We celebrated, if that's the right word, Valentine's Day a bit late this year. Or early. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell with us. A week ago John surprised me with an Alice(tm) doll. (I'd had one last year but I blithely gave it away to a friend without realizing how difficult it would be to replace.) I used to love Dilbert cartoons but I have to say they've gone downhill a lot since Scott Adams stopped doing general office humor and focused solely on business humor. I still like Alice, though.
Then on Sunday in Milwaukee we went to the Public Museum which is a spiffy place. It has my favorite museum diorama ever: the wonderful and weird Great Plains Indian bison hunt, featuring the sounds of thundering hooves and snorting of buffalo playing over a tinny little loudspeaker while you stare at some more or less lifesize bison and a couple of Indians caught at the peak of the hunting action. Yes, sir, you can just picture yourself there, as long as 'there' has a hokey painted background and a lot of schoolchildren shrieking like a flock of parrots.
It's actually a very good public museum. I always enjoy visiting it. This time we didn't go into the museum itself. We were there to see the new Imax elephant movie which we loved; it was set in Amboseli, Kenya, one of our favorite places in the world. The charging elephant scene is a tremendous rush. Afterwards, we mooched around the gift shops and I bought John a cute stuffed warthog. He bought me an extremely cool prehistoric artwork t-shirt. Awww. Mostly, though, we spent the day hanging around airports, flying to Detroit instead of Minneapolis due to delayed flights and missed connections, then wiggling uncomfortably in our seats on the extra long flight home. And we were still sad about our reason for flying, so we weren't up for anything much more than falling asleep as soon as we got home.
Monday being a holiday, we were able to recover from our exhaustion long enough to stagger across the street to the Walgreen's and take advantage of the post-Valentine's Day chocolate sales. We bought each other candy. We bought ourselves candy. We are now quite thoroughly sick of candy. But it was fun to buy yet more presents.
Basically, we never get too involved in pre-determined holidays. We just use them as not terribly necessary excuses to buy each other little tokens and amusing gifts. We're romantic in this regard. We rarely do anything special about our anniversary. We don't go nuts on birthdays. We have been known to forget the details of our mutal past like when we actually went on a proper date and what year we moved in together. It doesn't matter, so we don't worry about it. We just enjoy ourselves here and now.
My life is pretty swell, you know?
The Index
Next Incarnation