25 January 2001
Last year: "Be careful," I told him, and went back to scraping snow.
Last night, Matt pulled out a book we'd both forgotten about: 101 Nights of Grrreat Romance, which I'd gotten him for Valentine's Day a couple of years ago. The theory sounded neat - the book is comprised of sealed envelopes, in which are described romantic activities. I thought it would be fun. It turned out to be... well... The activities in the book turned out to be more expensive - both in money and time - than advertised, and some of them were downright dumb. We eventually gave up on the book.
But Matt has apparently been pondering what to do for Valentine's Day this year, and not coming up with any ideas, so when his eye happened to fall on the book, he decided he'd take out all the envelopes addressed to him (they were divided - some were meant to be opened by the man, and some by the woman) and read through them for ideas.
Since I hadn't really given Valentine's Day much thought yet, I figured I'd do the same. We went through them, building stacks: ideas that would be great with a little tweaking; ideas that had promise but needed a lot of tweaking; and ideas that sucked. We each read through the others' rejects, just to see if we agreed.
I'd thrown out a suggestion to take him to a dance class because Matt hates dancing. "The reason I hate dancing," Matt explained patiently, "is that I don't know how to do it!" Hmm. Okay, well, that one went back into the pile. Though I've never taken a dance lesson in my life, either, and that hardly prevents me from getting out on the floor. And he wouldn't dance the Chicken Dance with me at the Christmas party, and you don't really need lessons for the Chicken Dance. But we'll see.
Matt threw out a few ideas I thought were cute. For example, writing love notes on the bottoms of a cheap set of dishes, and then serving a meal on them so they appear bit by bit. Matt had tossed that one, apparently, because he assumed the cooking was at the heart of the romance and figured he already did half the cooking, so it wouldn't be all that special.
By the end, though, I had a nice stack of potential ideas, and three that I loved so much I wanted to do them right away. I'm trying to decide if I want to combine two of them into one for Valentine's Day and save the third for our anniversary, or do all three for Valentine's Day and pull out one of the others I saved for April. We'll see. I need to do some shopping soon, one way or another.
Oh, by the way: I had totally forgotten, when I told you about ruining the Cream of Reuben soup, that this month's topic for On Display is recipes. And since a couple of you have asked for the recipe, I went back and added the recipe to that entry. So if you wanted it but were afraid to ask, or if you lost the e-mail, now you know where to get it.
There is trouble in paradise.
It has happened several times now that when I go to shut down my new computer in the evening, it gets hung up and refuses to do so. The machine doesn't lock up entirely - it even lets me start up applications and runs them perfectly - but it won't shut down. If I tell it to shut down again, it tells me that it's already working on it. Just to check, I left it working for a couple of hours once. It's definitely unable to shut down. I have to hit the reset switch.
When this happens, whenever I start it back up, the clock is set to 9:00 am, January 1, 1904. I haven't checked to see if this reset is happening before I try to shut it down, and therefore perhaps the reason it can't shut down; or if it's a result of hitting that reset button. But it's pretty darn annoying, especially since I don't always catch it right away. I've got a bunch of files now that are older than my grandparents.
I'm not sure what's causing the lockup, either. I'll have to sit down this weekend and do some testing, but I think it's related to The Sims. I'm pretty certain that's the only thing in common with the lockups. So it's either The Sims, or it's The Sims in conjunction with something else. As I said; I need to do some testing.
But whatever it is, I'm not very happy about it.
Word of the Day:
gingerly - very cautious or careful
Currently Reading:
- nothing
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan