of months, more knowledge about diamonds than I ever wanted, and some extreme coercion from a close friend to do it right, but I finally got a ring.  Then was the simple matter of asking her father and then figuring out when and where to ask her…

I had a lot of time to plan these things, but with myself in Rochester and Leslie (and her father) in Mass., I had very little time to execute those plans.  I earned a lot of new gray hairs over the past couple of weeks, but I manage to arrange lunch with her father on Friday and get her to hike Mt. Monadnock in Jaffrey, NH with me this Sunday.  We got up to the top and I popped the question up there and she said yes, which was exciting.  Unfortunately it was below freezing with the wind chill at the top of the mountain so we didn’t stay up there to enjoy it very long.  Some pictures of the event are here:

Facebook Album
markpude.com Album

They’re the same thing originally posted on facebook, but I can’t help but be self referential…  We spent the rest of the day running around to visit each of our families to spread the news and by the end of the day we were both exhausted but happy.

I’ll probably update as appropriate here as things progress…

So I’m taking a little bit of a break from running which means that being ready in time for Buffalo is in jeopardy if not completely off the table as an option.  Over the past week or two, my left foot really started bothering me.  The top of the foot hurts for about the first mile or two that I run and feels very similarly to the stress fracture I had in high school that ended my very short and uninteresting running career to date at the time.  It took a long time for me to heal after that so I’m hoping that I caught it early enough this time that I won’t be out of commission for months.

Shooting for the Rochester marathon in September if I heal in a reasonable amount of time.

Time to go buy a bike I suppose!