Now, you might think going to Hawaii would enable Denise to avoid winter. But that didn't happen because she came back here for four of those 18 months and wound up spending two of the coldest winters in history in New Jersey rather than Hawaii.

Denise moved back to New Jersey 18 months, to the day, after she'd moved away. This time, she moved in with me. This was a new thing for me. I'd been a confirmed bachelor all my adult life and rooming with another human -- and a woman, yet! -- was new. For one thing, things moved around.

For another, mysterious things started to show up. One morning, I discovered a large, plastic blue foot in the shower. I gotta tell you, seeing a large blue foot in the shower before coffee is definitely a trippy experience. It turned out to be something used to clean feet, but it was weird.

Then there were the bottles. All of a sudden, hundreds of little bottles of lotions and potions and such showed up all over the house. Denise is a beautiful woman and she's got all the preparations beautiful women tend to need. Me, I had a bar of soap and an orange bottle of shampoo the barber had given me. And a six-pack of Diet Coke. Everything else was obtainable by calling the local Chinese restaurant.

Denise and I have loved each other for many of these last eleven years, but we didn't have a romantic relationship. For a few years, she was married to another guy (who is now a close friend of both of us), and I dated other women, including one crazy stalker chick, and another very neurotic woman with a thousand relatives. Denise and I would spend hours a week whining to each other about how hard it was to find the right guy or girl.

Somehow, things changed this past fall. We began to look at each other in a new light. Among other things, she actually survived living with me for a year and didn't want to kill me -- at least, not too often. We'd each been through some pretty big personal journeys and come out the other side stronger for it.

Those of you who know Denise know her to be a woman full of heart. She's got extraordinary dynamic range: one day she can be negotiating with an IBM general manager and the next day she can be riding her motorcycle alone through the mountains of upstate New York. Denise is an incredibly talented songwriter, a singer with a wonderful voice, and a person of deep convictions and even deeper compassion.

Denise is an amazing woman and I'm incredibly, incredibly lucky that this time, she said yes. Which brings me back to Elvis.

To be fair, we decided to get married before we left for CES. This gave us time to call the Graceland Chapel, in Las Vegas, perhaps 80 times to make sure all the arrangements were just right.

It also gave us a small amount time to make sure our wedding clothes were just right. We'd decided we wanted to wear "Aloha-wear," a style of wedding clothes common to Hawaii that also had the added benefit of looking good on my large frame. What I didn't know was that her dress was the exact white complement to my black shirt, and that the bouquet would match our clothing.