My Anti-Valentine’s Day 2017 & Dinner At Whole Foods

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

My wife and I have been married for 22 years and while it has not been all rainbows and unicorns we have stuck it out with each other. I don’t mean for that to sound negative, but you know what I mean.

One thing my wife and I both dislike is what we called “Forced Holidays”. This would include Valentine’s Day!

I get my wife flowers and we go to dinner often, probably more often that we should. So I don’t like it when I am told that on a certain day each year i need to go out to dinner with the masses on a weekday (usually) and purchase over priced flowers just so we can post pictures on Facebook of the flowers and show all our friends how awesome our marriage is.

Yeah, no. I told my wife we would not be doing that this year…. And she agreed.

I even posted on Facebook how i felt about it.

Pre Valentine’s FB Post

So I took it a bit further.

This year we had:

  • No Flowers
  • No Card
  • No Dinner (sort of)

So we agreed that we would disagree with Valentine’s Day 2017 and instead put a little money away. Instead of going on a forced dinner and spending money on overpriced flowers we just put a few hundred dollars in our savings account. The money we would have probably spent on dinner and flowers.

My wife did surprise me, however, in that she came home from running errands brought us some sushi from Whole Foods.

So that was it for us. Sushi from Whole Foods and in bed watching a movie by 9. That is my kind of evening.

Valentines Day 2016, No Flowers For My Wife & Doing The Little Things

Posted by Tim Blankenship on

So today is Valentines day.  My wife and I don’t buy into the hype of the holidays, not after being married now over 20 years. Now most people would say this is the most important time to do things, after all these years, but I don’t agree.

I think Valentines is like very other holiday such as Christmas to get people moving in a certain direction. And that is to spend money.

For Valentines day it is buying expensive gifts and overly marked up flowers.  It is going to a fancy restaurant and making this huge day of it.  I think it is sad.  Just my opinion.

My wife is very pragmatic – very down to earth.  She also does not buy into the hype.  In fact, this year, as she has said the last few years is don’t spend money on flowers. So I didn’t, sort of.

What my wife hates is buying flowers that will only die in a couple of days.  But she does not bat an eye when I buy her plants.  Especially her favorite plants, Hydrangea’s and Tulips.

flowers

So I got her two of each which she loved and will be around until she forgets to water them.  Don’t tell her I said that.

I try to do the little things that matter when I can.  I am in no way perfect, but I try to do the little things that my wife wants or appreciates.

For instance, we had to do our weekly shopping on Sunday.  I know she was not feeling good on Saturday night and didn’t go to bed until after midnight.  I knew she would be sleeping in.  I, on the other hand am a morning person and up at the break of dawn.

So I headed out early and did our weekly shopping at Traders Joe’s.  Then I mowed the lawn. All before 8 a.m. (This is Sunday, mind you).  So when she woke up, those two things were done and gives us more time to just be together.

Tonight, I cleaned up the kitchen.  Not a big deal, but I could tell that we both just wanted to go upstairs and rest so I just got it done.  And I got a big “thank you for doing that”

It is the little things you do all the time, not a big spend on flowers, dinner and gifts all rolled up into one day per year.

So we spent the day at Home Depot getting little projects that we completed around the house. Cleaned out the garage, again.  I swear, we clean it out every other month.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Well, this is day 3 of working out and is was just a day of rest. No gym today. Felt this body needed a little rest. Tomorrow is a big cardio day with the personal trainer.  Got to get a good nights sleep.

Talk to you tomorrow.