Several people immediately asked if I had someone to give it to. I didn't, at that moment.

• Someone suggested I give it to my mother. I said that that was a very sweet idea, but I wasn't quite that sweet (it's worth a non-trivial amount).
• Someone suggested I could get a piercing "somewhere", and wear it myself. But I'm not a piercing kind of guy.
• There was talk that I could probably take it with me to a bar and find someone to give it to, but that seemed like a bad plan.

One humorous thing I noticed was that for the rest of that conference, every time I walked up to a group of people, some woman in the group would say "You're the guy who won the diamond".

Someone suggested that since John White gave me a diamond, we were now engaged. I said that my mother and his wife would find that surprising. John said that since he didn't buy me dinner first, it didn't count.

This was the first time I ever used a hotel safe. I carried the diamond around with me the first day to show friends, but then I got nervous I might lose it. I didn't want to leave it in my room, since everyone there knew I had a loose diamond. So I checked it in to the hotel safe.

My eventual wife Colleen went with me to LREC in Granada, Spain. A number of people there knew about the diamond, including John White. I implored them not to mention the diamond in front of my girlfriend, since I was worried it would freak her out to know that I had a diamond sitting in my safe deposit box waiting for the right occasion...