Happy Valentine's Day!!!!

To settle up unfinished business regarding the Disneyland trip, here’s my re-cap of the drive home: It totally sucked, but was unavoidable—sometimes in life, the crappy, 40-hour detour is the only way to get to your intended destination.

Moving on with life, today I’m talking about Valentine’s Day. As you all know, I’m a romantic. My 10 Years of Magic blog last year proved that, I think (well, until life got too busy for regular updates, but I ain’t complaining!). So I love Valentine’s Day. This year, we celebrated on Thursday the 12th, because Amanda had the day off and we figured if we went on a date, we’d rather avoid the crowded weekend.

This year, Amanda and I had a gift-giving/presents theme of “The Seven Deadly Sins”. I like doing themes because it helps me come up with ideas for presents, but this one was really tricky--as Amanda will freely admit--and some of the results took some real creativity to fit in with the theme.
Here are the results:

Pride: Amanda got me a new button-up shirt, so I’ll take pride in my appearance. I made her a shirt based on Pride and Prejudice, coupled with the Wii, (which she should be proud of her expertise in). I present to you, Wii Pride and Prejudice:

Sloth: This was a pretty easy one—just gotta get ‘em something that encourages laziness. Amanda got me some episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on DVD and I got her the DVD of “You’ve Got Mail” and a wooded spa stool to sit on in the shower when she just wants to relax in there.
Envy: This was tricky. I had no idea what to get until Amanda mentioned that she wanted a houseplant and I thought “AHA—GREEN with Envy!” And she got a Best Buy giftcard for me because…ummm…envy?!? Amanda had some troubles with that one.
Gluttony: Another easy one—chocolates for all, and I also got Amanda a recipe book of curry dishes.
Greed: A Home Depot gift card for Amanda, and a CD for me (greedy since I already have so many CDs).
Anger: I got Amanda a soap dispenser/sponge holder for the kitchen sink, since I always get angry when she leaves the sponge at the bottom of the sink and dishes get piled on top of it. She got me an iTunes gift card—it was colored RED, like ANGER!!!!!!!!!!
Lust: None of your beeswax!

As it turns out, we didn’t go on a date, but we had a family Valentine’s celebration. Earlier in the week, there was a “Student of the Month” assembly at the kids’ school. Both Madison and Joel were chosen as students of the month. They were each given a certificate, a sports water bottle, and a coupon for a free meal at Mimi’s Café. Now, we’re not big fans of Mimi’s, but we figured with 2 kids getting free meals, we’d give it another chance. While our experience wasn’t as bad as TGIFriday’s a few years back (a place we’ll NEVER return to), our mediocre service, so-so and overpriced food, and the prevalence of senior citizens have all convinced us that Mimi’s is not for us.

Thursday was also Madison’s spelling bee. She was nervous, but did well in the first couple rounds with “smother” and “rabbit,” but got out in round 3 with “imply” which she spelled I-M-P-L-I-E. I think she was thinking it would be like “implied”, but she didn’t do too bad compared to a lot of the kids. And they were getting words like “loose,” choose” and “bullet” (which the kid spelled “bullit”). I’m glad she did it—I’m sure it was a real confidence-booster to get up onstage and tackle it, even with being nervous. You should’ve seen her shake her fists in victory after getting the first word right.

Well, that about does it for Valentine’s. To end with, here are a selection of Valentine E-cards I made (in conjunction with 8Fish) for the University of Utah. You can share/send these cards and a bunch of others I animated via the U’s e-card website: http://ecardsfromu.utah.edu/