Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day was never a very memorable holiday until last year when I met Breena. I went all out to try and impress her.... dinner at the Joseph Smith building, a symphony, and French Kiss flowers from proflowers.com. When I was young, I remember that my V-day gifts were much more shallow. I was somehow supposed to convey to my siblings how much I loved them, which usually consisted of the following:

1) Buying a bunch of candy bars from Rite-Aid.

2) Attaching a post-it note on it with their name written in chicken scratch for anonymity.

3) Sneaking out the back door just after family dinner and door bell ditching our own house, somehow managing to quietly sneak back inside without being caught.

Funny thing is, all my siblings did it. It was obvious what was going on, I'm not sure any real love was conveyed, but everyone had a good time doing it. We were all just glad to get some candy... at least I was.

Yesterday, my gift to Breena was a Phoenix Suns license plate frame. Okay, I know you're thinking that I'm a terrible husband, but keep the following in mind...

First of all, if you were at our wedding reception, you will remember that the Suns are one of our keys to a successful marriage. Being the Jazz fan that I am, this is a huge sacrifice for me. Nobody puts their second-favorite team's logo on their car. With this frame, OUR car will now be a Suns car.

Secondly, I visited at least 6 websites before I could even find a Suns frame that had the cool logo on it. All of the other frames had the ugly Charles Barkley era logo on it, so it took some serious net surfing to find the only one that looked good but wasn't sold out.

Lastly, our Valentine's Day was foiled by bad weather. DC was a block of ice yesterday. Because of this I didn't surprise Breena by putting the Suns frame on the car. I just handed it to her and said I wouldn't put it on until we moved to Phoenix (or atleast until it warmed up a bit). But really, the bad weather affected more than just our license plate installation. I ordered flowers for Breena to be delivered yesterday and they still have not arrived. For some reason ProFlowers flies them in from California... poor FedEx man... can you imagine delivering packages in this weather? I was sure that Breena was expecting flowers yesterday, so finally at about 5:30pm I broke the news that they weren't going to make it. Understandable. Little did we know that her gift to me would be delayed as well.

Breena outdid my gift... she bought us tickets to see the School of Rock Band All-Stars playing the music of YES with Jon Anderson (lead singer of YES). I was soooo excited. The concert was in a small venue which in addition to the concert included tables for dinner. Come to find out that the flights of the band were cancelled due to weather. Poopy. So, we decided to eat dinner at Applebees, basking in the ambience of a candle, ESPN, and fake roses. Dinner was actually very good though... Applebees has now passed Chili's on my best restaurant list.

As a replacement for our night of YES music, after dinner we decided to snuggle up to The Work and the Glory 2. Very romantic (not in the lovey way). Before you knock it, these movies are actually pretty good. I'm not a big fan of Mormon cinema in general (Brigham City the only exception... unless you can count Napoleon Dynamite, too), but this is a good story with some decent acting. Yay for us Mormons!!

After the movie we sat in bed with our laptops watching the gamecasts for the Suns and the Jazz. With Valentine's Day not happening exactly how we planned it, it was nice for the Jazz to show a little love by winning. Unfortunately the Nash-less Suns (and Breena) had their hearts broken for the 3rd time in 4 games. It's okay babe... you still have your license plate frame...