utenzi

I bought a dozen roses, a bottle of wine, and some ham yesterday. Since we're both sick (not sure if it's cold or flu) we didn't drink the wine yet but we'll go out to dinner tonight if our health allows. The poor snow-person below doesn't have that option. No heart = no going out. It would be difficult to get more cynical than the person who created these snow folk... but it is an amusing picture with which to illustrate a St. Valentine's Day entry. I wonder how the tradition of romantic love being associated with St Valentine's Day got started. I read the Wiki entry and according to it, there was a gap of over 1,000 years between the martyred saints (c. 197 AD - 267 AD) and the first known reference to Valentine's Day as a romantic time by Chaucer (Parlement of Foules) in 1382. Maybe we'll have that wine tonight but I think a toast made with cough syrup is more likely. :-(

Happy St Valentine's Day, everyone. I've managed to post this greeting a whole 20 minutes before the day is over. Yay! As you can see above, the lovely Kim decided to celebrate the holiday by visiting with me. We went shopping for her birthday present among other things. But look below to see who she ended up kissing---here's a hint: it wasn't me!!

Usually it's chicken soup that's touted for curative powers. And that's probably well deserved--but I decided last night to give lasagna a try. At worst, I'll still be sick but with a happy tummy. I hadn't planned on making lasagna but while on an emergency run at Wal-mart on Thursday--I ran out of ibuprofen--I picked up a couple of pints of ricotta cheese. Just spur of the moment. So tonight I'm thinking with my fevered mind what can make me feel better--and of course one of the first thoughts is melted cheese. Duh. And what is one of the best sources of melted cheese, I ask. Lasagna, of course! So I decided to make a batch with whatever I had on hand, and since I generally have a well stocked larder, the only real concession was substituting pork sausage for hamburger. I used sweet Italian sausage since that's my favorite for using in recipes. I didn't start this endeavor until about 10pm on Valentine's Day so I didn't finish until nearly 11:30...

I was talking to Julie, a girl I frequently hike with, last week about the ups and downs of romance and we both decided that unrequited love didn't deserve the bad rep it has. Both Julie and I been married once and are dubious about engaging in future relationships 'cause they're so much bother and often provide very little payoff. Lee (my girlfriend) and I have a long stormy history and that only buttresses the point. "So," you might ask, "What is your point?" Well, it's this: "real" relationships are rarely completely happy because they involve two or more people who have different needs and desires. Unrequited love, on the other hand, is all about YOU . What could be better? My first love was a girl I met in 4th grade. I admired her from afar for several years until her family moved away and never returned. I've never forgotten her. Or, to be more accurate, I've never forgotten my very biased view of her. And that's the po...

Here's a touching St Valentine's Day story. It's about how love--at least the invertebrate version thereof--can find a way to surmount distance and odds in the cold uncaring sea. Here's the story that I found on Science Daily . The news item is excerpted from the University of Alberta research story that can be found here. Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size - up to 8 times their body length - so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours. Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions. The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that when wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of ...

Nothing too serious today. Just a couple of pictures I took this weekend. This first one is a heart that I made out of peppermints while laying in bed bored. My girlfriend was on the computer playing some silly game. So, I--left alone with chocolate--just did what came naturally. I played with it. I hadn't been eating chocolate for most of February due to that diet restriction I was on and so the bargain candy I bought after St Valentine's Day was languishing in a drawer. This was the first bag I attacked. Chocolate! But I did pause long enough to make pretty shapes with the mints---the shiny red foil was too gosh durn pretty not to play with--before stripping those covers off and eating them. :-) Here's a picture of a black... cat. Ha! I bet you thought I'd use some other word but you're wrong! ( I did think the other word tho ) It's a boy and the most recent adoptee by my girlfriend. He's something like 5 years old and the people that used to own him (as...

The newest resident of my house is a little white puddle. Isn't it cute? Okay. It's not a real dog. It's one of those sentimental Valentine's Day critters. And no, nobody gave it to me. I bought it on Friday at a clearance sale. But at half price it was too cute to walk by. I covered up the sentimental sign on the front with the apple. Maybe apples are the fruit of original sin, but hiding that sign is no sin!

Happy St Valentine's Day everyone. I did the flower thing and for some reason they were delivered yesterday. My girlfriend didn't mind but I was a bit annoyed. Judy --what's going on with your industry? LOL I bet it is a wee bit stressful for florists this week. I sent roses to Ren and tulips to my parents. 18 of one and 20 of the other. A lot of plants lose their lives to this little celebration. As of 4pm Tuesday, I once again have heat in my house. Thank God! It's about to get cold again and I'd not want to have my heating unit on the sideline when the mercury drops below 20f again like it's supposed to later this week. The bad news is that the repair cost almost $500. To be exact, it was $498.75, and that was almost evenly split between the labor cost and the R-22 (freon) that needed to be put back into the system. More than 10 pounds worth at $22 something a pound. Hell, prime Kobe beef costs less than that! On the stock front I bought 1,000 shares of Chi...

Valentine's Day is only two weeks away. It's more a holiday for women than men, or so it seems to me, but today I found an interesting post that might change that at least a little bit. First of all, here's a card for everyone that reads this blog--but don't take it too much to heart if you're a guy. I'm just sayin... Now that we have the card givin' out of the way we can get to the blog post that caught my eye a few hours ago. It's from a craft blog--I bet that got the guys fingers twitching towards the back button--from Mia, a woman located in Perth Australia, who runs a website named One Hour Craft . She's also got a blog called Mia's Cloud . Now it's quite true that for the most part crafty blogs are totally oriented towards the fairer sex but in the case of this one post--not so much. You see Mia posted about making Valentine's Day string panties a few days ago. Now that's a present it'd be great to unwrap--or simply gaze up...