.jeri.

Hey everybody! What's new? Eh. I'll just read about it on Facebook. I hope you all had good weekends. Mine was a good one, though it went by too quickly.

Friday night we had a movie night with Ryan and Amy at our place, and it was my pick, so I exposed them to Heathers. I can't help it - I still love that movie. And I even love my cheap quality DVD of it.

Saturday I slept in like clockwork and puttered around the house until finally going out for a jog at the Creek Park. It was filled with families taking photos together, which meant most of the bridges were filled with people. That made it challenging to get around the park. I have been listening to The Brothers Karamazov while working out for the past month. I was so glad to be making it through a classic quickly, and then it ended and I realized that I had just listened to an abridged version of the book. DOH! I was so upset. That means one day I'll still have to go back and read the whole book again, but I'll already know how it ends. Lame.

Saturday night my sister and I had dinner out at Rutabegorz before heading to the university to check out its yearly opera production. They have gotten a lot more sophisticated over in the conservatory! They had complex stage lighting, huge set pieces, and they even rented large screen TVs to display subtitles - because they actually sang in Italian for the first time in over ten years! I was thrilled about that. The program featured tragic divas of opera, with scenes from Suor Angelica, Rigoletto, Tosca, and La Traviata. There were a couple of comedic scenes to help lighten the mood as well. It was like going to a best-of show, and over half the scenes were performed in Italian. Jenny and I were happy to pay cheap prices to sit in the front of the audience, as opposed to our $50 nosebleed seats at the Dorothy Chandler. We were also pleased to realized we're getting more familiar with the operatic greats, because we had already seen three of the scenes performed by the LA Opera! It was a great experience.

Sunday Ric and I went to church, where our Sunday School class focused on the idea of romance - what it is, and how we might show it to our spouses in different ways. It got us talking about what's romantic to each of us, and what would show our love the most on Valentine's Day. We agreed to forfeit our plans of going to a festival and instead decided to focus on things that we've each been wanting to but not had the time to do. First off, I let Ric take a giant nap while I watched the Olympics. Haha. After I got a bunch of house cleaning done, we went out shopping for workout shoes, and we also spent some Christmas gift cards. I happened to look up on my Open Table app whether there were any restaurants nearby that still had available reservations for dinner, and Taps actually had an opening, so spur of the moment, we ended up reserving dinner there. Unfortunately when we got there, it was a fixed menu that involved three courses, so it was far too expensive. We just dealt with it, and I enjoyed my meal a lot. Ric still needed a burger after dinner. Maybe that'll be a funny story one day, but the memory of our check will probably terrorize him for a while.

Life's busy lately. I just spent half the day at the Mini dealer getting various things fixed. Tomorrow our office is having a birthday lunch at Portillo's. I'll be out of the office a few days this week to do intensive data entry for our software conversion, which is more and more overwhelming as the go-live gets closer. And for some reason I have all sorts of doctor appointments in the next couple months. My calendar is starting to look crazy.

I'll just take a deep breath for now and wish you a wonderful week!