life is very full these days, even when it isn’t. i’ve been working harder and more often lately, which has been stimulating, which i like. i say bring it on. i’ll only get better if i am challenged, after all.

but in non-work terms, it’s been about the overload of goodies in the wake of christmas and a birthday. my pile of books waiting to be read is the tallest it’s been in ages, which is exciting, but comes with a feeling of pressure. not only do i love reading books, i love buying books, and i can’t do that again until i polish off this stack. another challenge i take pretty seriously.

luckily my reading time has increased as i finally caved to the digital age and decided to digitize our full music collection. for years i’d been romanticizing the act of actually putting a cd into a music player, not wanting to let that go. but naturally any new purchases were digitizing for iphone-loading purposes, which led to only ever clicking on itunes instead of grabbing a cd, because hey, that’s so much easier, which meant never listening to the other 80% of what we own. finally, i conceded, which meant hours of popping in discs and hitting import, and lots and lots of reading, five minutes at a time while the disc drive spun. finally, a few days ago, it’s done, and now i can put our entire 30 days or so worth of music on shuffle, and just soak it all in. amazing how many fun songs i hadn’t heard in years out of pure laziness.

then there was this just-finished three day weekend, which was surprisingly not full at all in terms of professional or social obligations. it being valentine’s and all, we made plans for a few date-type activities (bazaar for dinner friday, mortified sunday night). on top of that, we tried to hit up the LA street food fest saturday, but took a pass on seeing the epic line, opting to stroll down to cole’s instead. the rest of the time, there was movie-watching, olympic-watching, eating, lounging, drinking, laughing. essentially, three and a half days straight of nothing but each other.

and to me, that’s how you know you have a good valentine. anyone can plan a nice date for a few hours. woo them with fancy drinks and gourmet plates and dressing up and all that. that’s rookie stuff. we spent a whole weekend, an extended one even, together from dress-up to dress-down, tapas to french dips, stage show to IMAX (we also saw avatar), metro bus to couch, and had a great time the whole way through. in fact, it seems this happens at least once a month, where monday morning comes and we realize ‘hey, we hung out, just the two of us, all weekend’, without giving it a second thought. because we have a great time that way. of course we love our friends, but if nothing else, we have each other, and that’s wonderful. now that’s a valentine.