The Princess and I have been together for something like, a dozen years? Nope, eleven years, we’re in our twelfth. We’re a pretty lovey dovey couple, but we’re continually stumped by obligatory romantic occasions. For at least the last eight years, we’ll reach February before one of us remembers that our “anniversary” has past. Then a couple weeks later he wakes up with a start exclaiming,

“Crap! It’s my brother’s birthday tomorrow!”

Which leads us to the realisation that today is Valentine’s Day. Tomorrow everyone will want to hear how the oooiest gooiest couple they know marked the occasion, and we’ll disappoint them yet again. Really, by now they should expect this. Granted, when we tell people that we just stayed in, I think it’s received with a bit of a saucy wink.

I’m pretty sure we’ve never done anything for our anniversary (though this year we decided to try to do something next time), and we’ve done at least two Valentine’s Days. Once we went out for dinner in Toronto – I don’t remember the restaurant, but it was fancy and expensive. The food was good, but we were seated next to a bizarre couple. The guy was so Japanese maffia (figuratively), and he spent the entire dinner snapping at various people on his two cell phones, and checking his pager (this was long enough ago that people still used pagers). The woman was wearing something like six grand worth of clothes (including her shoes and bag), and maybe another grand in jewellery. She didn’t seem to notice that her boyfriend spoke just one sentence to her the entire meal. The other time – also in Toronto, we had both forgotten VDay, but the Princess bought me a really awesome motorcycle jacket, so we decided to call it a Valentine’s present. It didn’t fit my gangling arms, but I was able to have it altered.

So what’s up for tonight? Well, we’re staying in.