Valentine’s Day, Happy
A good sort of day for pictures of pretty pink trees, I feel. 
And they are very pretty. 
(The paler flowers are peach. The darker ones are nectarine.)
You just don’t expect them . . . indoors. In February. Note I can’t get a full length one of two flowering pink trees standing on the dog crate, which looks every bit as silly as you think it does, because the kitchen is too small.
People have asked what we’re doing for Valentine’s Day.
Peter’s playing bridge.
I’m staying home with the hellhounds, the piano*, and the chocolate.
Peter doesn’t really believe in Valentine’s Day. Although he’s getting soppy in his old age. When we were first married the whole commercial Valentine’s Day doodah made him very nearly frantic with loathing, which was fun to watch. And Peter is very good at presents** and anniversaries and things so if he wanted to do a werewolf-at-full-moon act for Valentine’s Day, I could stand it. But as the years have rolled on he’s started sort of half sheepishly turning up with roses and bottles of champagne. I personally would have thought that increasing numbers of years with me would have precisely the opposite effect but I’m not complaining.
Some years ago now, when he was still largely resisting the Valentine impedimenta, he wrote me a poem:
If I am yours and you are mine
What need have we for Valentine?
But if that is too heart-warming for any other scoffers out there, here is possibly my favourite Valentine card of all time.† And no, of course I’m not going to tell you who it’s from or who it’s to††, but I laughed so much Peter came out of his office to investigate the unseemly goings-on.†††
http://wondermark.com/store/card_paper.jpg
* * *
* And the frelling computer with frelling Finale. Tarnation and codfat.^ Remind me, the next time I have to do something over on Finale, like changing time signatures, to just wipe the beggar and start from zero. Gods’ blood.
I’ve also chosen a little Beethoven sonata–one of those he gaily describes as ‘easy’ because it’s only thirty-six pages long with only forty-seven key changes–to have a hack at learning to play. I haven’t seriously started a new piece in months^^ while this composing thing took over and I’m amusing the hell out of myself now looking at Beethoven and thinking, oh, now that’s interesting, I wonder why he did that?
^ I did not make this up. But I have no idea where it comes from, it’s not in Partridge, Google gasped and fell over, and I don’t feel like spending the next six hours searching every slang dictionary on the web.
^^ Very Bad Me
** Not to forget he bought me Finale three months before my birthday. And has been sorry every day since.
*** It’s really only the Traditional English Gentleman’s susceptibility to guilt, but that’s good too. Some day this year when I want something I’ll say idly, well, you played bridge on Valentine’s Day you know.
† And I was already a wondermark fan. But this has deepened our relationship.
†† Oh, all right. It was to me. My fans are legion. And possibly a little peculiar.
††† It obviously wasn’t Finale. Finale doesn’t make me laugh.
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