Another V.D.

Another Valentine's Day, come and gone. The day where red is in and hearts are not too girly. The day where florists, greeting card companies and chocolatiers make their killing and can kind of take it easy for the rest of the year.

I personally think Valentine's Day is overrated. This could be due to the simple fact that I haven't celebrated Valentine's Day in about 11 years. Why? Probably because my husband and I had our first date on February 13th (he had to work on the 14th) so we celebrate our dating anniversary on 2/13. Besides, we don't want to deal with making reservations, overpriced menus and mediocre, mass-produced food. I especially feel sorry for those people that have birthdays that fall on the big V-Day. We had a friend like that in college and when a group of us wanted to take him out to a family-friendly restaurant - oooh boy, was that insane....a table for eight people that were clearly not out to celebrate Valentine's Day, yet they still made us order from their special Valentine's Day menu because that's all the chefs were cooking up. Since then, we have not stepped out for a special Valentine's Day dinner.

I still get flowers - I think they're mainly for our anniversary rather than for Valentine's Day itself. My husband tells me ALL THE TIME (sometimes I wonder if he tells me too much) that he loves me. He knows that I love him too and we don't need one special day to remind eachother of that fact. My gift to him is going to the Cubs Spring Training in Arizona. I've been promising him for years now and finally, after not taking one vacation with him last year, I decided we had to do it. And thankfully, with the nice bonus I got yesterday, it will cover for the nice resort we're staying at, as well as spa pampering for me (that is my gift to me cause I love me too).

So how did we spend our Valentine's Day? Well - we were originally going to go to the gym and I was going to make a Chicken Chipotle Chowder that my friend always made and I finally got the recipe for. What we ended up doing was sitting in an H&R Block office for two hours getting our taxes done....I had started the chowder when I got home and got through the halfway point, but after reading the second part and thinking that we wouldn't be back until late, I figured we would have to grab something on the way home if we wanted to eat before 10pm. After our taxes were done and we got the blow that we owed the government more money (darn you government!), we decided to head over to Outback Steakhouse for a quick bite to eat. By this time it was 9pm and we had totally forgotten it was Valentine's Day. When we asked how long the wait was going to be, she said 25 minutes. The place wasn't even crowded - there were a ton of people just smoking and milling around the bar area. Had it not been for the smoke, I would've gladly just hung out in the bar. But there was no way we were going to wait 25 minutes to get seated.

So, Taco Bell it was - when my husband started pulling into a parking space, I was like, 'Um - no, we're getting this to go.' (We were a mile from our house and I didn't want to be the couple that hung out at Taco Bell on Valentine's Day.) When we got home, he turned on the TV, I tore open our quesadillas to make it all nice looking and punctured two Capri Sun juice bags for our drinking pleasure. Romantic? No way.

We ended the night watching re-runs of 'Ace of Cakes' and I fell asleep in his arms, in the warmth of our bedroom.

Just to be fair, we did have a very nice dinner on Wednesday night at Legal Sea Foods to celebrate our anniversary. I didn't want y'all to think that our Valentine's Day stunk - it didn't.