A Smorgasbord of Mushy Cute Stuff

Happy Valentine’s Day/Single’s Awareness Day/Thursday, everyone!

I don’t have any huge plans like I did last year, but Tim and I are going to stay in and eat pizza (I think…?) and watch movies this evening — we’re basically just doing what we usually do whenever we get to hangout over the weekend. Good times!

I just wanted to share some geeky and not so geeky Valentine greetings, including some I remember giving/receiving from the 90s, that I found on the interwebs!

Hope you all enjoy your day whether you happen to celebrate this Hallmark holiday or not

Harry Potter valentines by Kjersti Faret. Click here to see more!

Doctor Who Valentines by Tom Kurzanski

Dalek valentine by Amy Liu

 

I actually got that Abu card from a boy I couldn’t stand in first grade!

Star Wars valentines by Katie Cook

via Tumblr

I’m pretty sure I handed these The Little Mermaid cards one year

Downton Abbey valentine by Hurricane Vanessa

Sherlock valentines by robbicide

Firefly valentine via Hypable

I can’t find the original creator for this Firefly greeting – HELP!

Scott Pilgrim valentines via Uproxx

Cheers,
Nina

Love is a Mix Tape

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”

- High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

I am obsessed with mix tapes and I take the art of making one very seriously. You can’t just slump a bunch of songs together and call it a mix– you’ve got to think of who it’s for, think of what songs they might like (specifically by artists they may not be familiar with), or if it has a theme. Everyone has their own rules to making mixes. One of mine is that if you have the same artist on there twice, the songs can’t be from the same album and they can’t be placed back to back. See? I told you I’m serious about this shit.

For Valentine’s Day I made Tim a mix with songs that remind me of him (:barf: I’m sorry, I can’t help it if we’re so cute we make you sick), and I found that making a mixtape that’s strictly all love songs is quite difficult because you’re also using someone elses’ words to convey your thoughts and feelings for someone. So… yeah. I spent hours in front of my computer shuffling songs around to see how they flowed after one another. It took forever for me to come up with the final track list.  Some of the songs I chose also relate to our mutual love of Ryan Gosling as 3 songs on the mix have been in movies he’s been in (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” – Remember the Titans, “You and Me” – Blue Valentine, “Under Your Spell” – Drive).

Track list:

1. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough – Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
2. My Love – The Bird and the Bee
3. Wouldn’t It Be Nice – The Beach Boys
4. Islands – The xx
5. Lovers Rock – Sade
6. You Are My Favourite – Sophie Madeleine
7. Maps – Rogue Wave
8. Home – Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
9. Hand With Care – Jenny Lewis With the Watson Twins
10. You and Me – Penny & the Quarters
11. Trying My Best to Love You – Jenny Lewis
12. La Valse D’Amelie – Yann Tiersen
13. If I Came Back As A Song – Barnaby Bright
14. One And Only – Adele
15. Make It Wit Chu – Queens of the Stone Age
16. Here In My Room – Incubus
17. Secret Heart – Feist
18. Under Your Spell – Desire
19. I Wanna Be Where You Are – Michael Jackson
20. Hysteric – Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I don’t just stop at perfecting the mix — I’m all about presentation too! I like taking old jewel cases and use scrapbook paper to create the cover. For this particular one, I made little cartoony versions of myself and Tim by using the Hipster Dress-Up Game for girls and boys, then Photoshop’d them to stand by one another and added little details to make the girly one look a bit more like me (darker hair, freckles, olive glasses). For the back of the CD I found a little picture of Mickey playing the piano with Minnie looking at him adoringly that I snipped out of a Disney catalog years ago. It was too perfect as we both love Disney, and Tim plays the piano, and I like watching him play. And for the inside part of the cover sleeve, I found a quote about love by Dr. Seuss which pretty much sums us up.

I’m pretty effing proud of this mix. I always put a lot of thought and effort to every one I make, but this is the one I’m most proud of to date.

V-Day

Nerd love.

I used to like Valentine’s Day… y’know, in elementary school where we’d take an hour off towards the end of the day and have a party with punch, cookies, and pass out Valentines to all the classmates. When that stopped happening and I realized that Valentine’s Day is really just a holiday for couples to express their love for one another (don’t even try to tell me that it’s not just for romantic love, but all kinds of love, because that is bull), I became quite bitter. None of the boys ever had a crush on me in school, therefore I never received any Valentine grams during 6th period (except for that time my mom sent me one and signed it as Jon Bon Jovi ), and my track record with dating damn near doesn’t exist.

But alas, this year was not the same! I actually got to do disgustingly cute things because I haz a man now! Tim and I agree that it’s still a silly holiday, but since this year was our first one together we decided to go ahead and celebrate. Before we left for San Francisco, we exchanged presents. I made Tim a mixtape, which I will blog about this weekend because I forgot to take pictures of it and it’s too rad to not blog about (I’m super proud of it, okay?), a picture frame, and an Ellie badge from Up. Tim got me a couple of boxes of Godiva chocolates and some super awesome Minnie Mouse headphones!!! He also wrote me a sweet letter that made me cry because I’m weird like that.

My Valentine’s Day swag.

I was super excited when I saw that Tim was wearing a purple tie — it totally matched the Ellie badge I got for him!

We kicked off our festivities at Dynamo Donuts (I’ve blogged about them before here). Their customer service is always awesome, but yesterday was outstanding! The guy who helped us complimented our snazzy outfits and let us sample some beer flavored ice cream that a nearby ice cream shop made (it was from the last batch and a customer from earlier that day brought them a scoop). And he was super helpful in telling us about certain donuts they had available for the day, and even suggested I don’t get the powdered gluten free one since it would mess up my outfit. Dynamo Donuts never ceases to amaze me. Seriously. I can’t get over them. Dude with the bowtie, you’re awesome!

Heart Beet donut.

Matchy-matchy. This was pure coincidence.

After we ate our delicious donuts, we went downtown because I wanted to look at the Disney Store. The upper floor has a little kids table in front of a screen that plays musical scenes from different Disney movies, and we saw that there were crayons and coloring pages ready to be colored. We sat there for a good 30 minutes. One of the cast members even came by and told us we were doing a good job. Haha!

After I finished coloring my princess page, I helped Tim finish coloring his Winnie the Pooh page.

After coloring and oogling at the adorable huggable stuffed Disney characters, I suggested that we go to the Ferry Building since Tim told me he’s never been there. When we got there, we saw a gaggle of pillow clad people. I kind of forgot that SF has this annual pillow fight every Valentine’s Day. It looked kind of boring to me, to be honest. I was talking to my boss about it after my shift (yes, I work now!) and she said that maybe the point of the pillow fight is to let out aggression. And then I said maybe it’s for single people who really hate Valentine’s Day. o,0

The annual Valentine’s Day pillow fight in SF looked kind of uneventful.

We were going to try and find a place to eat dinner around Embarcadero, but the place I wanted to eat at was closed! Tim suggested we eat at Sanraku, a Japanese restaurant that my family and I really like, but it was a 23 minute walk away. Since it was in the area where we parked our car, the trek there was worth it. By this time, it was effin’ cold and windy and I cursed at myself for wearing a skirt, but I knew that sweet sesame chicken and miso soup were in my near-future. I often craved Sanraku’s sesame chicken when I was in high school. I had eaten there a few times with my aunts from the area. To this day, I still think it’s the greatest sesame chicken I’ve ever eaten. Dammit, I’m making myself hungry!

After dinner, we made quick little shopping trips to Rasputin and Nordstrom.  And for dessert we got strawberry cream puffs from Beard Papa (which is their GREATEST FLAVOR EVER) and orange cream soda.b

Needless to say, my first Valentine’s Day was A M A Z I N G!!!!!