Valentine's Date (A Few Days Early)

Eric and I have never made a really big deal about Valentine's Day. Why?  Well mainly because of the timing...Valentine's Day is 3 weeks after his birthday and less than a week before mine, and 6 weeks after Christmas. We always make a point to have a special dinner together whether it be going out or cooking something at home.  This year when I realized that Valentine's Day is on a Friday night, I told him there was NO WAY we were going out.  #1 we have never had luck going out to dinner on a Friday night.  We have been spoiled by living in a small town where you can walk into any restaurant at any time and immediately get a table, so a 20 minutes wait?! No thank you.  We just drove 40 minutes to get to the restaurant, we' like to eat now before my hanger rears its ugly head. And #2 It's Valentine's Day so the restaurants will be EXTRA crowded.  Thanks, but I would prefer a nice dinner at home.

I told Eric earlier in the week that I would make his favorite Goat Cheese Pizza and we can stay in on Friday, which he seemed quite content with.  But then remembered that he still had not seen Lone Survivor.  He has wanted to go see the movie since he saw the first preview for it (quite some time ago).  Unfortunately it got to theaters right in the thick of basketball season when all of my weeknights, plus my Friday and Saturday nights were being spent in the gym.  Last weekend he mentioned going to see the movie on Sunday afternoon, but decided to go fishing instead (not surprising, but I has happy because it gave me an entire morning to seriously clean the house). He called me Monday at work and said he wanted to go see it this week, so we decided we'd do an early Valentine's dinner and a movie date on Wednesday.  A few weeks ago I was browsing restaurants for goat cheese pizzas (can you tell we're a bit obsessed?) and realized that one of the Italian Restaurants downtown had two different varieties.  Naturally that's where we went and had an absolutely delicious dinner, although he told me my pizza was better (smart man).  I just wish I could figure out how to get my crust crispy like theirs!

1. Spinach Artichoke Dip on flat bread?  Yes, please.
2. Our Frenzia Pizza from SaZa's: goat cheese, grape tomatoes, caramelized onions, and bacon...this picture does not do it justice, this piece of pizza was about 8 inches long!
3.  A couple of years ago I entered an instant win contest on People.com and part of the prize were to AMC Movie passes.  At the time our movie theater was owned by another company, but for some reason I saved them thinking someday  I would run into someone who had AMC Theaters in their area.  Lo and behold our theater was bought out by AMC about a year ago.  I took the passes with us just to see if they would honor them. I didn't think they would since I'd had them so long, but there was no expiration date on them.  To our delight (well my delight) they accepted them!  We had to pay a buck fifty per ticket for a processing fee or something like that, but I will take a $3 movie date over a $15 movie date any day!  My pack rat tendencies paid off for once!

After dinner we headed to the movie and nearly had the theater to ourselves.  It reminded me of when we we'd go catch the late movie during the week in college, but instead of the movie starting at 9:45 pm it started at 6:40 pm.  Seriously how did we do so much on so little sleep back then!?  The movie was fantastic!  Eric read the book so he knew the story line and I was amazed at how much he could recall (he read it 5 years ago when he was deployed).  It was a very intense movie, but Eric said the entire thing stuck to the real story. In case you haven't heard of the movie Lone Survivor, it's a true story of Marcus Luttrell and 3 other Navy Seals fighting for their lives after they were discovered in the mountains in Afghanistan by goat herders.  If you like war movies, go see it.  It's awesome.