Valentine's Day Weekend

L. and I celebrated our first married Valentine's Day on Saturday night. It was a little bit of a hectic weekend because we were also getting L. ready for his business trip to Brazil, but more about that later. First the Valentine's Day celebration.

On Saturday, we both slept in a bit, since I had been sick all last week and L. was not fully sick but was fighting a little something. We got up, and I gave L. his Valentine's Day presents. I got him several books about his favorite subject, music. I also got him a really cool archive of Rolling Stone magazines on DVDs - all 40 years worth. Oli got his daddy lots of good treats for the plane and hotel room.

I then took some extra time to get ready for L.'s surprise. I knew that I needed to get dressed up, but I wasn't sure what for. I found a cute black dress and accessorized with a cute bag, shoes, and wrap for the night. I did up my makeup and then we headed out to the surprise location, during which L. gave me a gift - the movie Ratatouille, which is one of my favorites. It was sort of a clue of what was to come, which was a phenomenal dinner.

As we headed into downtown Seattle, I could only guess at where we were going because there are so many great places to eat downtown. We stopped in front of El Gaucho, and I suddenly got excited to try some steak. L. knows that my alltime favorite steak is at the Met, and I've heard that El Gaucho rivals the Met as far as steaks. We got inside and headed downstairs to a beautiful room with candlelit tables and a live jazz band. We waited for a few minutes to be seated, so we danced a fox trot and a swing dance to the live music along with some other guests. We were then seated and had a moment to drool over the menu. I chose a Frenched Rib Chop and L. chose a Baseball cut sirloin with lobster, and we shared their mashed potatoes and asparagus. The whole meal was delicious, and was followed up with a fruit, cheese, and cracker course, and then dessert. I had creme brulee, while L. did a wonderful cheesecake with strawberry coulis. The whole thing was incredible, and just as I thought our night was drawing to a close, L. placed a small box in front of me on the table. I opened it up to find a beautiful pair of small white gold loop earrings with diamonds. I immediately went to the restroom to put them in where I had a bit better light. They are georgous and were a total surprise. I've never even seen these before, and somehow L. just knew that they would be perfect for me. They will be great for both everyday wear and for more dressed up events.

Yesterday was busy as we worked to get L. ready for Brazil. I was working on getting an old laptop ready for him to take so that we could use Live Messenger and Skype to communicate while he was down there, since his work computer is locked down by their system admins and we couldn't connect it to the Internet. Just as I got everything done and we were playing around with the software, L. started checking some emails and such and a virus popped up. It turned out to be a particularly awful virus, which I just didn't have enough time to deal with last night, so he left without the computer after all. I was going to rebuild it anyway when he got back, so now I'll just work on doing that while he's away instead. It was so frustrating though. We're hoping that when he gets to Brazil, he can work with the IT guys down there to open up his computer a little bit to allow it to connect to the hotel Internet and do Skype and Messenger at least. We'll see how that goes. If not, it will be just regular old talking on the telephone!