valentine's day and other things

So Valentine's Day happened since the last time I posted. To celebrate Valentine's Perry and I try to find the worst card at the supermarket and exchange them. I really wasn't feeling it this year. All the cards I found were just bad bad, not funny bad. So I made a card. Perry called it cheating, but I call it improvising.

The outside of the card:

The inside:

Yes, it's an Adventure Time reference but also a real life reference. Before I leave for work I give Perry a kiss on the cheek goodbye even though it's 3:30 a.m. and he's still passed out in bed. Sometimes he just looks so damn comfy and adorable when he's sleeping, I'll admire him for a bit before I kiss him. Not weird, right? All justifications aside, the point is he's woken up a few times with me leaning over him in the dark just staring at him. I imagine it is a slightly jarring way to wake up.

And Perry followed the rules and got me a store bought card. He did really well.

I didn't take a picture of the inside, but I believe there was a three little pigs reference. It was perfectly awful.
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We had a few 70 degree days last week and I was able to open the windows and let some fresh air in the house. It was glorious. I danced up and down the hallway between chores and felt pretty certain winter was on its way out. It's 40 degrees again today, but it was a nice sneak peak into spring.

Since winter will be gone soon, the other day I tried to think of things that I'm going to miss about this season. I couldn't really come up with anything other than I'll miss wearing sweaters. I have "fashionable" sweaters in my closet, but 90% of the time I go out in public this is what I'm wearing.

Well, just add some grey sneakers to my feet. This is my winter uniform. I may as well throw all my other winter clothes in the trash. It's easy, it's comfortable. I feel invisible in it. There's a convenient front pocket for my car keys, an attached hood if it rains. 

In the spring and summer there's too many clothing choices to make. Jeans or skirt or shorts? Then I have to pick out a matching top based on my "bottom" choice and shoes that go with that. Boo.

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I mentioned in my other post that I've been cooking a lot more than usual. Well, the trend continues.

This is the only thing I took a (bad) picture of. It's an Italian lemon cream cake. It was supposed to taste like the one they make at The Olive Garden. It didn't but it was good in its own right.

Not pictured: barbecued ribs, deviled eggs, a loaf of egg bread, broccoli and cheese rice casserole, baked ziti, lemon blueberry bread, and Tuscan soup.

I attribute all this cooking to winter boredom. Next year I'll try learning how to crochet instead.
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I've had the series Mr. Selfridge in my Amazon Prime video queue for a while and started watching it last week. Perry was playing New Vegas on the couch next to me and got sucked into watching it with me. It's pretty addictive and drama heavy and I actually like it better than Downton Abbey. Truth. The thing is, I can't tell if I like Jeremy Piven as the main character or not. 10 episodes and I still don't know. See that expression on his face.

That's his expression for almost 75% of the series. The rest of the time he's crying or in a coma. Still, I enjoyed it.
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And courtesy of imgur last week I found a subreddit called "let's not meet" that contains supposedly real life creepy stories of the non-paranormal nature. Real or not, they make for a good read.

is winter over yet?

What have I been doing the past few weeks? Feeling generally unmotivated and blah and ready for winter to be over. I'm tired of everything outside being dead and cold and muddy. But until such a time when the awesome restorative power of life lifts me up and makes me thrilled once again to be alive, here's how I've been killing time:

1.) Baking a lot more than usual. 

Particularly bread. I've never made bread from scratch before. Fresh bread is freakin delicious and beautiful, but I don't think I'll continue to do it except on rare occasions. Why? Well, homemade bread doesn't keep too well. Like maybe only three days tops. And I've found it really difficult to eat an entire loaf of bread in three days. Not that I didn't put in my best effort.

2.) I finished my Lego Tower Bridge.

Perry had been helping me until the third level of the tower and then it sat on the dining room table untouched for about a month. So I finally decided to finish it this week that I was off of work and...I did. The End. It was my first Lego building experience of any kind and the end product was cool, but I don't know if I'd want to do it again. I felt kind of like a trained monkey at a certain point. Just following directions. Very very long directions. I got the same kind of satisfaction as I would assembling a piece of furniture, but there's a reason I don't assemble furniture for fun. I think if you're designing Legos into something original (as in not following direction) it could be a cool hobby, but not that way I was doing it.

3.) I've continued to exploit my Amazon Prime subscription to the best of my ability. When I'm doing fairly stationary chores like cooking or washing dishes or ironing I like to have something playing on the laptop in the background (I don't have TV, remember?). Normally it's the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live or Modern Family or Paranormal Witness. Guilty pleasures are great for making lame chores less lame. Anyway, thanks to Amazon, Veronica Mars is now my newest guilty pleasure. And all the seasons are free.

4.) Watching The Last of Us.

Notice how I said watching and not playing? Perry did the playing. He got a PS3 for Christmas and this was the first game he decided to play on it. It's very suspenseful, and story driven so it makes it great to just watch.

I did not like the ending. This game has been out for, I don't even know, a while? so I feel like I could write very specifically about it without spoiling anything, but I won't. I feel like the reason they made an ending like that was to make people say "Wow, how different, how revo-freaking-lutionary! What a plot twist. Never saw it coming." However, the last 20 minutes just made me feel completely alienated from the main protagonist whom I was supposed to be sympathizing with/caring about for the past few hours and made me feel like the entire game was just a waste of time. 

I did tell Perry how if it had been a book and not a video game I probably would have really liked the ending. There's complicated layers to it. But there's no narration in this video game like a book would have. The main character just turns psychopathic. Oh, sorry. Spoilers!

5.) Listening to a lot of 80's pop.

May I recommend Aretha Franklin's 1986 album Who's Zoomin Who? It's currently my best winter pick-me-up.

On a completely different note, I feel like there's about to be a major shakeup in my family life sometime soon. I don't want to say anything definite because nothing is definite at this point, but with all of the possibilities of big change, I feel like at least one of them is going to happen. I just hope it's a good one.