Valentine's Dates

For as long as I can remember, we have celebrated valentine's day by going out to dinner. This year we had dinner reservations as usual, but Bo got shipped off to Chicago last week for work so we had to reschedule for the following weekend.

So instead, I spent a romantic evening with Kim and her roommates and their pugs. We wore sweats, ordered Chinese delivery, drank champagne and wine, and watched Ides of March. My kind of a date! Especially since her roommates have an awesome basement theater, which is now a new "must" for my "future home".

120 inch TV...seriously insane

all the lovin' i got on valentine's day ;)

Meanwhile, Bo had made plans to meet up with my friend Adrienne in Chicago and sadly had to cancel his valentine's day plans once again since he had to work late that night. So they had dinner the next night and from what I heard they had a great time :)

Even though Bo and I weren't together - we were still with people who we love. And we got to celebrate Valentine's Day again on Saturday when he was back in town.  We spent the afternoon at the High Museum for the Picasso to Warhol exhibit, which we had been meaning to go to for the past month or so. And since we were there we also checked out the Art of Golf exhibit, which I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting.  Highly recommended for those of you here in Atlanta - and I am not even much of a museum person.

Later that night we went to Il Localino for dinner. As with all other celebrations, we picked a restaurant we had never been to. It's a very small Italian restaurant nearby in the Highlands/Inman Park/Old Fourth Ward area. We were a little turned off at first, because there is no hostess table (even though we had reservations), and the bar/waiting area is in the back and is extremely small and in the way of the kitchen. It was really crowded, but once we were (finally) seated, it was well worth the wait and the food was incredible. As far as Italian restaurants in Atlanta go, we ranked it second place only to Veni Vidi Vici. Although this was not your typical romantical-type setting, which suited us just find. Much to our surprise, towards the end of the night they turned on some smoke and a few disco balls, started playing disco music, and passed around random hats for everyone to wear. It was really strange, but it seemed like this was a normal thing there (??) so we just went with it. We made friends with our waiter and he gave us complimentary limoncello (love!). Cheers!

I'm sure that I am in the minority female population by saying this... but as much as we love holidays and celebrations, Valentine's Day is by far our least favorite holiday. I'm not a hater. Don't get me wrong - I love love. But we most definitely do not make a big deal of it. We deliberately try to avoid most things that are "typical" or "cliche" - which is just about everything that this holiday is to us. And a lot of our practical perspective on this holiday stems from the fact that we started dating in high school. With Bo's birthday in November, Christmas in December, and my birthday in January, our measly allowances were running pretty low by the time Valentine's Day rolled around in February. So he would order me the $1 carnation through our high school and that was about it. So really, not too different from any other day. And not much has changed since then. We don't do gifts or flowers or even cards. (Bo still insists that he won't give me flowers for Valentine's day unless someone offers him $1 flowers and will also deliver them to me! To my knowledge, this service only exists in high school and not in the real world.) While I do like gifts and cards, I am not really a flower-kind-of-girl (true story: when we went to the florist for our wedding, I just told them I wanted yellow flowers). Because 1) they tend to die in my house, so we have fake plants in our home, and 2) dang, they are expensive! and as the CFO of my household I cannot justify buying stuff like that just because you are "supposed to" show and say how much we love each other, when that is something we do every day anyway. I prefer the gifts/flowers/cards any other day of the year when it is a genuine sign of affection, and not forced upon us by an overly-commercialized holiday. You know, on days when people do not feel compelled to post lovey-dovey, mushy-gushy facebook posts - gag. I thought my friend Susan said it best on Valentine's Day - "Tell the people you love how you feel everyday. Today is just another day to say I love you. It's no different from yesterday or tomorrow." <3