A memo from the desk of TMI

I have vericose veins. On my...






...fanny flaps.



Apparently vulvar verices (as they are technically known) are common in around 10% of pregnancies (though that's considered to be a wild underestimate as it is believed the condition goes largely unreported), and appear most frequently in the fifth month (check) of a woman's second pregnancy (aaaaand check).



God I have being unoriginal.

WHY THE FUCK AM I STILL PREGNANT?!?!?!?!

My due date was Friday. This is shit. This is NOT the German efficiency (and I'm 25% German, so that should count for something.)

I'm huge. I can't sleep. I can't sit comfortably, stand comfortably, walk comfortably, or lie down comfortably. And I'm fed up with swapping one discomfort for another just for variety's sake.

Also, I'm exhausted. I can't sleep. I have to pee every 45 minutes (until about 4 am by which time I'm sufficiently dehydrated that I can go about 2 hours between weeing. If only my uterus was as keen as my fucking kidneys.) And my RLS* has become unbearable. I lie in bed at night jerking like a mule that's undergone army experimentation, thus guaranteeing that the Pirate isn't getting any meaningful sleep, either. (And he hasn't whinged about it once, bless his tighty whities.)

We went to see Brendon Burns in Oxford on Thursday night, hoping to laugh the kid loose. Nearly worked, too. Had a couple contractions before the show began, and after 90 minutes of solid belly laughter I carried on contracting strongly, if erradically, until about 2 am. Then it all fizzled out and died and I've had nothing since. Bah.

Tomorrow is my nephew's birthday. He'll be 1. Keep your fingers crossed that something kicks off tonight so the cousins can share a birthday. That would be cool.


*Don't laugh. It's real, and it SUCKS.

Is she a woman, or a guppy???

Is anyone else at all distressed that a mother of 6 children (ages 2-7, which means she didn't get her period for 5 years) felt the need to have fertility treatment? Am I the only one who thinks that's crazy?

1. I SERIOUSLY hope her health insurance didn't pay for that fertility treatment
2. What on earth makes her think she's capable of looking after 6 kids AND 8 infants at the same time, while her husband is on duty in Iraq no less???
3. Why would anyone want that many kids? I can understand having 14 kids in the grand old days before birth control. You either had to accept that you'll be a baby machine or give up having sex with your husband for the rest of your life. I know what I would have chosen. But this is the 21st century people! You no longer have to make that choice. Wake up and smell The Pill!

8 babies. That's not a family, it's a LITTER. It's dangerous (for the mother and the kids), it's irresponsible and puts an unfair drain on social service programs and the medical system (at the end of the day, whether she's on medicare and wellfare or and employed adult with health coverage, it's still the rest of us who are picking up the tab for this woman's personal attempt to populate the planet with her own spawn), and it's not fair on the rest of her kids, who will now be completely ignored until the 8 babies are all out of diapers.

Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts?

Back at "GO"

Today is my 30th birthday.

30 is one of those landmark birthdays where you sit back and look at your life as it is and compare with where you thought you'd be at this point. Let's take a look, shall we?

A. Where I thought I'd be:
Happily married, at home with my Pirate, having some people to dinner to celebrate.

B. Where I actually am:
At my parents' home in the USA, back where I started, feeling old and wondering when I'll see my Pirate again.


Now before you panic let me assure you this has nothing to do with any kind of marital issues. Pirate and I are still madly in love and horny as hell and all that gross newlywed stuff. The problem is immigration issues. I'm stuck here, waiting on my spousal visa, without which I cannot return to the UK. They said it could be as long as 10 weeks.

My aunt knows the Honorary British Consulate for the Detroit area, who is a very nice man and is trying to push things along for me and shorten that 10 week estimate. Meanwhile the Pirates-in-Law have contacted their MP to push things along from that side. With any luck if they both push hard enough they'll meet somewhere in the middle and I can get the fuck out of here.

So here I sit, in my parents' house, feeling old, wondering how I ended up back here again. I feel rather like I've been playing a board game, and drew a bum card or landed on a crappy square that sent me back to "GO" while everyone else is playing on, now half a board ahead of me.

Oh yeah, and I gained 6 pounds over the holidays. 2009 is off to a great start.

High Dorkness

Guess what we did tonight?

I don't think you lot have a clear understanding of just how dorky me and the Pirate are. We are exceptionally dorky.

As Pirate has just said to me (while watching what I type over my shoulder), "The word 'pedant' sums up our relationship quite nicely."

Yes, we listen to Radio 4.
Yes, we watch University Challenge and Mastermind.
Yes, we iron our clothes, eat our vegetables, wash between our toes, and go to bed early. But that is just the beginning.

Tonight we settled a long-standing argument. (Mostly so that one of us would have the opportunity to be smug.) We have been arguing for a while about the plural of the Toyota Prius. But tonight we settled it.

We have this argument because my parents have two of the marvelous little hybrid cars, to which we refer as the family Prii. (Pronounced pree-eye).

Pirate insisted the plural of Prius was Priuses. (I know.)

Since Prius isn't a Latin word, we agreed that the closest equivalent was "focus," and tonight, well, tonight we finally went up to my office, pulled out my Latin grammar and looked up the declension of "focus."

For the record, it IS a second declension noun and therefore the plural is "foci" (something I already knew from high school math class, but that argument didn't fly with Pirate). The only way, in Latin, to pluralize a noun ending in -us is with -i.

So I win. Thanks to Kennedy's Revised Latin Grammar, c. 1962 Longman Group Ltd.

No-man's Land

I saw a new specialist yesterday about my back. He's the head of physical therapy at Plymouth's largest hospital, and he specializes in lower back pain.

I'm not in quite a sufficiently poor state to justify surgery at this point. Most days I can function just fine. It's really only about 1 day a fortnight when I'm genuinely unable to do basic things for myself like get dressed and wipe my ass. Most other days I have pain on and off throughout the day, but I can do the things I need to do, albeit a bit stiffly.

The problem is, I've already just about exhausted all the non-surgical options. I'm fit, healthy, strong, and flexible. Given that, there's very little I can gain from further physical therapy. There are a few things that can be worked on, some movements that I can't do, so they are giving me an NHS physio who will give me more/new excercises, etc. But The Expert said he couldn't guarantee it would have any real impact on my quality of life.

So I'm in a bit of a medical no-man's land. If I were any worse, they would operate, but I'm too healthy to benefit much from phys. Arg.

I asked about my long-term prognosis. His response? (And this is a direct quote) "You have a bad back."

Thanks.

The one small segment of silver lining is that if I do get any worse I'm an absolutely perfect candidate for a particular kind of back surgery that no one else had discussed with me. Instead of removing the disk and fusing the vertebrae, which I thought was the only option, they can add little rubber springs to my L4 and L5 vertebrae on either side of the damaged disk to give it more stability. It's only got a 50-70% success rate, but because I'm such a perfect candidate for it (young, healthy, fit, and with a single-level problem (ie only one affected disk)), they put me at the top end of that estimate, and maybe as high as 80%.

So in the meantime I muddle on as best I can, unlikely to get better, and waiting to get worse, so that then I can get better.

Back to back

My back has been getting slowly but steadily worse for several weeks. By this weekend I was having serious problems, including but not limited to:

• pain that reduced me to tears every time i sneezed or coughed
  
• an inability to bend over to put on my own knickers
• an inability to bend over to wash my face
• an inability to get into a car w/o assistance
• an inability to twist around to wipe my own ass

So I finally did it. I slept on the floor.

I expected that I might feel somewhat better after a night on the floor, instead of in a bed so soft that when you sit on it your ass sinks below the level of your knees. I did not expect that after one night on the floor that I would feel completely fine.

That pretty much settles it. We need a new mattress.

For budget reasons we'd really rather not make a major purchase until after Christmas. As a stop-gap we're going to try putting a sheet of plywood between the mattress and box spring. Several people have suggested that this will help, so it seems the obvious first step.


(Oh, and I've got an appointment with the doctor in the morning to see if there's anything else that can be done from a medical perspective. In the past 2 years the NHS has shown a distinct disinterest in my back problems, but this is a new doctor so maybe he'll be more openminded to helping a 29-year-old healthy woman with chronic pain issues. I'm not holding my breath, though.)

Insomniac

It's 6 am. I've been awake for 2 hours. I don't think I'll go back to bed this morning.

The bed is horrible. It's too small and too soft. With Pirate in it I've got no room to move. My half of the bed is smaller than my mummy sleeping bag. And the mattress is awful. It's really old and completely soft. When you sit on the bed your butt goes all the way down to the box spring. It's doing my back in. I can't turn over in it, and if I'm in one position too long my back hurts. I wake up 6 times a night just to roll over, which I have to sit up to do.

But despite all this I've been able to sleep. It's taken 9 or 10 hours a night to get the equivalent rest of 7 or 8 good hours, but that's ok. Tonight it was the temperature issue again.

I'm cold. I'm always cold. It's a fact of life.

Pirate is hot. (My god is he hot!) He generates heat like a little sea-faring blast furnace. So I want loads of covers and he wants none. USUALLY.

Except the last few nights. It finally got cold here, and he's been complaining that his shoulders are getting cold, because I like to have an arm on top of the blankets and he likes them all the way up to his chin, but when I put an arm out it pushes them all down to the level of his armpit and his shoulders get cold.

So all night tonight as the covers have been sliding all over with their usual independent-mindedness (why the hell do blankets not stay where you put them????), I've been adjusting them to keep Pirate tucked in the way he likes.

When I woke up to move or pee (it's hard to tell sometimes what wakes me) I discovered ALL the blankets and duvets piled on top of me like a 4-foot-deep dollop of wool whipped cream. I couldn't move. I woke Pirate and said "AREN'T YOUR SHOULDERS COLD!??!?!".

"No," he replied. "I'm baking. You can have the covers."

Aaaaaaaaaagggg!

I dumped them all on top of him and got up to blog and eat chocolate chip cookies.

It's finaly happened.

I've actually begun dreaming about the election.

In my dream last night Obama won the popular vote but the electoral college was tied. Since I have no idea what happens in that (highly unlikely) scenario, my dream came to a screeching halt as my brain tried to figure out where to take the plot next.

Does anyone know what happens if the electoral college ties???

A Pirate's Wedding, Part I: A Bottle of Rum

There was a lot of drinking. There needed to be. After the stress of cleaning and moving out of my flat* the arrival of my bridesmaids was a more than welcome relief. Miss Melville came down from Aberdeen and Vi flew in from America with her husband, Wally, and their son, Smally Wally. The Paleo-embryologist (also known as the Welsh Cake, or 'Cake' for short) was the only one of the three who actually lived anywhere near me, and had been keeping me sane all summer by taking me to The Ram and pouring rose' down my gullet whenever I got stressed out.

So Thursday, the day before the wedding, exactly 3 things needed to be accomplished. They were
1. Print out the service books for the wedding and tie them with ribbons
2. Bake, frost, and decoarate the wedding cake
3. Attend the rehearsal

That's still a pretty full agenda.

The service booklets would have been done the day before if I hadn't fucked them up and if my printer hadn't wasted all the good paper I'd bought by printing off the fucked up copies even after I pressed the "cancel" button and dozen times and finally turned the thing off. So first thing Thursday it was hop it off to the stationery shop to buy more paper, phone dad and get him to come over to my hotel room where I'd set up my computer and laser printer and get him to supervise the rest of the printing, and then get Aunt Sr. Pain-in-the-Ass to fold, punch, and ribbon-tie all 90 copies.

That was accomplished by 10:30 am.

Then it was grab all the cake supplies and get a cab up to the University of Bristol Chaplaincy, where they have a full-size professional kitchen with TWO ovens, which i'd booked out for the purpose of baking my cake. (IRONIC: the reason I was able to use the chaplaincy is because I'm a member of the UofB Atheist society, which is part of the multi-faith forum, which has access to the chaplaincy office. Thus I, a godless heathen, was able to use my atheist connections to bake a cake in a chaplain's office for my giant, pompus church wedding. Brilliant.)

The bridesmaids were all supposed to meet me there at noon, and yet somehow, not one of them managed to make it there without assistance. I would take me too long to go to into the convoluted scenario when they all kept phoning me saying "I'm at the corner of pillarbox and lampost. Where are you and how do i find you?" but it took a while and became far more complicated than it ever should have been. You goofballs.

Finally cake-baking and wine-drinking commenced. The first thing that needed to happen was grating the 20 pounds of carrots for the carrot cake tiers. That took a while. The whole process was reasonably well organized though, and once we got the first cake in the oven it all went fairly well. At The Cake (the human one, not the eating one) and Miss Melville went to get my dress from The Cake's flat and take it to the hotel where i was staying, and I went with Vi and the Wallys to the church for the rehearsal.

The rehearsal was extremely rushed. We only had a 25 minute window, and the minister really rushed through everything. Which was kind of good because it kept my mother from interfereing and interrupting every 10 seconds with questions about irrelevancies, but it also didn't give time for the readers to practice their readings, which I thought was rather important. Pirate and I did get to practice our vows, using the names of Marge and Homer and not looking at each other. I managed to get through all the God bits without rolling my eyes, which was an accomplishment.

After that it was a fast dinner at the nearest restaurant** and then back up to keep working on the cake. This is where it all started to go tits up.

For one thing, the chaplaincy had double-booked the kitchen, and when I got back there were 3 muslim blokes there cooking a feast for Ramadan for about 50 people. I wasnt' able to get in the door. They said they would be gone in 10 minutes. An hour later they were still there so I just started working around them as best I could.

They finally left but the place was a mess. I was able to work around the mess, but when they came back to clean up it really go hairy. I needed the sink to keep washing mixing bowls and utensils as i changed back and forth between carrot and lemon cake and frosting, but they were using the sink. That killed another 45 minutes of valuable time.

Then at one point one of them TURNED OFF THE OVENS!. Thank GOD the Cake noticed and we turned them straight back on so there was no damage done. If she hadn't seen that happen 2 tiers of my cake would have been ruined.

And then finally one of the batches of frosting didn't turn out. For some reason it was complete soup. It wasn't usable. So we weren't able to get the whole cake frosted that night.

The Cake's b.f. (The Pud) turned up about 11 pm from York where he's doing his PhD in entymology. We called a cab to take the cake (small c) to my hotel where they agreed to refridgerate it for me overnight. The 4 of us -- The Cake, The Pud, Miss Melville and myself -- piled into a cab, and between us we were able to hold on to all 4 tiers of cake and the bowl of soupy frosting. It was nearly midnight when we got to the hotel, and the cake was still only half frosted!

Stay tuned for part II: The Big Day



*I vacated my flat on the Wednesday before the wedding and moved in to the hotel. On Thursday morning I woke up and discovered I'd left ALL my socks and underwear behind.
**The Rehearsal Dinner isn't a custom over here in the UK, which is good because I was able to eat and run

Crisis du Moment, III

Yesterday a bill arrived from FedEx. They seem to think I owe them 175 pounds in import duty for a package my mother sent me 6 weeks ago. It was a personal gift with a value less than $400, and so no duty is owed on it. For some reason they refuse to believe this. Moreover, the irritating letter came with huge writing across the top: FINAL WARNING. It was the first notice I'd received. Assholes. Somehow I need to convince them I don't owe them anything and get that in writing before they phone Experion and fuck up my credit rating.

Oh sweet Jesus. Whatever we do, we must not, under any circumstances, elect John McCain. He has supported every one of Bush's proposals, and will carry out any legislative or governmental changes enacted by Bush, including this new catastrophe. We cannot allow this to happen.


On a more cheerful note, I am leaving today to visit Pirate and the in-laws for a week, then Pirate and I are going up to the Fringe for a few days. I will still be available on Blogger and email, so I will be in touch with Edinburgh bloggers. Whee! (I don't have time for a vacation, but holy fuck do I need one.)

Target Practic

That's the third time in a month I've come home on my bike to find bird shit all over me - head, back, backpack - whatever. At least this time it was only a pigeon (small, purple, semi-solid poos). Last two times were seagulls -- big blogs of white and yellow, stinky sloppy crap.

Fucking shitehawks.

I think they're getting back at me for shooting them off my window ledge with a super-soaker.

Angst. With a headcold. And sunburn.

Why is that you only ever get sick at The Most Inconvenient Time Imaginable?

I'm sick. Henley is in less than a week and I'm sick. Shit bugger wank balls fuck damn arse shit fuck.

And because I'm sick, I feel like crap and therefore can't be bothered to give you a long, drawn-out, delightful narrative of the weekend's spankings. There were two. I shall sum up.

Saturday:

Competing in the double scull. Was so nervous I was nauseas for 3 days leading up. Got attached to the stake boat, nearly blew my cookies, had a really mess start (holy fuck that stream was strong!!!), and rowed a line like a fucking sine curve. I was all over the river. Even so we only lost by a length. I figure if you factor in all the extra distance we did on account of my fucking steering (or lack thereof) we actually went about 100m farther, and therefore won. Too bad the judges don't see it that way.

The Mother-in-law came as well, bless her M&S socks. All that way to watch us lose. (Twice.)
Had a nice picnic anyway. The weather was good. There was a lovely irish wolf hound who befriended me and got belly rubs out of the bargain. I got dog hairs on my wet lycra.


Sunday:

Racing in a quad scull with a seriously strong crew. Scratch crew. We'd only had 1 outing together prior to racing. It was just for a lark. But the Bristol women who swore up and down that they didn't want to race a quad scull and thereby effectively threw me out of the club (remember that?)... THEY ENTERED A QUAD AGAINST US.

Knife in back: TWIST.

Holy fuck were we out for blood. We wanted to win it. BAD. Rarely in my life have I wanted anything so badly. I wanted their heads on platters. With little bits of parsley garnish sticking out of their eyeballs. The cunts.

We had an awesome start. After a few strokes we were already clearly ahead. Poor Weybridge didn't stand a chance. (I should clarify here that we were actually racing Weybridge. The Bristol quad got knocked out in their first round, but we wanted to win the whole event just to demonstrate our obvious superiority. It would have been nice to meet them in the final, but they got eliminated by New South Wales.) We were going to decimate them and go on to the final.

Until Sal crabbed. Massively. And then, utter genius that she is, her reflex was to use both hands to try to recover her blade, and so she let go of the second one! Aaaaaahhhh!

So that was us done. We made a valiant effort and came back well, even managing to close the 4 lenghts of open water between us and come in contact with them again, but then we ran out of river and they crossed the line first. Had we had another 200m of water we'd have gone right through them, but it was a short course and there just wasn't time.

Weybridge were really friendly about the whole thing and we cheered them in the final. They lost to UL, poor dears.

But we decided the quad has sufficient potential that we will carry on racing it through the summer, because we're confident we can win shit. And the weather was perfect, so that was nice. And I got to pet a 12-week old beagle puppy named Donut, who was an absolute little doll. And there was chocolate cake in abundance, which also helped. But i'd gladly give all that up and more to have won that race in the quad.

Yeah, AND I got sunburn on the top of my head where my hair was parted.

And now I'm sick, one fucking week before Henley. Frustrating ain't the word.

I'm going back to bed now.

Nighty-night.

Set theory: shoes

There are shoes I like. There are white shoes. Somewhere, there must be an intersection of these two groups. There must. It simply has to be.

Right?



These are "orchid," by a company called Platino. If anyone can find them in white,* please tell me.


*or off-white, cream, ivory, bone, eggshell, or magnolia. I'm not picky.


UPDATE: i just spoke with the store. these shoes are made especially for Wynsors by Platino. They are not available anywhere else, and they are not made in white. Aaarrgh! It's not fair!

UPDATED UPDATE: I just bought these. Mom will hate them. I don't care. job done.

Oh that DOES it

I have had it up to *here*

You know I've been going out of my mind with the wedding plans, right? And I've only been telling you a tiny bit. In addition:

I've been on the phone with my mom more than 2 hours a day for the past 3 weeks.

Last night, after I was in bed (I hate being awakend when I have to be up at 6 am for training), I got a phone call from my father telling me that my mom was upset because I had pushed her out of the wedding plans and she wanted to be more involved!

I pushed her out???? SHE'S FUCKING TAKING OVER! SHE'S MORE INVOLVED THAN THE PIRATE!!!!! I've been reduced to meer middleman, conveying her wishes and commands to the various parties.

Not only that, but there are numerous issues over which she and the Pirate disagreed, and with few (1) exceptions, she has entirely gotten her way. This weekend I got really weepy with the Pirate because I felt that I was being torn apart, and there was absolutely no way I could keep both him and my mother happy, and that if it came down to it, he's more important and his wishes take priority, but I don't (didn't) want to have to be that blunt with my mother.

And then she has the balls to get upset with me. I went livid.

I spent 30 minutes on the phone with dad explaining all of this. He was incredibly sympathetic, and at the end of my tirade said, "You've got me convinced. She's the one out of control." He was about to attempt to deal with her diplomatically and explain my feelings (she's running me ragged micromanaging everything), when she heard him on the phone and exclaimed "Oh, so now I'm the enemy!"

Great. just fucking great.

So what did I do? I rolled over and played dead like I have since I was a kid. I learned very young that you don't win arguements with my mom. No one does. They are pointless. In 29 years she's never once said "I was wrong" about anything. Ever. So I sat there listening to her tell me how much I had hurt her by leaving her out of the wedding (I still have genuinely no idea how she can possibly feel this way) and I wound up aplogizing to her.

God I'm spineless.

I told her how I feel. But did she aplogize? Did she fuck. She doesn't apologize because she is never wrong. It's that simple.

So I aplogized to her. She feels better. I'm still seething. I can't convey how angry I am. And I strenuoulsy resent the fact that she has made planning my wedding into a minor war, fought with emotional manipulation and guilt. Finally at 1:30 in the morning I hung up the phone, took a double dose of sleeping pills, and cried myself to sleep.

On Thrusday (Valentine's Day), Pirate and I are leaving to spend 2 1/2 weeks in Capetown, South Africa. Hopefully in that interval I will be able to calm down and come back feeling refreshed and actually enjoy the wedding planning again. But I'm not hopefull. Pirate and I will be seriously discussing the possibility of eloping.

I can't take this any more, and there's still more than 7 months to go.

Why I'm going insane

Last night I received a 4 page document from my parents. It was a giant list of questions about the wedding. 4 pages. single spaced. Here is a sample of the questions contained therein:

• Where will [bridesmaid from Scotland] stay? When will she arrive?
• When and how will you collect your dress from the dressmaker? [the dressmaker is half a block from where I live.]
• When will the rehearsal be held? How long will it last? Where will we go to eat afterwards? How will we get there?
• What is [Best Man’s] availability? Who will ensure that he gets to where he needs to be, when he needs to be there and dressed as he needs to be? [He's an adult for Christ's sake! Do you want me to wipe his ass for him, too?!]
• What symbol will you put on the place cards to indicate to the serving staff what meal people have ordered? [I'm not kidding. The wedding is more than 7 months away and they are already worried about the fucking place cards.]
• Who will be your Trail BOSS, someone who will ride herd on and coordinate all the activities for the day? Let wedding party and guests know when and where to be, insuring guests get in from the airport in good order. Insures everything goes as planned. THIS is a tough role. [Sister in law] did it using an excel spreadsheet and minute to minute planning to help but still had glitches.
• Where will you dress for the wedding? At the hotel? At the church? How many hours ahead of time should dressing begin? If dressing at the hotel, how will you get to the church? Walking will be very risky. [it's across the street.] In whose car? Will a cab work for such a short fare
• Pirate won’t arrive until the day of the wedding. Where will he go? He shouldn’t see you in your dress before the ceremony. Could he dress and groom in his parents' room at the hotel? How and when does he go to the church? Who sees to it? [are you fucking kidding me? He gets himself to the church. By walking! He's not a fucking child!!!]

And it goes on. and on. Can you see why I'm going nuts?!?!? These people are out of their minds. They are micromanaging me into insanity.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wedding Streeeeessssssssssssss!!!

People simply won't give me the information I need!

I haven't been able to finalize the date because
I can't book a reception hall because
They won't give me the price quotes I asked for AND
I don't know how many people are coming because
Neither my fiance' NOR his family will type up a fucking GUEST LIST!!!

So I've done nothing but make wedding plans for over a month and still not a SINGLE THING IS PLANNED BECAUSE PEOPLE WON'T ANSWER MY QUESTIONS OR GIVE ME ANY FUCKING INFORMATION!!!!


I want to elope.

Wankety balls bollox shit fuck wank damn carp

I'm sick. AGAIN.


I really do NOT need this, not now.


I'm gonna go get jiggy wi' da' Lemsip* (as the kids say nowadays). I'll be back later.




*Theraflu

Halp!

Dear Adoring Public,

Can anyone answer this question:

Why would someone say they want to get married, and then not want to tell anyone they are engaged?

Besides Romeo & Juliet-style familial disapproval (which doesn't apply here), can anyone think of a reason to keep an engagement a secret other than having serious second thoughts???

Signed,
Befuddled in Brizzle

UPDATE: After I got a little weepy with him about it, he finally bit the bullet and told his folks. (They were ecstatic.) I feel somewhat relieved.