Valentine's Day Dancing

I generally think of Valentine's Day as an hyper-commercialized Hallmark-created holiday. So we usually stay in and I let Brett cook for me. Actually, I let him do that a lot anyway, but God bless Hallmark for making an excuse for it. :-) And instead of buying over priced flowers that will die in a week, we buy each other seeds for the garden and start them. This year we are not starting seeds, having given up on finding a solution to the problems appropriate lighting and temperature in a cat free zone of the house, but we did buy seeds to sew when the weather turns warmer, and thus commit ourselves to a summer of gardening, even though at the moment the summer looks like it could be quite busy with travel! We're most excited to be planting a new blackberry bush. After a year or two of fantastic growth and awesome blackberry glazed ham (didn't even need a Hallmark holiday to talk Brett into making that a few times!), this past year it died. The leaf buds had opened last March and we got a sudden snow here. Nothing that didn't cause some frost bite and set back fruiting and flowering by a week or so, but for some reason, it completely killed the blackberry plant. We waited and waited and it never did put any new leaves on. So we'll be replacing it and looking forward to a few fruit this year, and more to come next season - Happy Valentine's Day to us!

This year we decided to break with tradition and went out for a fantastic night at the local ballroom. They had a nice event with private dance lessons, catered dinner, and of course dancing the night away. We learned some new moves, had great food, and met new people. Oddly enough, of the two tables of 8 that were next to each other, at least one person in each couple was working in the field of physics! I figured that would put the kibosh on the romance for the night :-), but everyone carefully turned talk away from "those" topics - though it was fun to share the evening with people who got Brett's jokes!