Valentine's Day weekend

The last couple of weekends have been wonderful - but then, most weekends are pretty great, because not having to go to work is fantastic. Valentine's Day weekend was a long one for me, since I was able to use "flex time" to take Friday off. It was lovely, even though James had to work. I took the car in for an oil change, and I did some chores around the house so that we wouldn't have to worry about them over the weekend. When I picked James up from work, I gave him a bouquet of yellow spray roses to kick off our weekend of romance - it really surprised him! Friday night we got a pizza from our local pizza place and had pizza and beers and watched the Olympics - simple and good.

Saturday morning I woke up earlier than James and made my granola, which was a yummy way to start the day. Saturday morning was awesome because I got a delivery from UPS - a heart-shaped box of Sees candy! That was such a great surprise. It was from James, of course. Sees, as far as I know, is only available in CA and it is the best chocolates I've ever had. Then an hour or so later, there was another delivery - flowers! It was so exciting to get an arrangement of flowers like that. I'd been hoping for a bouquet from the grocery store, so a vase of perfectly arranged flowers blew me away. It's really a whole different ballgame compared to grocery store flowers (which of course are nothing to sneeze at!) and it was so sweet that he planned all this. I felt so loved. I gave him the heart-shaped tin of Ghiaradelli chocolates that I had picked up for him on Friday, and a sweet Hallmark card. We spent the day doing our weekend errands so that we wouldn't have anything to do on Sunday and we could just slob around and hang out, which is what I really wanted to do.

We spent a good portion of Saturday priming the bathroom, and we painted it Sunday morning. That room was so ugly. The tile is a gross 1960s pink and unfortunately we can't do anything about that (yet!). But it only goes halfway up the walls, and the top half was wallpaper that had been painted dark, gross brown. We tore down the wallpaper a while ago - probably in the late summer or fall. It was a huge chore since the wallpaper had been painted. Then underneath, we discovered that the drywall was all dingy, stained from the wallpaper glue and riddled with a lot of nail holes that had gouged out pockets of drywall. And that's how we lived with it for a long time! You just stop seeing it after a while. Then all of the sudden we realized how ugly it was, and we had to fix it, and by Sunday late morning, we had lovely, smooth, nicely painted walls. We used a shade of off-white that has a bit of peach shade to it, to go with the horror tiles. Almost any other color would have clashed.

Valentine's Day was a delicious slob day. We didn't even leave the house. I just wanted to relax and hang out and just be together, so that's what we did, and it was wonderful. We watched Olympics, played with our Wii, watched a movie... it was very relaxing. We made dinner together - steak with rosemary-blue cheese-walnut butter, sauteed beet greens, a salad of baby greens, candied walnuts (which I candied myself, having no idea what I was doing and making it up as I went, and it worked really well!), dried cranberries, blue cheese and beets that I sliced and cut into heart shapes. Aw. With a balsamic vinegrette. A salad with cranberries + goat/blue cheese + candied nuts is my go-to fancy salad. I meant to make potatoes but totally forgot! But I did make banana bread muffins from scratch so it was okay. And we made molten lava chocolate cakes for desert, and they were so yummy! I think I prefer eating in to going out to a fancy restaurant - the food we cook is just as good, and it's a lot cheaper, and it's just us and that's lovely.