Valentine's Day-s!

Well, we did a marathon of Valentine's activities this year. Jeremy has had a lot of time at home lately, so he cleaned the house and went shopping on the 14th while Jill was at work. He created a six-course dinner and activities to go along with it.

first course
carrots with vegetable dip
bruschetta
seasoned fries
[picnic in the living rooml play Phase 10]
second course
house salad
[move to the formal dining room, complete with new candles]
third course
sausage farfalle with sweet red peppers
[talk over dinner]
fourth course
artichoke with a garlic butter sauce
[instead of popcorn, we peeled the leaves off our artichokes and watched the movie that Jill got to pick out--she chose Armageddon]
fifth course
petite, mesquite grilled filet, covered in carmelized onions
[we decided that I had overdone the menu, and saved this for Friday's dinner]
sixth course
fresh strawberries and bananas in a decadent chocolate sauce
[these stayed in the kitchen so the "decadent" sauce would drip on our counters and lineleum, not the carpet!]

Friday we went to the dentist and to work, and had our 24-hour marinated filets for dinner---yummy!

Saturday, Jeremy had to practice a musical number in the morning and Jill had a baby shower to attend for someone in the ward. After, Jill gave me the schedule for the day and we drove off into the sunset...

We grabbed lunch and had a mini-picnic on our way out to "deCordova." Then, we spent time inside looking at photographs and some other art. We watched this intersting short film called "fear" or something that showed young kids growing up during the cold war, learning how to "duck and cover" while at school or on the bus or while in the playground for when the air raid sirens would sound. Intermixed were images of slightly older youth getting physicals and doing jumping jacks and stuff at military boot camps. I can't imagine what it was like to grow up like that.

While we may face similar bombing-type threats due to the increasing pervasiveness of terror and increasing targeting of the US, we have no air raid siren nor emergency drills (not that the ducking and covering would actually do much...). And our fear of attack ought to be less than that of people living in other war-torn and terror-ravaged countries, where it's not if an attack is coming, but when. We're blessed to live where we have the resources and infrastructure to better battle these type of threats. Regardless of how you feel about the fairly recent creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and/or President Bush, hopefully you caught the part of his last "State of the Union" where he outlined some of the plots that have been foiled. For various reasons, DHS and other intelligence services are not prone to advertise their successes--no great PR machine is at work on this end, and the media is only too quick to highlight their failures. However, we should know that attempted attacks on US soil and US interests around the globe are being discovered and prevented, with little fanfare to let us know, but an extra day of safety for us.

Anyway...sorry for the depressing/random tangent.

One of the exhibits there, inside, was photographs of children--some sad (in old Chicago ghettos that looked like warzones) or disturbing (children (7-9 yrs)pretending to smoke candy cigarettes or actually smoking), etc.

Some of the outside sculptures can be viewed on the website. Here are two interesting ones. The link below shows two sculptures, by the same artist, that were not originally designed to be together, but have been placed in close proximity to each other at the museum. The second sculpture stands in the back corner, hidden behind the first.

http://www.decordova.org/decordova/sculp_park/levy.htm

You can explore the decordova website for other sculptures. Here are some pictures that we took:

DeCordova Date

Then, we walked around the "old" shops for a while before we went to dinner in an old firestation at a restaurant called Walden Grille. http://www.waldengrille.com/

It was a romantic evening.