I ended up staying up until noon-thirty or something close to it, and took something to help me sleep. Nickie kept asking me what time I needed to go to sleep to be up at 5, but that didn’t end up happening. He wouldn’t tell me why I needed to wake up, only that I should dress up. I kept asking what we would do if I didn’t get up in time, but he said that it would be fine, that we could do it tomorrow, so I should sleep until I wasn’t tired anymore. I ended up sleeping really late and I got kind of upset when I thought that I was going to miss out on my surprise. It was already 9pm, but he called “the place” and they said they were seating until 11:30. I walked into the bathroom to get ready and turned on the light to see, and walked back out into the bedroom to get something and on my desk was a bouquet of roses, a little box and a card. Nickie had made the card for me, it had a key and a heart on the front. The box was a little heart shaped candy dish, sparkly red on the bottom and clear on the top with a bear on it and pink, red and white runts inside. I cried. I wasn’t really expecting anything for Valentine’s day… We aren’t doing so great right now, and I figured we’d just end up spending the evening together doing something nice… It caught me off guard. And it made me very happy.

Anyway… Rush rush rush, we managed to get ourselves ready to go. Nickie had said to dress up, and I didn’t have anything to wear. So I decided to go with cute and punky instead of nice, and wore a little school girl outfit. As it turns out, the surprise was the Cheesecake Factory. This is an upscale restaurant that has 30 different flavours of cheese cake as well as fabulous food. Anyway… We got there at about 10:30 and we were seated at about 11:30. During the time we waited, we looked through the menu and figured out what to order so there wasn’t any waiting once we sat down. We ordered an appetizer, which was fantastic, but neither of us could finish our dinners, let alone eat cheesecake. So we got our leftovers and a whole slice of cheesecake to go. Our server was great. I had her ask the manager if they could serve me alcohol at midnight, since it was my birthday, but the manager said no. Wasn’t a big deal or anything… I was drinking a super keen peach smoothie thing anyway. Tasted like real peaches!

At about 12:30, we finished up and headed home. We thought about trying to find someplace to go hang out for the rest of the being-out-able night. Our server suggested hitting a bar on the way home, and mentioned one, and coincidentally, I had remembered a couple of our friends mentioning that they were planning on going to the same bar. But we called them, and they had gone someplace else and Nickie didn’t know where that was. So we went home.

I was disappointed that I had forgotten my camera to take pictures while we were out to dinner. So when we got home, I started taking all sorts of pictures of Nickie and the flowers and the candies and so on, and Nickie took pics of me.

I had talked about wanting a pretty princess tiara to wear on my birthday, and Nickie promised me that we’d go looking for one tomorrow, but I decided we might as well go look for one now, since we had nothing better to do. And where do you look for anything at 6am? Walmart! We got there and went to the toy section, the idea being that I could pull off wearing a cheesey plastic kiddy tiara. But the only one was huge and purple, and that wasn’t quite the idea I was going for, so we headed elsewhere. Somewhere along the line, I decided that I needed some supplies for a present I was planning to make for Nickie. So we picked up posterboard and headed for the back of the store. We wandered through the fabric section and I talked about making something to wear for my birthday, but you can’t buy fabric afterhours because there’s nobody there to measure it and cut it for you. So we left there and spent time sitting in the craft section while I picked out paints. Then by some bizarre chance, Nickie turned around, and on the other half of one of the aisles was wedding supplies and nestled in the middle was a pretty princess tiara. I ripped one of them out of the box and tried it on, but we decided to wait and actually shop for one tomorrow, since deduction implied that wedding stores probably sell them. So armed with paints, brushes and posterboard, we headed home.

Nickie sat up for a while longer and then went to sleep, while I retreated to the living room and proceeded to make a mess into a masterpiece. And made Nickie a (late) Valentine’s picture that says on it “love makes us beautiful.” Not sure why it says that… but that’s what I thought to put on it while I was making it, so that’s what it says. And he had said something about liking banana runts the best, and how he divides them up and saves the banana for last. So I bought him a box of runts with 2$ I found in the pocket of the pants I had dug out of the bottom of the drawer to wear that night… and divided out the banana ones and put them in one little present and the rest in another one. I woke him up to give it to him. He loved it.

And that is how it went and how I got to where I am now… Sitting here writing about the best Valentine’s day I’ve ever had. Nickie did everything to make me feel like I was the most important and special thing in the world and it worked. That’s exactly how I felt. We had an absolute blast.

Last year a pretty crappy Valentine’s day and the worst birthday in the history of birthdays for reasons I won’t get into. This year I had the best Valentine’s day ever, which I would have to say is a pretty good start for my birthday tomorrow.

Thank you, Nickie, for making me feel special.