This morning he handed me a sweater. Most girls may be familiar with gift giving rituals of Valentine's Day, but most boys in my life have junked this day as businesses exploiting capitalism. So, this sweater was a shock. I intended on getting him a present, but my wallet idea fell through last week.
My day began with a rush out the door to Ithaca's only interesting store, Urban Outfitters, which isn't really interesting at all. I spent an hour debating on what to buy and making the store manager run around looking for size 9 shoes. I had no idea what size fits him.
I spent the afternoon trying to book my parents a reservation for dinner and calling the restaurant to do something special for them while whipping up some molten chocolate cake batter for dinner. Then, my dad emailed and asked if I received the two dozen roses mom sent. Nothing. I tracked down the order and realized the building manager delivered the flowers to the wrong apartment and whoever received my flowers wasn't actively looking to return them to me.
But 4:30 rolled around, and I had to go food shopping with J. Wegman's was a shitshow, of course. We picked our live, 2 pound lobsters and some groceries and headed for the liquor store for some bubbly. When we finally got around to cooking, we realized the pot would not fit our little ocean buggies. He ran off to Wegman's again in search for a pot while I tried to fix our mess of a kitchen.
We had a little photoshoot with our lobsters before saying goodbye to them. Instead of stir-frying with black bean sauce like the original plan, the two of us stood by the stove--him cracking the shells and me slurping up lobster juice. After a while, we had no intention of really sitting down for dinner. And, it was the best lobster he'd ever tasted.
We laughed. We drank. We ate and cooked while listening to jazz music via Pandora.
The cheese in our fondue never melted. We ended up pouring the entire bottle of pinot grigio into our fondue. It was like a chunky cheese booze soup. His bright idea was to dip the entire baguette into the pot and take monster bites of the soaked bread. It was delicious.
We didn't have the patience to eat our molten chocolate cakes, so I burned the tips of my fingers trying to pop them out of the silicon molds as soon as they came from the oven. I successfully removed two of them, but we ended up shoveling bites of hot chocolate and spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream from the tub into our mouthes.
It wasn't classy. It wasn't perfect. But, it was the best Valentine's Day I've ever had.
