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Good Night, Sweet Valentines

So another Valentine’s Day has come and gone. It can be a lot of pressure, no? For those without Valentines, it’s kind of annoying. For those with new Valentines, it’s the gauging how you and your new love will celebrate the holiday. For Valentines who’ve been around the block a few times with each other, well, the challenge is sometimes finding a unique way to celebrate, or finding the energy to celebrate, or um, sometimes, remembering to celebrate.

The funniest Valentine story I have was from the year I got engaged (the day before V-day because Mr. Sally J couldn’t contain himself). I was teaching pre-k & kindergarten, and we’d been talking about St. Valentine. The story goes that Roman emperor Claudius prevented anyone from getting married so that soldiers could concentrate on fighting in the war. St. Valentine secretly married couples during this time. We had read a story about this, and that same week I told the children that I was engaged to be married. Without missing a beat, one of the kindergartener’s chimed in, “You’re not married yet? Really? Were you in the war?”

Use tonight’s open thread as you see fit “¦ either to recount your most awesome day of love, bitch about the fact that it wasn’t, or whatever else floats your boat.

67 replies on “Good Night, Sweet Valentines”

Well, we had a lovely valentines night last night. We went to an event organised at the Zoo – gourmet picnic accompanied by acoustic guitar music after an evening tour of the African Savannah area. It was amazing.

Spent the second half of the evening wishing we were evil enough to take the guitarist’s ‘I take requests’ literally, and tried to work out what the most ridiculous song we could make him play would be…

In other news, I’m so glad to have found a refuge from the Giant Gawker Disaster. This is perfect :)

The big question was, did we make him play something wildly inappropriate (Like a Virgin) or amazingly naff (something from the sound of music – oo! The Lonely Goatherd!) or, my personal favourite, something that requires more than one singer, like Bohemian Rhapsody.

He made the very wise choice of only doing an instrumental version of Hallelujah.

And so I was merciful.

The good thing about organising Valentines Day myself (despite it not being the ‘romantic thing’) is that it ends up being romantic :D

I’m counting on some West Coast or GMT users to be awake to see this, maybe? My boyfriend and I are doing the long distance thing for the next few months and he’s very far away with a 7 hour time difference. We both had to work yesterday and even though I said I’d try to call him on his lunch hour I ended up crashing straight after dinner. I told myself I wouldn’t be disappointed with this V-day but I woke up this morning really pissed off with myself, my boyfriend, the stupid circumstances that put him far away, and the feeling that maybe if I cared a bit more I would have stayed up late to talk to him. Neither of us did gifts or cards or anything because I suck. But it’s just a Hallmark Holiday, right? RIGHT?! This means nothing, right? RIGHT?!

GMT+1 here! I did the long-distance thing for six years, so I feel your pain. I think keeping the relationship strong in spite of the distance is hard enough without trying go place on it the same expectations you would on a non-LD relationship, especially when there’s a huge time difference involved. Are you beating yourself up because you didn’t call your boyfriend on V-day, a.k.a. “International if you don’t call your SO today you don’t really love them” day? I don’t think it means anything AT ALL! Would you be beating yourself up if you had been unable to call him any old regular Monday?

Hey, I’m a GMT+3er, so I’m definitely up.
Well first, it is a Hallmark holiday, but it can be nice to take the opportunity to celebrate your relationship. But if you decide not to do so, that’s also completely fine. So long as its the decision the two of you make together.

But it sounds like there’s other stuff going on here, too. Long-distance, especially across multiple time zones, is really hard. Mr. Blue and I were countries apart for two years and it nearly imploded our relationship, but he invested some major rebuilding efforts and we were able to salvage it, recover and even get hitched.

In my experience they only work when both sides are equally committed to the relationship. If you love each other, it’s worth it. If you don’t, it’s an emotional and mental suck.

But when you’re apart it can be tough to sort out your feelings for him and your frustration with the separation, too. Sometimes people put a mental separation between them when they’re physically apart to spare themselves mental anguish. Or, because they truly are losing interest.

I know this isn’t very reassuring. But maybe the Vday crash is an indication that you need to think a bit more about your feelings. Maybe today you were both just off a bit, and and if it’s only a few months apart, maybe it’s worth hanging on. You can celebrate a belated V-day when he gets home. And if not… then you’ll know that too.

So the new Baking Club at my school is planning a bake sale in which people can decorate their own cupcakes – they get to choose their frosting flavor and then top as they see fit.

If you were at this bake sale, what kind of toppings would you want for your cupcake (besides the classics like sprinkles and crushed Oreos)? The only rule: no nuts.

Oh. This is an easy one. Go to a toy store and pick up all sorts of little plastic figures and knick-knacks, and put them in a bowl for toppings.

If I were making a cupcake, I would fall all over with happiness if I had the option of putting, say, a tiny little skull on top of it, or a pair of dice, or a little itty bitty unicorn. People will go crazy. Promise.

Candy! Seasonal candy, or classics like coke bottles, mini Reese’s, gummi bears/worms, sour candy.

My student group at my university had a scoop-your-own candy sale, and it was shocking how excited even all the serious, business casual adults were about choosing their own candy. So candy + cupcakes would be like the the sweet tooth’s jackpot!

Notqutieacowboy and I kind of celebrated V-Day yesterday at my place- I roasted a boneless leg of lamb to perfection and cooked up some mussels in white wine. Then today we went to the bank and got pre-approved for a home loan and made an appointment with a real estate agent to see some houses tomorrow. And I successfully negotiated the payoff of a medical bill that ends up being less than half of what I owed! To top it all off Notquiteacowboy got me a beautiful bouquet of tulips… In the words of the ever wise Ice Cube, Today was a good day.

Had a good Valentine’s Day, although we had to improvise a little because the swordfish we were going to cook smelled AWFUL! However, I am now spectacularly unmotivated to do anything approaching work. The champagne may have had something to do with it. The 4 page paper due tomorrow and the 10 page paper due Wednesday are haunting me.

It’s 5am here, I just got up because I have class later in the day and this was the only way I could put in a few solid hours of writing before that. Up at 6am I can do no problem, it just feels like a very early morning – but 5am still feels like the night before! In other words: I am NOT a morning person and being an adult SUCKS. More coffee!

How’s everybody’s night going?

Yikes, good morning to you I guess! My plan is to stay up late and get work done tonight so I don’t have to get up before 8 AM tomorrow…it’s 11:35 here so I hope all goes as planned. Maybe it will if I put down the laptop.
Also I’m really feeling crabby because one of the readings I have to do came in the smallest ever print and I literally have to hold the thing up to my face to read it. What the fuck.

Anyway, enjoy the coffee and good luck with the work!

I commiserate! You mentioned senioritis downthread, right? Yeah, in my experience, that shit does not get better: if I had to define my grad school experience in three words, I would probably go with procrastination, all-nighters, and panic attacks (ok, four words). I hope you have a productive night!

Boyfriend and I had the most expectation-defying dinner out tonight! A new cafe just opened up 5 minutes from my house, but I live in a slightly sketchy older part of town, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was advertised as 4 courses for $40, and we’re both constantly broke, so it seemed to fit the bill.

WELL.

We had a little reserved table with felt hearts scattered all over it, and beautiful china. The food went as such:

1st course: crostini with melted brie and fig jam
2nd: summer salad + ginger butternut squash soup split between us. My soup was cold but still delish.
3rd: Chicken pesto panini on multigrain, pressed roast veg wrap full of mushrooms (cut into eight pieces altogether). We couldn’t finish it and got it wrapped up.
4th: FONDUE. Strawberries/bananas/pineapples, huge heart-shaped pot of melted chocolate, HEAVEN. I wanted to stick my face in it.
Unexpected 5th course: 2-tiered tray of little teeny tarts and truffles and pretty things with individual teapots of whatever you want- I had cream earl grey. We couldn’t finish the goodies and took 2/3rds of them home with us.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS THIS WAS AMAAAAZING. And one $50 bill covered everything. And I’m pleasantly full still, 5 hours later. Tomorrow I have one piece each of the two sandwiches, two truffles, and a cupcake for lunch. Cannot. Wait.

Thanks! Yes, it was a surprise. We’ve talked a lot about getting married and I knew he was planning but I had expected him to wait until our anniversary next month. He had been bringing up going to the same event we went to for our first date waaay in advance so I’d figured it would be then. But I guess once he found the ring he couldn’t wait any more. He had planned to do it when we went out Saturday but the ring got delayed with the snow so he came over tonight, and then we ordered Thai food and watched Dexter.

So my VD evening went thusly. I came home to Mr.Pear in his jammies. We stood in the kitchen eating left-over pizza, where he informed me be was going to be playing WoW to make 80th level tonight (I may have suggested he try for 2nd level husband). I had several Greyhounds (vodka and fresh pink grapefruit juice) and started playing FFXIII on the PS3 (gorgeous). C’est l’amour!

FFXIII!!!! :) Pardon my dirty mind, but I read VD as venereal disease.

Anyway. FFXIII is, I think, one of the weakest FFs. I hated the voices so much – especially Vanille. Try having her as a party leader. She sounds like she’s either having sex or in a lot of pain constantly.

It is SO gorgeous though.

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