Bittersweet Valentines

This weekend, L and I celebrated our 7th Valentines Day together, and our tradition has always been to keep it as low key as possible.  Well, this year turned out to be a little bit different.  We were woken up on Valentine's morning to a call from L's parents informing us that L's grandfather had passed away that night.  This came to us as a total surprise, since we had just had dinner with him two weeks prior, and we were all getting together for brunch at L's parents' house (including the grandparents) that morning.  While this became more of a stressful and emotional day, we are just glad that he went peacefully in his sleep.  The funeral has been set for Thursday, just down the road from where L and I live.   It's hard to believe that this picture of L, his father, and grandfather was only taken 7 months ago...

(copyright Studio Blue Photography 2009)

There was a part of us that just wanted to mope around for the rest of our day, and forgo our Valentine's Day plans, but we decided that it wouldn't do us any good, and that we should still make our special dinner and take some time for ourselves.  This was the best decision we could have ever made.

This year, we decided to split a nice steak and try our hand at making snow crab legs (L had never really had crab until last night!) for the main part of our meal.

We sauteed mushrooms for the steak, baked a potato, and steamed green beans to complete our meal- drinking copious amounts of wine all the while (we have a new favorite red wine called Menage a Trois).  This is, by far, the best meal that L and I have ever made together.  We used to suck at making fancy meals, but we've gotten a lot better at it over the years, and have also become more adventurous with what we'll try to make.  The crab legs will definitely being making an encore appearance in our kitchen in the near future!

L even injured himself while trying to dismantle the crab claw... I guess they really don't want to be eaten or something!

After digesting for a bit, we finished off the night watching an older BBC show called Jeeves and Wooster with our amazing cheesecake that we had picked up from The Cheesecake Factory (we do this every year).  L's was Snicker cheesecake and mine was Red Velvet cheesecake- yum!

The title of this post says it best:  this year was a very bittersweet Valentines day.  While we are very saddened by the passing of L's grandfather, we were glad to be able to spend some time together to just appreciate each other and what we have together.  L's grandparents were married for over 65 years, and we hope that we can make it as long as they did!