Stephanie Midori Taylor will you marry me?

	Background and Preparation. Stephanie and Andrew met in February of 2006. For the first year or so, Stephanie and Andrew were still just getting to know each other better and learning more about their respective lives. Andrew, for instance, learned that Stephanie was a vegetarian after taking her to a restaurant that served pork-broth ramen. Stephanie found out that Andrew likes to mispronounce Japanese to Japanese friends as a joke. They discovered that they share a good deal of the same interests and values, such as international outreach and doing church, academics, and the same favorite anime series. They appreciated their compatible strengths, such as Andrew's strength in finances and computer programming and Stephanie's artistic and hospitality skills. In the spring and summer of 2007, Stephanie and Andrew participated in pre-marital counseling sessions held at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, since they knew that in the fall of 2007 their lives would be much more hectic. Throughout these sessions, Andrew and Stephanie learned relationship skills that they hope will help them build a healthy life together and which helped them to understand some of the fundamental dynamics of a life together. Starting from early 2008, Andrew and Stephanie learned that they could spend their lives together, feeling that they would enjoy this and be able to bless more people together than they would apart.
The Selection of the Ring. After they had decided this, Stephanie expressed her desire for a green ring. With some of Stephanie's input, Andrew was able to find a jeweler who proved very helpful and made a 3-stone palladium ring with one green sapphire, one blue-green sapphire, and one blue sapphire. Weeks after he ordered the ring, it finally arrived having been delayed due to the rarity of blue-green sapphires. When the ring did arrive, Andrew was afraid that the entire ring would be far too small. One gemstone is green, Stephanie's favorite color since a toddler as well as her middle name ("Midori" means "Green" in Japanese), one is blue, which is Andrew's favorite color, and the middle larger one is blue-green - a blending. It's beautiful.
The Day. On Saturday June 14, 2008, Andrew took Stephanie on a date to Chodanggol, a Korean tofu restaurant in New York City. Riding together on the subway, he nervously worried that he would lose the ring. He had hoped to ask Stephanie if she would marry him in Central Park, but a deluge combined with Stephanie's preference not to go for a walk later that evening stopped this course of action. Nervous and worried about losing the ring, Andrew decided to ask Stephanie in the restaurant. After chatting on various topics, Andrew said, "Can we talk about something completely different?" "Okay," Stephanie replied. Andrew grinned sheepishly. "What do you want to talk about?" Stephanie asked. Andrew grinned sheepishly. Nearly a minute later, Andrew made his move and dropped to one knee (and then the other), holding out the ring, and said "Stephanie Midori Taylor will you marry me?" To which she answered, "Yes, I'd love to, Andrew." The restaurant erupted in applause. Andrew, having been so nervous, had not moved. "Would you like to put it on?" Stephanie asked, looking at the ring held between his thumb and index finger. Andrew did so and returned to his seat, after which the waiter brought plum wine and congratulated them.
Resizing of the Ring. The ring that Andrew had first thought was too small turned out to be way too big. Palladium also proves to be a hard metal to find a jeweler for. In order to resize the ring, Andrew spent about 4 hours wandering from jeweler to jeweler, first on 32nd street near the Empire State Building and then in an area called the Diamond District on 47th Street. At each building, Andrew would ask "Do you have anyone who can resize a ring, a palladium ring?" to which almost every time he heard no. At one building, there was a man who could do it, but he was leaving for the day and would not be back. Finally, Andrew found a jeweler who worked by himself in an odd, broom closet-sized, cluttered nook off of a stairwell who agreed to wait around and resize the ring that evening Stephanie came down directly from work and Stephanie and Andrew watched in wonder as the man resized the ring. In the middle of the resizing, the jeweler had Stephanie try the ring on again, but it took a lot of work for her to get the ring off her finger. The jeweler returned to his bench to continue working, and regaled them with stories of having learned his craft in "the old country", and then he set the ring aside to cool. Shortly after this, he began frantically looking all over the tiny, dirty workspace for something. Puzzled, Stephanie and Andrew waited... until it slowly dawned on them that one of the stones was missing from the ring. When they realized this, they joined the jeweler in his search but did not find anything. Half an hour later, the jeweler asked Stephanie and Andrew to move a couple steps back. There, on the floor, the jeweler found the missing stone which must have fallen out when taking the ring off of Stephanie's finger. Stephanie, Andrew and the jeweler breathed a collective sigh of relief. The jeweler reset the stone, fixing the settings for all three stones and polished it to a far greater brightness than it had come in from the distributor.