Sparkly: The Dell holiday party was on Saturday. We rented a tuxedo for Jon, and I wore a silver ball-gown skirt with a burgundy, sparkly shirt. ...Do you know that Dell has a lot of employees? Holy cow. But the theme was Mardi Gras, and there was dancing and champagne and jugglers and magicians and a guy on stilts and crawfish and other fried, possibly seafood, things on a buffet in the dark (meet Jon, my tastetester).

But beforehand, Jon took me for a walk along Congress Street, over the bat bridge. The moon was full, Christmas lights hung along the bridge, the Colorado River glistened below. And then he made that most cinematic of movements: Reach into the tuxedo's inside jacket pocket, remove the little velvet box, and get down on one knee.

And then he stood up and told me about the warranty on the diamonds...