Happy Valentine’s Debacle!

Let me just preface this by saying that in the end, we had a pretty darned good day. There were, however, plenty of opportunities for me to doubt that outcome, and hey—it’s about being together, right? Well the likelihood of so many things going wrong in a single day (let alone on Valentine’s Day) has reeled me back into the blogosphere. So here I go.

The day started off like any other day—alarm fired off at 7:30am, I hit the snooze bar 2-3 times in defiance… until I am coherent enough to recall that today was actually a special day and an occasion for not going into work. That’s ok, I’m sure they won’t miss me. In fact, I’d be willing to bet money that nobody even knew I was gone. As my wife later said, “that’s sort of good and bad.” After these realizations I opted for “off” vs. “snooze” the 4th go around, and went back to bed. I must not have been as coherent as I thought I was or else I wouldn’t have done such a foolish thing as the next time my eyes opened it was just shy of noon. Yes that’s right, noon. Not exactly my plan, but hey that’s alright; I must have needed the sleep. Incidentally, my mother would often say that and I’m not sure where it originated from… and I ALWAYS need the sleep—usually the sleep I’m not getting—and I WISH it were a valid excuse for sleeping in every day. [Sigh] But I digress…

So on our agenda for the day was a number of possibilities, the most immediate attractions being food and the San Diego Zoo. It had to have been after 2pm by the time we gathered ourselves and got out the door… and we opted for Mimi’s café. They serve breakfast all day, and darn-it, that’s what we wanted—who cares that it was almost 3pm! After eating an excellent breakfast, we hit the road en route for the zoo. Mind you it’s just after 4pm at this time, and once we’re south of North County San Diego, southbound traffic starts backing up as people head home from working in Sorrento Valley to their homes in PB and Mission Valley—all that to say I could have found nicer parking lots to sit in if that’s what we were interested in doing. There was heavy traffic from La Jolla pretty much all the way to downtown. Joy. So at long last we get to the zoo and pull in to park. Parking lot is VERY empty. Bad sign. So empty, in fact, that we’re able to park in the very front row. That never happens… unless, of course, the zoo was closed. Silly me… winter hours… they close at 4pm. Well at least there are bathrooms just outside the gates.

So there we are sitting in the car, in the front row of the zoo parking lot (score!), trying to figure out what to do next. Other items on the possible agenda were to hit up a movie (we’d been wanting to see “Night at the Museum”), something involving Heidi bringing along a pair of socks, and a late reservation at the Macaroni Grill. Naturally, the paper I jotted movie times down on got left at home. Good thing we have GPS on our phones that allow us to find movie theaters around our location along with their phone numbers. With the advent of the internet, has anyone actually called a movie theater to get show times lately? I think I had to sit 6 minutes into the call before getting to the times to our film for Edwards. So we’re already almost downtown since the zoo is in Balboa Park, so Heidi suggests heading to Horton Plaza. I typically don’t care to go downtown as the driving usually stresses me out and in my mind I can be just as satisfied by similar non-downtown attractions as well as the fact that—well, I could go on… but suffice to say at the end of such thoughts I found a ringing in my head that sounded something like “aaaaaas yoooooooouuuuuu wiiiiiiiiiisssssshhhhhh”... and I decided in the spirit of Valentine’s Day (and more importantly, loving my wife) that it was downtown we go. And hey, Horton Plaza has a United Artist’s theater, so we plug it into the GPS and we’re on our way.

Well so far we’ve had two big strikes in my book… the zoo being closed was the obvious biggie, but sleeping in until noon is up there and arguably the causal factor behind not getting into the zoo. So as we make our way downtown, somehow it eludes us to call ahead for show times to the UA in Horton Plaza despite having called a host of other theaters. Perhaps it was our enthusiasm in trying to find some redeeming reason for heading downtown after sitting in all the traffic in some hopes that there would really be something for us at Horton Plaza. How naïve of us.

First of all let me say that as much as I typically hate malls, Horton Plaza is pretty cool. Imagine what a mall would look like if it were 4-5 levels, downtown, and open air. Having said that, it also seemed to mock us the whole time we were there. We exit the parking garage and hang a left, looking for a directory to find where the theater is located. On our way to the aforementioned directory, we notice a couple of those photo booths that Heidi seems to want to do whenever we see one, and I figure hey, why not, right? If it’ll make her happy… but first let’s find that theater. After walking down a ways and across to the other side to the directory, we discover had we LOOKED right when we exited the parking garage, we would have practically been in line for the box office. So back to where we started. Turns out, the theater has ZERO movies we’re remotely interested in, and now we have to figure out what to buy before we leave so we can get our ticket validated. Well, $70 later we’re validated and ready to head out ($7 for parking isn’t sounding so bad at this point).

Oh but now to the business of the photo booth. The nice gentleman at the ice cream shop breaks my $20 and we hop on in. It snaps 4 pics and says to wait 1-2 minutes for them to print. The pics show up on the little screen outside the booth and they’re actually not that bad. Cool. So we wait. And wait. We’re talking like we’re discussing something important and checking our phones and all but in reality we realize we’ve been standing there for probably 6 minutes. Fantastic. Well we didn’t come this far to leave empty-handed so we head over to the other nearby photo booth. There’s a line for this one (now we know why there wasn’t one for the other perhaps) but at least we know it works. So another $3 later and we’re getting 4 more pics snapped. Only these ones aren’t as good because, well, I’m pissed. Oh well… we may as well swing by the other booth on our way out to make sure there’s no activity before we leave. Nada, but hey—at least the machine froze leaving our pictures on the outside screen for all the world to see. But since the pics were decent enough, we think it might be worth trying to see if loading it up again yields any result. But we’re out of singles, so Heidi swipes her CC and it authorizes another $3. Aaaaand nothing. The screen doesn’t even change inside the booth. But I happen to notice a phone number to “call if you experience problems.” At this point I’m open to anything, so Heidi dials it up and gets a recording that informs her that due to ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS the office is closed. But hey, they give us the option of leaving a message and we might get our $6 back. Splendid.

That was strike three and then some in my book, but I know Heidi loves Horton Plaza and like I said, we’re together, right? At this point it’s looking like our desire to see a movie and our late dinner reservations are mutually exclusive, so we’ve got to decide which we’d rather do. As we’re back on the road towards North County, we decide to swing by the Edwards Mira Mesa since we opted to take the I-15 and the theater is just off the freeway. No point in calling ahead for show times as we’d be arriving by the time I got to the desired information in their recording anyways. Naturally, there’s only one remaining show time for what we want to see, and it’s too late. But hey, at least we got a parking spot near the front row. And I even poached for it… Heidi was so proud.

As we’re back on the I-15 northbound, we had enough travel time for me to call Edwards again as well as call a couple other restaurants and see what our chances are for getting a table without reservations on Valentine’s Day (in an attempt to have our cake and eat it too… dinner AND a movie isn’t too much to ask for, is it?). In our first break of the evening, we find there’s no wait at Bruno’s (a nice Italian place walking distance from our Edwards) and there’s a decent movie show time to boot. Dinner and a movie it is. Fantastic. And both turned out to be just that. Oh—except for the man sitting behind us in the theater who fell asleep about four times snoring louder than the T-Rex roars from “Night at the Museum”… I mean, seriously, THX had NOTHING on this guy.

I’ll leave the rest of the night up to your imagination, but I think it’s safe to say I had the soundest night’s sleep I’ve had in a long time (excluding of course the miracle sleep I experienced on Bill and Cherise’s futon… I did not know such sleep existed… what in the world). But at the end of the day I realized despite many plans going awry, I love spending time with my wife and that indeed made it worthwhile. Hope you all (Rick) had as great a Valentine’s Day as us!