It was my first day in Long Beach, I was moving into the dorms at CSULB and Anika happened to be helping people move in. I was the last person she helped carried boxes for. I thought that she seemed pretty awesome and her name was so cool, I hoped I would see her again. She told me about a tailgate going on during the afternoon, and so I decided to go. We ended up running into each other and she was surprised I remembered her name. A week later she invited me to Yogurtland to which I replied "are you going with people or can I pick you up?" ... She said I could pick her up ;) ...and that was the wonderful start of our story together.

Well, the plan was to go for a walk on this frozen lake up in Mt. Shasta, little to my knowledge, the lake had almost three feet of fresh snow on it and was not as frozen as I anticipated. As we trudged around through the thigh deep snow, Anika began to jokingly threaten that "...there BETTER be some freakin hot chocolate or something..." at the end of our seemingly aimless hike. What she didn't know was that I was secretly (or maybe not so secretly) FREAKING OUT because I, for the life of me, could NOT find the agreed upon photo location (with my secret photographer) due to the super deep snow. I finally decided to turn us around and walk back in the direction we came from (which made Anika super confused and probably a little annoyed) and hope that the photographer would see us. I chose a frozen log that was jetting out onto the lake and decided to just go for it there. Good news! She said yes! (and the photographer found us.. whewwph) but as Anika would put it, "After I said YES, he fell into the lake!" Yep.. I slipped off the log and ended up plunging my feet through the ice into the freezing cold water (see picture below). After we had a good laugh and Anika helped me back onto the log, we went back to our cabin and were greeted with the most wonderful handmade wedding desserts and toasted our engagement with beautiful 100 year old 20's champagne glasses. The day couldn't have ended more perfect!