We've come a long way.

We've come a long way since the first Valentine's Day the Pastor and I had together. That year, 2005, the Pastor's Valentine to me was an email.

He emailed me a picture of a Hello Kitty toaster he had given me a few weeks earlier. The subject line of the message said "here." There was no text in the body of the email, just the attached picture.

I'm still not sure why I didn't break up with him then. In my defense, I was a very busy woman working a kajillion hours a week. Too busy to kill him or dump him, so he got lucky.

The Pastor took me out this past weekend for our belated Valentine's Day celebration.

We stayed in our city but went downtown. Isn't everything better downtown?

The day started off with the Pastor taking me for coffee and a pedicure.

I hadn't had a pedicure in two months. I've been a DIY gal lately. Getting pampered was heaven. The Pastor sat in a massage chair next to me and did his own version of pampering - he read Hebrew. To each his own.

I wore a sexy blue dress - not a Goodwill find but a bargain. I picked up the $128 dress for $19.00. Somehow, I managed to not get a picture of me wearing the thing. I can only assume the Pastor didn't want too many people to see how good I looked for fear that a picture like that could only go viral on the internet.

Here's our lovely hotel room:

My only complaint about the whole weekend would be that I don't like King beds. They are too big, allowing the Pastor to escape from my schooching.

I gave the Pastor his Valentine:

What can I say? When he's not sewing, he loves his silicone kitchen gadgets. This one was purchased in the post-Valentine clearance at Target. That's the bonus of celebrating holidays late - half off!

We watched movies on the laptop:

His picks, rented from the library, included one about monks who all get killed and a silent movie. I thought my Redbox movies would prove to be superior, but they really weren't.

We went out to dinner at our favorite restaurant:

In the pic it looks like we were super classy people who didn't eat the last bite of ice cream, but I can assure you after the picture was taken we did.

The fun continued the next morning. My Prince Charming took me to see an exhibit at the art museum:

And of course there was more coffee:

It was a lovely weekend. The Pastor said he hoped I enjoyed it, he probably wouldn't be free again until June.

I'll take what I can get - as long as it's not another picture of a toaster. He knows better now. If he tries a stunt like that again, he'll be toast for sure.

Sew In Love

The Pastor has many spiritual gifts. One would be that he is the worst gift giver, ever. Along those lines, when purchasing flowers, he gets the flowers so close to death I'm surprised the store is still selling them. Either that, or he has a secret flower dumpster. These flowers end up having the opposite affect on me. Instead of being happy he bought me flowers, it makes me seethe with rage. Is this what he wants? Are these flowers a secret metaphor for our relationship? Then I have to keep the dying flowers around for days to continue to rot. And I never feel like I can say it's sweet that you buy me flowers but please please please buy me some that are still alive and smell like flowers and not decay.

Sigh. At least he tries.

One year for our anniversary, the Pastor gave me a ring. A yellow gold ring (ick) featuring a belt buckle (ick). The accompanying note read "thanks for buckling up and joining our lives."

Ick. Ick. Ick. Ick. Ick. Ick. Ick.

Nothing says "romance" quite like a belt buckle and tolerance.

This past Christmas I didn't get a present. Not even a sketchy bouquet. I realized he had been swamped, so I cut him some slack (my gift to him). Typically, we've not done Christmas on Christmas. He has given me gifts in January when the Wise Men came to visit the baby Jesus, and coincidentally when everything is on sale and our property taxes have been paid.

This year Christmas came and went. Then the Magis came and went and I still didn't get squat. I was beginning to feel like he was going to try to pull a fast one on me and do the dreaded combo Christmas/Valentine gift.

I wasn't going to let that happen so I told him flat out what I wanted. I wanted MAC makeup brushes. In my mind (which was formed watching Disney Princess movies) they would be carried in by cartoon birds and be presented to me arranged like a bouquet tied with ribbon, but at this point I'd take whatever I could get.

Deep in my heart I knew it would be too much for him to handle, after all he has a Ph.D. Also I'm fairly certain he's never seen a Disney Princess movie. So I decided to cut him some slack and made a very specific list, complete with instructions, turn-by-turn directions, how many steps from the entrance of the store to the makeup counter, salesperson names, brush names and numbers, and alternately a website where they could be purchased with free shipping. It was the most effort I could make to get my present without actually buying it myself.

Fast forward to my husband becoming completely obsessed with the idea of us (ME) needing a sewing machine. Having lost our dear sweet lady who did mending for us, we were left with a hole in our lives that couldn't be darned.

Much like a bouquet of dead flowers, it seemed to disappoint the Pastor greatly that I couldn't and had no desire whatsoever to sew. I let this make me feel bad for about two seconds until I remembered the Pastor doesn't like sports, so if he can be a guy who doesn't like sports I can be a girl who doesn't want a sewing machine. Besides, in my Universe, things are sewed by talking cartoon animals and fairy godmothers.

Imagine my surprise when he brought home a sewing machine and told me Merry Christmas.

I thought I might lose it. I reminded him yet again that I DIDN'T. WANT. A. SEWING. MACHINE. I briefly toyed with the idea of maybe keeping the sewing machine, and exactly WHAT I COULD SEW TOGETHER ON IT.

Finally, he opened the sewing machine box. Turns out he had bought the sewing machine, taken it out of the box, and wisely replaced the contents with this:

I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of cartoon birds fly out of that box too.

In the end, the Pastor taught himself to sew, and he's quite the little Seamster. As for me, while he's sewing, I'm painting my face.

It's February 20, and I still haven't gotten my Valentine, but he's promised it is coming this weekend. I can't wait to see what he's whipped up for me on his sewing machine.

I'm on to you, Pastor!

The Mystery of the Missing Socks? The Clue on the Dryer? The Case of the Foiled Footwear?

I'm playing around with what my Nancy Drew book titles for this one would be.

Seems like the Pastor has a dirty little secret. Technically I guess it would be a clean little secret, but I've got him all figured out, and I didn't need my bobby pins or flashlight to solve this one.

The Pastor went out of town this week and while he was gone, I went a sleuthin' and found this, dun dun dun:

He could have done a better job of hiding it from me. I suppose he thought if he left the bag in a safe place, a place he thought I'd never look with him out of town (on top of the dryer), it would be safe.

You see, the Pastor thinks he has finally figured out some way, some sort of system while doing laundry, to isolate the mismatched socks. He thinks if he separated out this batch of lonely socks from the last bout of laundry-doing, he'd be able to make it make sense. That his little system of putting them in a bag will somehow make us be able to find the sock-mates.

When I found the bag of lonely socks? I couldn't have laughed harder. It was almost as though he had given me a Valentine. Almost.

I don't have a Ph.D. Or a few Master's Degrees. But this I know for sure, you will never figure it out.

It is un-understandable.

The socks will never make sense.

We will always and forever have a pile of mismatched socks.

This is just how the Universe works. Socks just disappear.

And on top of the Universe's natural order of things for socks, we have kids that go back-and-forth between different houses. They do not come to our house with matched socks on. Just like everything else in our house, even our socks are divorced and remarried to other socks. Then when the kids leave again, they leave with one of those pairs of preciously matched socks, and they disappear into another kind of black hole entirely.

It'll be fun though. To watch the Pastor after the next go-round of laundry, dumping out all the socks and enlisting the help of the kids to match them - you know, those kids who are not wearing matched socks in the first place. You will be able to see his blood pressure rise with each stray sock.

Maybe I'd care more about this if I even wore socks, but I don't and I never will. I won't wear anything that means I'll just have that much more laundry to do. I've got plenty of other cases to solve without spending any more time on socks again, ever.

And that, my little sleuths, is no mystery.