valentine laundry gerbils

Valentine's Day

J surprised me on V-Day with roses, dafodils, and having the day off - hooray! We had lunch at our favorite spot, Moe's - where we split our usual Billy Barou and drank an obscene number of refills of Cherry Coke.

Our day continued by visiting the local pet stores and admiring/talking to/petting gerbils, hamsters, and bunnies.

The evening concluded with chocolate cake and a homemade meal by mois with strawberry dacquiris. <3

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On Saturday Munchkin and GooberBear assisted us with our laundry:

* Munchkin took each piece of clean laundry, sniffed it, and then carefully set it on the floor in a crumpled pile.

* GooberBear took over the socks by shoving the socks' mate down into the toe.

"Uncle J, do you know how to find the sock? You just put your hand down inside and then there it is!"

* Goober was also very impressed with one of my socks that had snowmen, reindeer, and snowflakes on it:

"Ooooh Aunt B, this sock is soooo cute!"

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Grizzly Bear was in rare form on Sunday (yesterday, if you will) - he's still pretty grumpy, but we've tricked him into putting his paws on us when we have sunflower seeds (by far his favorite kind of seed) - but yesterday he actually hopped right out onto our hands, looking around with his little blind eyes and quivering his whiskers like crazy smelling his surroundings. It was so cute! And he didn't bit us once!

I've also discovered something rather disconcerting: gerbils...shed. There are little gerbil hairs all around in his cage - I've never seen such a thing from a rodent!

valentine's cheer

Waiting for Valentine's Day to have a special dinner out is for chumps - that's why J and I hit Red Lobster on February 7th to celebrate our love. J came home from work and exclaimed "Tonight's the night, let's go!"...I love it when he's all spontaneous about things like this, it makes it so special. So we got dolled up (...I got dolled up, J did the male equivalent), and after 30 minutes of chipping the ice off the van we were ready to go (J chipped the ice while I got dolled up. He's such a nice man!).


We went to Red Lobster because 1) we had gift cards and 2) I adore it...it's my favorite restaurant. One of the benefits of having your Valentine's dinner early is none of the restaurants are mobbed (it annoys me to no end that Red Lobster does not take reservations, I think they take sadistic pleasure in making people line up straight out the door into the freezing cold). Even though there were clearly empty tables they gave me a buzzer...a new, fancy buzzer that not only beeps when your table is ready, it tells you in a creepy automated voice: Your table is...ready.

We got such a bounty of seafood goodness, you would not even believe it - but the most exciting feature of our dinner by far was the 'ultimate fondue'. This cheesy greatness was filled with little shrimpies and crabmeat and auuuugh!! it was SO good.

The only downer to the night was that we had one of those mystical disappearing waitresses, so when we were ready to go it took a good 30 minutes before she came back with our bill.

All in all, however, the most wonderful evening was had. :)