Flowers and more flowers

Flowers
Jesse and I don't have any Valentine's Day traditions. What I mean is that each Valentine's Day is different. Some years we do nothing other than give each other a hug, and some years we exchange candy. Jesse sometimes makes me "Luv-E Duv-E" mix CDs (I'm up to Luv-E Duv-E Volume IV) with love-themed songs (not the sappy kind... you wouldn't find those songs in his extensive CD collection!) and sometimes we make each other cards. Well, this year, I made a fancy dessert (more fancy than yummy, but it wasn't bad) and he had flowers delivered to me at work! I've never got flowers for Valentine's Day before, never mind delivered ones! The flowers are a bunch of alstroemerias.


He was surprised that I didn't bring them home on Valentine's Day, but my reasoning was that if I left them at work, I could spend the whole of Friday admiring them and I was sparing Jesse the pollen (since he's allergic to flowers). But, with Jesse's permission, I brought them home on Friday so I could admire them over the weekend. Well, when I got home from having my car smog checked and doing the grocery shopping yesterday, I found Jesse feeling miserable and blaming the flowers on his agonies (nausea, sinus headache, chills etc.). So I moved them to my bedroom and cut off all the anthers (pollen holders). We also opened up the windows and it seemed to help him a bit. He's still sleeping, so I don't yet know how he's doing today (hopefully better). You can see the cut stamens in this photo.


More flowers
Then, I woke up at 6:45 am today (Sunday), which is earlier than normal and, for once, was not because some early-morning golfers decided to shout at each other (I live next to a golfcourse and am frequently annoyed by golfers being loud, urinating in public, and/or setting off their car alarms). I don't know why I woke up then, but once I was awake there was no going back to sleep because I was too excited, thinking about a vacation Jesse and I are starting to plan. We've been saving to go on a big trip this year, and had been considering going to Australia (neither of us has been there before). Yesterday, we finally got around to more seriously thinking about our trip, and we're now thinking of going to South Africa! There are parts of South Africa I haven't seen but want to, so our preliminary plan is to rent a car in Cape Town and go for a ~10 day excursion up the west coast then inland to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and back (or, continue to Johannesburg... rental car companies allow one-way trips, for an extra fee). We're thinking about doing this in September or so, which is when Namaqualand will be in bloom! I hope this trip comes to fruition! I've already been thinking about what camera equipment I'll want to take, whether I should get another memory card for my camera, and how much cash I should take (from my trip to Denmark for a conference in 2006, I learned that taking US $ cash is the best way to exchange for local currency). I've even thought about what luggage I should take and which Pick 'n Pay in Cape Town we should go to buy food for the drive. Perhaps some of those thoughts could wait? Oh--one other thing I have thought about doing, while in Cape Town, is to go on a bike ride through the Cape Point Nature Reserve. As long as the baboons don't get us. I'm sure I'll be writing more about this in the coming months.

Last portraits of things once loved, and a first portrait of a new thing already loved

I took down our Christmas decorations today. The living room looks a little bare now! I took a photo of the tree (a ~2 foot high artificial tree) during its last minutes...

The small gourd decoration with the Santa face on it came from a couple in Washington state who sell homemade stuff... I had bought kitchen towels from them and they threw in the painted gourd as a thank you. The other gourd-like decorations are plastic Halloween ornaments I bought at an after-Halloween sale and made into hanging decorations for my tree.

Because my parents drove down to San Diego to see me for Christmas, they could bring more stuff with them than my mom usually can on the plane (this was the first time my dad visited me in San Diego). They took this opportunity to bring me a table! It's a dining table that has two leaves that fold down, making the table quite compact. Jesse and I love having a table (when we've had guests over for dinner before, we've had to sit around our coffee table. We once had a 8.75-month pregnant woman over and I felt quite bad for her--she ended up sitting on the floor). It fits perfectly around the corner from our kitchen. Here it is with one leaf up...

The downside to the table is that sitting on a wooden chair reactivated the "acute" type of pelvic pain I have (a pain in my butt, to own the truth). I must be too used to cushy couches/chairs. So, that's why the pillow is on the one chair now. (The photographed chairs are ones I already had, I just didn't sit on them until now... previously, Jesse had used one as a sitting place when he puts his shoes on, and the cats had used the other one as a perch)

Jesse is allergic to many things, including flowers. But, I like flowers. So, soon after he left San Diego to go visit his mom for the holidays, I went and bought myself a bunch of white carnations. Well, I didn't think they'd last longer than the two weeks Jesse was to be gone, but they have. Jesse has been sneezing like mad the last day, so I may throw them out later today (Jesse says I don't have to, but his sneezing tells me otherwise). Here's their last portrait...


In putting away my Christmas decorations, I was re-acquainted with a set of potholders I'd recently put away in my linen closet. These potholders saw me through graduate school and now three years beyond. They're almost old friends. I'd put them in my linen closet when I made myself some new potholders and was a little nervous about whether or not they'd actually protect my hands from heat (I did not make the old set)! So, I held onto the old ones until I could figure out if the new ones work. They do, so I decided I had to get rid of my old ones. As you can see, they were well used...

And that's it for today.