The announcement

So here’s the big announcement. On July 10th, 2005, I asked my girlfriend Nadja Frick to marry me. She said yes (actually “ja”, as the whole thing was in German), and therefore we are now engaged to be married.

(To see the rest of this entry, click on "Read More..." below).

The first wedding at least will take place in Germany. Therefore, I expect many of my friends/family will not be able to afford to come to my wedding. It is possible that we may also hold a second wedding-like ceremony in the USA, most likely in Connecticut. However, there are no details yet. In any case, the legal wedding and the first church wedding will take place in Germany (in Germany, weddings held at a church are not legally binding, and therefore the actual legal ceremony is held at a government office.)
As for dates of the wedding. I have a week vacation during the summer semester, during which we will most likely get married. My vacation starts on Saturday, June 3rd, and ends on Sunday June 11th (and depending on my schedule, I may have no Monday classes).
If we want to get married earlier, the date would be before the start of the semester. The semester starts on April 24th, therefore the wedding would be around April 15th if we decide to get married sooner.

For those of you who don’t know, Nadja and I plan to go to California in Fall 2006, where I will work on a Ph.D. in mathematics. Therefore I will need to work on getting a visa/green card for Nadja. This isn’t as automatic as one could hope. In fact, it’s very non-automatic (oddly enough, in Germany – a country which is not intended for immigration – the permanent visa is as good as automatic. Weird, huh?) I haven’t informed Nadja of all the legal details yet, so you guys will have to wait too (legal details of an international wedding would be an excellent way to spoil the mood of the engagement day).

That’s the announcement for now. I’ll post more details later. As I get new information, I will post it. When there are developments, I will also post those. This website also has a forum, if you look at the links, where you are free to post stuff (you will have to sign up, but don’t worry, that just means making a password). We will need you thoughts, prayers, and ideas, since the whole situation will probably be a little stressful (the wedding itself will be difficult to arrange with the legalities, and the fact that the wedding will have to be held in a country which is foreign to either my family or Nadja’s, and then afterwards, we will probably proceed to move to a place with is at least 3 time zones away from where we grew up - in Nadja’s case 9 time zones. 9 times zones is more than a third of the way around the world).

More later.
-Mike