love me a good presidents’ day weekend. and valentines to boot? what’s not to love.

friday night was my birthday gift, tickets to the demetri martin show, which i was really excited about. as i told a few people already, his new show on comedy central which started this week was good. not quite as pure gold as his hour special from a while back, but definitely worth watching. the live show was really good. hardly any old material, and a lot of winners. i told jessica afterward, there were so many great jokes i couldn’t possibly remember any to try to repeat back to others. the guy is just really laid back and comfortable on stage and painfully witty. great time, even though they had set up chairs in the fonda which meant by the time we got there it was full and i had to sit in the balcony for the first time ever in that venue.

the only weird part was that he took ‘requests’ at the end, which is one thing for songs, but kinda bizarre for jokes. especially when the crowd cheers really loudly after the punchline. we didn’t really understand the crowd’s thought process at that moment. ‘hey, that’s that joke i know from before! WOOOOOOOOO!’ yeah, strange, but at least peppered with new jokes as well so it wasn’t just a weird close to an otherwise excellent show.

valentines day was just plain enjoyable, with an afternoon wine tasting at vino 100. if it weren’t in the hollywood/highland mall, it would be a cute little neighborhood shop, so don’t let that bias you against it. we had a yummy little cheese and chocolate and nut platter and a round of wines, throwing in an extra glass at the end and picking one to take home at the end. then we watched wall-E and got all cuted up watching robots fall in love before going to dinner around the block at campanile. it’s funny that a nice restaurant you could probably hit with a slingshot from our apartment we’d still never been to. overall i’d say it was a solid B+, a little packed in for it to be too romantic, and some of the dishes in our 5 course menu were a little plain, but others were totally delicious and of course, the company was fantastic. we talked a little about how different valentines is now that we’re fully committed versus the earlier years when we were still wooing eachother, and decided it’s a lot easier to just have a good time now that the pressure’s off. plus it’s fun to chuckle at the other couples around us who are obviously still in the awkward early days instead of best buddies for life like we are. instead we can just drink a lot and enjoy the food and go home and pass out googly-eyed and happy.

then the rest of the weekend we did almost nothing and it was fantastic. i’ve been killing a ton of zombies in left 4 dead which is possibly the most fun game since playing halo with the guys in college, doing plenty of reading, and staying indoors mostly from the february chill and rain. now i hope this week i get enough spare time to do all my work and still get some writing done for under culture, which i have slacked off on for a week much to my embarrassment. fingers crossed.