I'm flying into Albany from my quarterly business trip to Chicago. I love to gaze at the landscape during the descent, so when I saw this big sign in the field, I thought to myself, "Aw, isn't that cute." Every time I've been paying attention, I've approached the airport from the south, along Interstate 87. So the thought never even entered my mind that we might be approaching the airport from the east, along the path that I knew passed very close to my house. Nor did any memory receptors fire as I stared down at the very fields which I had spent the better part of two decades farming with my father. Nor when I saw the D, which I took to be some sweetheart's term of endearment nickname, rather than the "just ran out of sheets" shortening of Dee, which happened to be the name of my sister. Yeah, the one whom we've all been teasing for a while about when she and her boyfriend were going to get married. No, I wasn't indulging in the $5 cans of Bud Light on the plane, I swear. I attribute my lack of perception to the, um, long day of mind-numbingly painful meetings. (Sorry boss.)

So we land and I deplane, still completely oblivious. My wife meets me at the luggage carousel to drive me home. We pile into the car and head off. Just as we exit the airport, she excitedly speaks, as if she suddenly remembered something, "Oh! Guess what?"

Like an avalance, it hit me. D = Dee. The fields, the barns. Those were my fields, my barns. How the hell did I not recognize them? My brain must have thought we were coming in from the west and just dismissed the possibility. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. In an instant, I yelled back, "OH MY GOD I SAW IT!" I just about gave her a heart attack.

Everybody got a huge kick out the story. She said yes. They got married. Time passed. A few months ago, I fired up my Google Earth install and scanned for my house again. I had installed it when it first became available, and of course did the "find my house" thing, but I don't recall why I was scanning for it again this time. I seem to recall the original set of images for my area being only black and white. Regardless, I'm quite certain that the images now available for this area (the ones containing the proposal) are not the same ones that were in the initial publicly available GE version. I'm pretty sure I would have remembered seeing that banner, despite my apparently otherwise poor perception. So when I saw the banner on the updated photo set, I couldn't believe it. I immediately took a screen shot and attached it to this email to my family:

Quote:

Google has this application called "Google Earth" which is a sort of a 3D globe mapping on steroids thing. Basically it overlays satellite photos on geographical and topographical information so that you can get maps with photo-realistic landscape renderings. It's fun to play with to "find your house" and see if the satellite photo includes you playing in the yard or whatever. It's a free program if you want to play around with it, you can get it at http://earth.google.com/. Anyway, I was poking around the farm area looking at the different fields we used to bale, and I found this.



Mom was the first to reply:

Quote:

AWESOME!!!



Then my brother:

Quote:

i have used google earth at my school before. it is really cool. i guess you can look back at old dates. if you go back far enough you can see a pic of mom wiping her eyes with paper towel after lifting that one bale.



(We always used to make fun of mom when she "helped" us bale hay.) Finally, my sister replied:

Quote:

It made me cry. Thanks for sending that. That made my day. Because we were only allowed one "fly-by" due to the day's traffic pattern caused by the wind from the west, our attempts to get great pictures of the proposal sign were futile. That is the best picture I've seen yet.



Her husband wasn't so convinced though -- he thought I photoshopped it. His reply to my sister, which she naturally immediately forwarded to me:

Quote:

No. He must have altered that image. That can't be the one they have on the site.



(OK, so I may have a reputation for being a jokester, but that's completely unfounded, I assure you.) He finally realized it wasn't faked when he noticed that the Y was smaller than the other letters, an effect of running out of sheets, and a detail that I wouldn't have known unless I was there. (Or unless I saw it from a plane, but I guess that detail slipped past him.)

So, anyway, pretty cool story, especially when you consider that the sign was out there for only a week or so. Good timing on those satellites.