Snow! A ring! More snow! And lots of cookies and baking and soup and bread

Many of you fellow citizens of the Facebook Nation already saw the "status change" on Jake or my profile, but just to complete the new media announcement loop: Jake proposed the other day, I said yes, and then there was a ring (on my finger), and we are now officially engaged. Double exclamation points!! Here's Rock checking out my newly engaged hand (both of my parents individually asked if we had "told Rocky yet"-- I suppose we have). He is unimpressed because it is not edible.

For some reason I like the word in Spanish better -- I am comprometida. Which also means "in a difficult situation," according to my dictionary. And he is my fiance, I guess, and vice versa. Odd that the word in English is, for some reason, French. Are we "betrothed" in English? Anyone have a good vocabulary suggestion? I am still getting up to speed on all of this.

No idea on when, where or what we will do (not a religious thing, but some sort of ceremony, which we'll have to figure out). We have briefly discussed names. Galvez-Faleschini and Faleschini-Galvez (with and without hyphens), Galvezschini (I am particularly fond of the confusion and ethnic ambiguity that the z-s-c-h combo might create) ... but I am a fan of just keeping our respective names, respectively.

Jake was incredibly thoughtful and sweet and--uncharacteristically--devious. He had a plan that I was completely clueless about. Which resulted in him proposing with me carrying a large bag of kettle corn, which then accompanied me to the very nice jewelry store where his friend was waiting for me to come and pick out the ring. Which I did, albeit sort of in a daze, and wore home on the 49 bus through a snow storm. I swore everyone was looking at my hand, which of course they were not. Just we were. It is now my lucky bag of kettle korn, so I am finishing it off uncharacteristically slowly. I should figure out how to make kettle Korn, because I seriously love that stuff. But more on all of that later, probably.

In the meantime, we are completely snowed in here in Seattle. Buses aren't running, airport closed last night, the streets covered with packed snow and ice and no tire chains for sale within a few miles of here. We live on a big hill, where this happened just a couple of blocks away. So I have been cooking and baking up a storm -- two types of biscotti, potato leek soup with celeriac, bread, chocolate chip cookies, dark-chocolate covered nuts ... I finally made a chicken stew. Thank God we had dinner guests the other night to help with some of it.

I am probably moving on today to cranberry nut bread and pumpkin chocolate chip. Maybe pecan pie and lemon meringue tart tomorrow and Wednesday. And I think I did it: found a recipe for lard bread!!! That I am hoping to try on Wed. More on the baking later. I think I'll put all the recipes together in a link or a doc.

All this is in between dissertation work, of course. Um, yeah. I say as I head off to the gym (wear the ring?). But it has been a crazy few days and I so have a draft of some stuff that needs to go to my advisor. I may post if I can figure out how to do a pdf.