Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!

This was mine and Joe’s 11th Valentine’s Day together. Probably like most people, we’ve run the gambit of Valentine’s traditions: a romantic weekend out of town, a fancy and expensive dinner, gifts, chocolates, cards, flowers. Each Valentine’s Day has been nice and enjoyable. It’s nice to do something different and not feel like we must keep an annual tradition just because.

After having just moved 3 weeks ago, we decided to stay home this Valentine’s Day. We’re both trying to watch what we eat, which is tricky when you eat out, and we’re also trying to watch our spending. So we bought a marinated pork tenderloin, some small potatoes, some peas and some corn and had a delicious and perfectly lovely dinner at home – just the two of us.

When Joe came home from work there was a lovely vase of flowers waiting for him. I bought dark pink astromerium, light pink snap dragons, and large white mums from the floral dept at the grocery store and arranged them in a vase. They really looked pretty. Joe is not fond of red roses, in case you were wondering.

For the past 10 years I have ordered flowers from a florist and had them delivered to Joe’s office. He loves cut flowers and getting them at the office gives him a chance to show his straight co-workers that they aren’t the only ones who can get flowers at work. Plus, I just think it’s hard to beat the feeling of getting flowers delivered to you at work. But since we’ve just moved and I don’t know anything about the quality of the florists near his office, and also to save a little money (okay, a LOT of money), I bought the flowers and arranged them myself. They looked beautiful and he loved them, which is really all that counts. Once again, it was different and it was good.

‘Different’ has sort of become our theme since we moved, and it’s not by accident. We both recognized that we could stand to make some changes in our personal lives and in our life together, and being open to something different is a key to embracing change. Joe wants to be more organized than he was before so he’s really been trying to pick up after himself more than before. He wants to be more fit and lose weight so he’s been going to a personal trainer and working out at a gym. I want to stop procrastinating so much so I have tried setting goals of productivity for myself and not allowing myself to put them off until another day. I want to be more physically active so as soon as the weather breaks the freezing point I am going to walk the dog or just walk myself on my lunch break. Living in this house is also a means of embracing change. Our house in VA had a huge basement for storage and a large pantry in the kitchen. These allowed us to store things without being organized and made it hard to quickly find things we needed. It also allowed us to keep things we didn’t need and never used. This house has neither a basement nor a pantry, so it has encouraged us to be much more organized and thoughtful about utilizing the storage spaces elsewhere in the house.

Whether its Valentine’s Day celebrations or storage – sometimes a change is good.

Drag Queen name of the day: Ginger Snap