As much as I buy into Google’s many efforts to take over my electronic life, I have to confess that after four years of using Gmail, I still miss my Outlook-style folder organization system. I know, I know - Microsoft, boo hiss! - but let’s face it, Google, for a person with a sliver of a life, your label system is way too laid back.

I understand that I am supposed to use your powerful search tool to find emails that I need, that by “archiving” them I am creating my own customized database of messages. But my brain has been trained to file things, not archive them. (Maybe my newly-minted librarian friend Ivy can help us here.) I like folders. I like putting folders inside other folders. The idea of searching for my own documents, rather than filing them, makes me feel like I’m sitting at a messy desk and someone else says, “I swear, everything is right where you left it when you went on vacation. Go ahead, ask me where X is. I’ll get it for you.”

I am way too much of a control freak for this laissez-faire attitude toward email.

So Google gives us labels to try to satsify the Type-A need for control. Sorry, G, these labels do not cut the mustard. Sure, they seem fine at first, but even having separate email accounts for personal, professional, and wedding communications, I still yearn for categorization within these three aspects of my life. (See my slapdash hack for grouping my active clients together, above.) Is this a brain that can’t break out of the Outlook mold? Does my brain just take longer than four years to accept Google’s loosey-goosey labeling system? Will Google ever yield and say, “Enough whining! Here’s your damn folders!”

Seriously, though, how much more whining will it take, guys.

The time has come for a cheesy, possibly nauseating engagement post. You have been duly warned!

Oscar surprised me on Thursday night when he magically appeared on my doorstep in Brooklyn. He was supposed to be working in Barcelona and then going to his family’s house in the country for the weekend. I was 100% fooled and caught by surprise. I was also surprised on Saturday morning when he proposed!

After breakfast he brought me to Prospect Park. We sat on a bench by the boathouse, near a little bridge. He then told me a list of reasons why he loved me and why he wanted to marry me. I was laughing and crying in turns, because some of the reasons were very touching and others were pretty funny. Then he offered me a beautiful Tiffany engagement ring and asked me to marry him!

I happily accepted, and I kid you not - as we will tell the story for the rest of our lives - although it was an overcast day, when I said yes and Oscar slipped the ring onto my finger, the clouds parted and the sun shone briefly upon us. Isn’t that kickass??