Happy Valentine's Day!!!!

Obviously I already confessed last month that Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday. And it's not because of the chocolate, or the flowers, or the limericks that Hallmark makes up and prints on pink and red cards. I think it's because everyone has such low expectations for the holiday. I feel like any card I send or gift I give is genuinely appreciated because it's not expected.

So, of course I started my Valentine's Day a little early ... Friday the 13th, another one of my favorite days. (I always have really good days whenever it's a Friday the 13th. Maybe it's my lucky number. Maybe I'm just weird like that.) So Friday, after I finished my shopping I started baking. Now I realized that this was risky ... everything I've attempted to bake in the last 6 months has ended up in the trash. And it's not because I have high standards, I don't. It's just been that bad. So I decided to bake from a box (always a much safer bet) and make C a Funfetti cake. It's his fave. And then I also decided to make some dog treats because, really, how can you screw those up? The whole point is just to bake them until they're so dry and hard that they'd break a tooth.

Funfetti cake was really my second choice. I actually tried to make heart shaped cupcakes ... they turned out like this:

not good. :(

Which meant the dogs got the remainder of them. So I took the rest of the batter that I had, poured it in a pie pan, and baked it for a rediculously long time. The end result was this:

I realize I'm no Betty Crocker but it's ok. I'm making progress. This was edible or should be edible. We ate so much food during the day on V-day that we still haven't attempted this.

The dog treats were no problem. I'm a pro at these and the dogs go nuts for them.

mmmm .... now if only human food was this easy to make.

So ... Valentine's Day morning Charlie woke me up with pancakes and flowers. Awwwh ... what a good guy. So we ate, exchanged presents and then left for Loveland.

some of our loot.

We were planning on driving around and checking out some houses which we did and then we ate at Applebees. During lunch a barbershop quartet showed up in white tuxes with red bow ties and started singing. It was a little odd but I got the impression that Loveland goes all out for V-day. There were cardboard hearts that were painted with messages all over Main Street. One of them was a guy asking someone to marry him. But my favorite part about Loveland ... water! We drove around Boyd Lake State Park and it was the most amount of water I've seen in one place since moving out here.

*sigh* I grabbed this picture from their website. I miss the beach.

When we got home I cooked dinner. (A much safer idea than baking). And we stuffed our faces with a huge amount of food and wine and spent the rest of the night trying to recover.

Toby was annoyed I didn't bake the pork roast for him.

They were hungry.

Happy Valentine's Day, C!!