Happy Valentine

It's Valentine's Day tomorrow! I've got my heart shoes all ready. I love this holiday. Always have. In high school, my friends and I would all send valentines to each other. There was always some group selling white and pink and red carnations as a fundraiser, and sometimes we'd buy those, or you could pay the choir to sing to your victim in the cafeteria during lunch. My friend Sarah sent me a Singing Valentine one year. Luckily, we were seniors then, so it was funny and nice. As a freshman, I probably would have suffocated under the weight of my own self-consciousness. All those people! Looking! At! Me! In the cafeteria!

I usually sent homemade valentines. One year I baked chocolate fortune cookies like these; another time I made wax paper hearts with crayons. Martha Stewart was a big influence. I still send out valentines each year, although my list has shortened considerably as I've gotten lazier and more self-indulgent. I'm pretty much down to immediate relatives this year. Soon I'll just make a batch of cookies for myself and call it a day.

I don't have big plans for tomorrow. Although I love Valentine's Day for the way it brightens up the otherwise bleak weeks of mid-winter, I don't like the more commercialized aspects of the holiday. Stephen and I never go out to dinner on V Day, nor do we buy each other roses or diamonds or anything like that. Instead, we usually stay home, light some candles, and challenge ourselves to cook an all-red meal (last year it was penne with homemade tomato sauce, salad with red peppers, and brownie sundaes with raspberry sorbet). Because tomorrow happens to be a Thursday, we'll also spend it watching Lost this year. I mean, what better way to celebrate Valentine's Day than by watching a bunch of belligerent marooned travelers run around a mysterious island punching each other in the face? Don't you just love that?

Breakfast for Lunch

Stephen is student-teaching at a public school this semester. One of the advantages of working at public school vs private school (where he interned last year) is that he now gets school lunch. Sometimes he'll have leftovers and bring home a tiny orange, just bigger than a clementine, or an apple the size of a plum. I guess that's where they send the produce that doesn't make the grade supermarket-wise. I wonder if all oranges and apples used to be that size, before we had so many performance enhancers for them.

Today, Stephen's school had Breakfast for Lunch: french toast sticks with maple syrup. I like the concept of Breakfast for Lunch, but it wouldn't be much fun if lunch actually replicated my usual breakfast: yogurt with granola. Or, because we were out of yogurt this morning: black tea with milk and honey. That's not much of a lunch. But french toast sticks sound great.

What I don't like the sound of is Breakfast for Dinner. I want dinner to be a salty, hearty feast, not sweet and carby (you know--pancakes, toast, cereal). I'd much prefer Dinner for Breakfast. In fact, whenever I can get away with it, I'm perfectly happy to skip straight to "dinner food" first thing in the morning. Pizza, spaghetti, french fries: bring 'em on. I know, it's so wrong. So deliciously wrong.

Poorly

I'm sick. I've got a sore throat. I feel weak. Waaaaaaaaaahhhh.

Okay, enough whining.

Good news: The sun set after 5 today! And I voted. This is an exciting primary. People kept asking last week, "Do you know who you're going to vote for?" I've been debating it a lot with Stephen at home, with co-workers at lunch, and often in my head. It's nice that the result isn't a foregone conclusion. It's nice to see people excited rather than scared or desperate, as so many were leading up to the presidential election in 2004.

On Sunday, before I got sick, we visited the MIT museum. I've never taken an engineering course, but seeing the many cool exhibits there made me wish I was studying robotics or biomedical engineering or something. Designing robots that mimic the human sense of touch? Doing cancer research with zebra fish? That's so interesting. And useful. (And a little sad for the zebra fish.) We monopolized the ROV simulation, honing our underwater piloting skills. Stephen was the one who finally beat the time limit. He's a natural. Me, not so much.

There were some really cool sculptures/machines by Arthur Ganson, too. Check out the Quicktime videos here. I really like the one with flying scraps of paper. (Warning: There's some sound.) I'm such a two-dimensional thinker; I would never have thought to do something like that.

Comfort / Food

I hear the Groundhog saw his shadow yesterday. No surprise there; winter's never going to end at the beginning of February. I'd count us lucky if it's over in six weeks, really. Maybe the climate's different in Punxsutawney, PA, but Feb 2 seems overly optimistic for Boston.

We drove out to the 'burbs yesterday: Concord and Burlington, MA. I bought this quilt at Upstairs Antiques, the same place that Stephen got me a suitcase and Stephen's mom got me a cake stand for Christmas. They had lots and lots of old blankets and quilts there, but this one jumped out at me for the incredible variety of fabrics and the sheer amount of (wo)manpower that went into it. It's a Postage Stamp quilt, which means that it's made of thousands of stamp-sized squares of fabric, all pieced together in a perfect grid. It has a little damage: the binding is frayed, a few squares are unraveling, and there's a small hole in the center square. Some past owner had covered the latter with a huge, bizarrely incongruent apple-shaped patch (??), which I painstakingly removed. I'm not sure how I'll fix the hole, but even the batting looks better than that patch.



One of my resolutions this year was to read more. I hardly ever read books for pleasure anymore. I read the New Yorker and Newsweek religiously, and lots of blogs and articles online, but rarely a book. I'm going to try to read one per month. In January, I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which explained away a lot of confusion I had about the Oxford comma and other niceties of punctuation. Yesterday, I bought The Omnivore's Dilemma, which comes highly recommended. I've just started it but am already glad that we're planning to get a CSA share this summer.

We also visited the (Famous) Concord Shop, where I bought a non-stick ("anti-adherent") madeleine pan. Stephen got me a regular madeleine pan a couple of years ago, but I've never gotten the hang of pre-greasing the thing, so my cookies always end up looking like torn sponges when I try to remove them after baking. I got interested in making these again when I saw Ratatouille a few weeks ago. You know the scene where the food critic bites into the ratatouille and flashes back to his childhood? That's an allusion to Proust and the madeleine in Swann's Way, right? Anyway, now I'm all excited to make some cookies. Cookies that don't disintegrate in the pan and break my heart.

Lately

I'm:
(finally) getting a resident parking permit
re-reading Cancer Vixen
watching Persepolis
listening to Kimya Dawson
trying weight training
making icebox cake
wearing long underwear
marveling at the pageantry of the State of the Union address

To Do

First day of a long weekend. Ahh. I'm really getting into the new year, finally getting around to a lot of things that have been on my to-do list forever.

Last week, I went to the dentist. It's been a year and half since my last visit. But when you change dentists, there always seems to be a long wait. I scheduled this appointment back in October.

The new dentist, Dr. S, is way different from Dr. C, my old one in New York. Dr. C's office hasn't changed much since he opened it, probably about 30 years ago now. He's always had the same faux wood paneling in the same little cube of an office building, the same pictures of Disney World mascots on the walls. The same orangey fluorescent tubes in the lighting fixtures overhead. The teal exam chairs may be from the 90s.

Dr. S's office is in a big old red house, the kind of house you might want to raise your children in. I mean, someday. It's bright and sunny inside, and the magazines are new. The x-ray machine takes digital images! A little cord runs from your mouth to the computer, and when the machine beeps, you can turn to the right and see huge, ghostly images of your teeth pop right up on the screen. Revolutionary!

Also, I went to the RMV this week to trade in my old license. It wasn't much different from getting a license at the DMV in New York--same long lines, same forms (basically)--except that they take two pictures of you here and let you decide which to keep. Last time I had my photo taken in New York, the woman behind the counter laughed. Also, the Mass RMV has a feature on its website to tell you how long the line is at each of its branches. Isn't that nice? I think I like this new state.

Snow Day

It happened! It actually happened. Wow. I don't think I've ever had a snow day from work before. We got tons of snow last night. I slept very fitfully, fretting (in that distorted, half-aware way one does when drifting from sleep to wakefulness in the wee hours) that the snow wouldn't come, that I would awake to rain and letdown. I kept thinking, "Is it too early to check the closing alerts? Yes, too early," but my body stayed on semi-alert all night.



I'm so glad I don't have to go out there to work. We'll clear the car off later, but for now, my to-do list looks like this: sit on the couch, knit, watch TV, think about lunch. As a kid, I dreaded snow days a little because I hated shoveling the driveway. My dad thought it was good exercise for us, so he refused to buy a snowblower. I never found the right combination of clothes that would prevent me from getting soaked by either snow or sweat. Now, I'm grateful that someone is paid to clear the front steps for us. Means I can stay in my pajamas and drink hot ginger lemonade.