Happy Friday! I hope you had a sweet Valentine’s Day yesterday. Today’s Naming the Good Stuff post is going up a bit late in the day and I’m dedicating it to Valentine’s Day - there was enough Good Stuff yesterday to fill a whole week!
I should say, I am NOT one of the “I don’t really care about Valentine’s Day/Valentine’s Day is dumb” people. I love Valentine’s Day. Always have, always will. Loved it single, loved it dating, loved it engaged, loving it now married. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Valentines you’d give the whole class, and before I got married I sent out Valentine’s cards to all my friends instead of Christmas cards (I wanted to save Christmas cards for when I was married). I feel like it’s cool to hate Valentine’s Day, but oh well :)
This first-married Valentine’s Day happened alongside a recent revelation for Grace and me. We are feeling super passionate about our finances as a married couple and wanted to come up with an idea for V-Day on a budget. And it was one of my favorites yet!
My Valentine’s Day started the night of the 13th, when Grace came home with a huge bouquet of pink roses for me. It was so big, I split it up into three separate arrangements for different parts of our house (one of them, on our coffee table, is in the pic above).
During the day on the 14th, we had a slow day at home, both getting some work done and just enjoying the simple joys of our little house. We have the most amazing lemon tree behind the house, and I went out and picked lemons in the afternoon. Probably my biggest harvest yet!
It rained so much in LA on Valentine’s Day. In the evening after feeding the dogs, Grace and I got dressed to go out (a little bit dressed down, given the rain), and headed out to our perpetual fav (and perfect budget-friendly date night): Hamburger Haven! It’s cheap comfort food at its finest. We got a veggie burger and a tuna melt and had the whole place to ourselves.
After dinner we walked across the street to Salt & Straw! The best ice cream around. Grace got the chocolate hazelnut praline, one of the February seasonal flavors, and I got the honey lavender, which I probably get about every other time I go there. It’s so good.
Another sweet thing was that while we were eating our cones inside to avoid the rain, we ended up chatting with a cute couple standing beside us. They were two guys and had met at their temple so we bonded over attending gay-friendly congregations. It was just awesome. As we were walking to our car, Grace and I were both saying this is what we LOVE about living in West Hollywood. These days, it’s great that there are so many gay friendly places to live in the US, but there are very few where it’s more common than not that the couple sharing ice cream next to you will also be gay. It’s hard to describe to other people why that’s so good for the soul . . . but it is. I can’t imagine living anywhere else, at least not at this stage of life :)
Lastly, when we got home we watched a movie on our little temporary home theater—a projector and 80-inch screen we rented recently. It definitely elevates the at-home movie experience. We watched Silver Linings Playbook, which I realize is old but I’d never seen it. And it was very cute. I thought it would be kind of sad and was relieved that it wasn’t.
The end!