hearts, flowers and other nonsense

I've never been a fan of valentine's day. No, it's not because I spent too many valentines days alone. Even when I was with someone, I still hated it.

I wouldn't let my mom wish me a happy valentines day. I renamed the day, a brand new holiday named (of course) after its creator - Jaime Day. (I was a terribly creative 6th grader, wasn't I? But it kind of stuck and my mom gave me a happy jaime day card every year through college) If you were celebrating Jaime day, you wore green and black because it's as far away from red and pink as you can get. Celebrations of love and hearts and all that mushy stuff were reserved for any other day of the year.

Maybe I don't like valentines day because whenever I try to do something special, it doesn't work out quite right.

Like the first v-day hubby and I spent together...

We were going to head into Boston. I had reservations at a great little italian restaurant. We had tickets for something he wanted to see, although I'll be damned if I can remember what at this point. Everything was all set. Until that morning where he came down with a nasty bug and spent the entire day praying to the poreclain gods.

Fun, huh?

Or our second v-day together. We were going to make up for the fact that the prior year was such a bust. I found this b&b up in the white mountains, got us this two-floor suite with a hot tub and fire place. Very nice? Very romantic?

Maybe for the other couples staying there...

That year I also had the brilliant idea of talking the school into participating in the criminal law moot court competition. The school teamed me and hubby up to compete together. And those evil bastards that run the competition set the brief due date as February 15. Although we had been frantically researching and writing this thing for over a month, we pulled allnighters every night that week.

The sun was starting to set on v-day and we still weren't done. We were on - no joke - draft 15 of the brief. So instead of packing light and heading up north with the brief and competition behind us, we loaded the car with our laptops, a printer, print outs of hundreds of cases, 5 legal pads full of notes and 3 packs of computer paper.

We check into our beautiful room and cancel our dinner reservations. Looking longingly at the hot tub in the corner, we hunker down for our 6th straight night of nonstop work on that stupid brief. And a mere 13 hours later, as the clock struck 5, we were done.

The room looked like a cyclone hit it. Papers were strewn everywhere. There was not one square inch of floor that wasn't covered. If you've ever seen "The Paper Chase" our room looked exactly like theirs did at the end of a week cramming for final exams.

We stumbled up the winding staircase to our bed and pass out instantly, fully dressed and too tired to care. Later that morning, we tried to mail the brief from the post office up in Ashland only to learn that the little dinky towns up there don't staff their post offices over the weekend. We had to race almost 2 hours back down to Concord to mail the thing before the post office closed at noon. We made it just before they locked the doors.

Nice way to spend what is supposedly the most romantic day of the year, right?