I’ve always found Valentine’s Day to be an unusual day. Such significance placed on a day when really the 364 (or 365 in this leap year) other days of the year are what really constitute love and endurance. My thoughts on this day are generally too philosophical to share easily so here are some random thoughts:
Chocolate covered strawberries (well chocolate covered almost anything) are yummy.
Money comes and goes. Apparently so does love.
“Sometimes one smile means more than a dozen roses” – on the wrapper of one of the Dove chocolate squares (given to me by my best friend for my birthday) my kids and I melted in a small pot before dipping strawberries & mandarin oranges in it.
Love shows up in the strangest and sometimes most unexpected of places and people.
My kids are my best valentine’s “dates” ever, and they are showing me how to dance the “shuffle dance.”
My son showed me that you can search Wikipedia in different languages.
My daughter’s smile and laugh melt my heart.
Google’s Valentine’s Day home page video (you tube link; embedded below) is so simple and true. People fall in love when someone quits giving you stuff you don’t want or need and “connects” with who you are and what you enjoy.
I saw the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this past weekend with a friend and it was way more intense than I thought it would be. It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen a dramatic, serial killer type movie. It got me so angry at the evil, sadistic criminals and what they did to those poor innocent girls. The movie was really well done and the plot was strong. It had such an interesting mix of characters in different phases of their lives (e.g., an 80 year old, a middle aged divorced guy, a 24 year old girl) with vastly different experiences. They intertwined with each other nicely. Although we are taught that it’s wrong to take justice into our own hands, you can’t help but be proud of the 24 year old girl/woman (Lisbeth) who didn’t sit back and let herself be the victim unlike the woman they were looking for who they thought was murdered but actually ran away 40 years ago from the people hurting her. Lisbeth didn’t run away from the people who hurt her, she paid them back in spades with a dose of their own medicine and made sure they wouldn’t hurt anyone else. It got her in trouble when she was little, but it made her hard and street smart as she got older. This movie is apparently the first in a set of three based on books written by Swedish author and journalist, Stieg Larsson, and the series was published after his death in 2004. I look forward to seeing the next one.
I’m reading a book right now that I plan on writing about soon. It’s a bit of a touchy/feel-y book but very powerful if you can absorb the concepts. Maybe I’ll add in brief movie reviews to my future blog posts. I’ve been renting movies and seen some in the theater over the last several months. I finally saw Avatar, but on DVD. I could tell I missed a lot of the stunning visual experience not watching it on the big screen. The plot was predictable in a Romeo & Juliet (i.e., different families, tribes, cultures, species, whatever) sort of way except for both Human & Blue Alien lovers live, don’t accidentally die, and the humans were defeated. I rented Valentine’s Day, kind of cute because of Ashton Kutcher but otherwise not a very strong plot and The Men Who Stare at Goats starring George Clooney (handsome!) which was good but apparently not as funny or good as the book. It was interesting to see Clooney play a character that is psychic.
I took the kids to see Toy Story 3 a couple of weekends ago and of that’s a great one. I started crying way more than I probably should have when the Lots ‘O Huggin’ Bear didn’t pay back the favor of Woody (the main toy character) saving his life and let all the toys go towards their death when he could have saved them. My daughter kept saying (because she was sitting on my lap) “Are you crying mommy?” I just said “yes, because I was sad that Lotso the bear was so mean.” I couldn’t tell her that mommy is still working through a lot of unresolved issues and the reason for the overly abundant tears was far more complicated? 🙂 I cried when I saw the Disney movie Up. My son even said he felt sad when he watched it. I didn’t used to cry that much but those damn Disney movie writers/animators sure know how to push those buttons in me. I think I need to rent more of them…
For some reason I felt compelled to write a Valentine’s Day post. My husband spent most of the day with the new head of school for The Magellan School (bilingual Spanish immersion school he is founding) that is opening Fall 2009. She flew in from Colombia this weekend to start meeting people and getting ready for the school opening. I really like her! She reminds me a little bit of my husband’s sister. One of the reasons I knew she would work well with my husband is that she grew up with several engineers in her family and knowing how to work with the ‘engineering-type’ is a plus because often I don’t understand how my husband – the rocket scientist – thinks (or doesn’t think)! They met with interested parents and were interviewed by the local news station KVUE. The segment is supposed to air on the Sunday night news after the Oscars. I took the kids to swim class and we joined them for lunch at PF Changs.
We were planning on going to my best friend’s son’s birthday party but he got sick and we had a bunch of things going on here, so after my husband finished up his school related activities, we went to Barton Creek Square mall so I could exchange some things at Nordstrom’s that I had gotten during my recent trip to visit my mother. And yes, they took back a pair of shoes I had worn once that didn’t end up fitting well. Now that’s customer service! Given that I usually shop at Target, that was a great experience.
We ended up having Valentine’s dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, where we had to wait 20 minutes for a table. For being in a down economy, the mall was overflowing with people…especially the Nordstrom’s shoe department! The kids enjoyed the pizza with fruit and we enjoyed the eggplant pizza with goat cheese and sausage. I sampled two different kinds of martinis. [As an aside, I’ve decided to make it a goal to try as many kinds of martini’s as I can this year!] The caramel apple martini was pretty darn good!
So it was an unusual Valentine’s Day but we have an unusual household so it was not too odd a day (especially after the martini’s! 🙂 ). Here are some links to some other interesting Valentine’s Day items:
Twitter raises $35 million! (I heart twitter – although I still don’t really know how they are planning to make money, but I have faith!) You can follow me on twitter @aruni. Currently I have about 1,700 followers. There’s another article on TechCrunch about the investment too which is an interview with one of the new investors.
I’m not looking for a lover, I’m looking for a portal and stop f-ing with my mind, f with my heart instead cartoons by Hugh (aka @gapingvoid who has more than 13,000 followers on twitter). I asked him if he was going through a mid-life crisis, and he said he went through his years ago at a very young age. After I saw one of his cartoons with a naked women, I asked him about it and he sent me a link to one of his cartoons of a naked man…which I won’t link to here to protect the innocent, but it was pretty darn funny! Then @vicequeenmaria who lives in Miami sent me a link to a cartoon with alligators going to some place called Mango’s that I didn’t fully understand until she explained it, but it is too racy to link to here!
Love at first site by @paisano (he has more than 3,000 followers) where he lists logos that were changed to reflect a Valentine’s Day theme (e.g., Google, Yahoo).
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