Valentine's Day Approaches

Thu Feb 13th, 2003 02:39:18 AM EST

Diary Entry 124
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Friday is Valentine's Day. It's also Kate's birthday. So I'd be in big trouble if I forgot... but, no worries, it's going to be great. We're going out to Lavanda, a fancy Italian restaurant and wine bar in Palo Alto. Afterward there's a couple of places in downtown that have live jazz, so we'll stop by one of those.

When get tired of the jazz, it'll be time to go home, and we'll do the presentation of the gifts. I have three gifts for Kate, one for Valentine's, one for her birthday, and one that's a book for both of us to enjoy. She says she has something for me, too, and it sounds pretty exciting from the hints.

After the gift-giving, well...

We're getting all dressed up. Kate's got this zip-up black shirt. It looks great with these black pants she has. Another option was a colorful skirt, but I liked the all-black look.

I got inspired by the all-black theme, and so I went shopping tonight at the Macy's men's store in the Stanford shopping center. Now I have a black silk shirt and black corduroy pants, plus new black socks, shiny black dress shoes, black leather belt, black sunglasses, and black silk boxers. (Who says men can't coordinate colors?) The centerpiece is this awesome black leather jacket. I look straight out of the Matrix in this stuff. It's all good stuff, too, brands I like. They always seem to have big sales when I go there, and tonight was no exception: I got incredible deals, like $125 for the jacket, tagged at $475 originally, and $30 for $80 shoes.

This week started out in a frustrating way, but it got better. In particular, on Monday I gave a presentation to my research group at our lunch meeting, and it didn't go so well. I got a lot of confused-sounding questions and some comments that seemed half confused and half heckling. At any rate, it was obvious that the presentation needed lots of revision.

On Tuesday, I did the revision, and today I did the presentation again for a different audience. It went much better. I am happy about that.

Last Friday, Kate and I made dinner together. It was fettuccine carbonara this time. We also had fresh bakery bread with brie. Yum. Later, we picked out her outfit for Valentine's...