Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine’s Day. Yes, alright, I know it was yesterday (our time, and therefore one and a half days ago your time) but happy V anyway. Or as some weirdo’s call it, Happy Love Day. Apparently they don’t want to accidentally call up remnant thoughts of a Saint – that’d be too specific to a particular religious group and we can’t exclude anyone on the grounds of religion (unless they’re running for President and don’t happen to be thoroughly and irrevocably Christian). As if Hallmark have ever cared whether there actually was a St. Valentine or not. This day isn’t about long-deceased Saints, everybody knows it’s about blackmailing your spouse into cards, dinner, chocolates, flowers and jewellery. And my score for the day was: chocolates 0, cards 2, one each from spouse and daughter, jewellery 1. Well, 2 actually, they were earrings and they generally come in pairs.

I don’t know how to figure this guy out. He forgets my birthday most years, at best usually producing a card and chocolates at the last minute, or occasionally flowers (which he hates spending money on – things that will die and stink within a week); he routinely whinges about Christmas gift buying and so either gets me to buy my own or goes and gets something way off the wall; and I’m still waiting for the ‘thanks-for-having-the-baby’ token four and a half years after the event, yet here we are at a non-event on the Australian celebratory calendar and I get the second piece of jewellery ever (wedding rings don’t count) and it’s another pair of earrings, six years after the first pair, which incidentally, were also a Valentine’s Day gift. Apparently it was time for an upgrade.

Either I haven’t worked hard enough on explaining the important celebration rites or he’s just being peculiar to throw me. Which I suppose works. I was surprised, and rather impressed. They’re lovely and it took no prompting from me to get them. Just when you think you know someone….

Yasmin’s Valentine’s Day was another study in excess. Every kid in school gave every other kid a Valentine’s card (they make boxed sets of small ones especially for school kids – 30/32 per pack and one for the teacher) so she came home from the school Valentine’s party with a bag overflowing with small cards and candy. We haven’t even finished the Halloween stash yet. But the boyfriend list has changed. Yes, there’s a boyfriend list already. The other day and announced she was going to marry Aiden, and sitting at the dinner table turned around to me and said that she “can’t wait to fall in love with Aiden”. I said “Really? That’s nice, eat your peas”. But he’s got too many girlfriends (he’s a bit of a ladies’ man) so she added a couple of other names to her list, and then dropped one of them because he called her a baby. I dunno, the love-lives of pre-schoolers – such a fast-paced world.

Other than yesterday’s experience of joining in yet another excessive local ‘holiday’ celebration (there was no day off with this one), we had our last few days with M-i-l. On the weekend we decided to make the most of the nice weather and took a trip to Long Island. I wanted to see the Hamptons. We took the car on the ferry from Bridgeport (a bit like the inter-island ferries in NZ only smaller and a shorter trip) and predictably got lost heading to my destination. And just as predictably didn’t have maps for the area we got lost in. I’m so over fighting about it, all I could do was be totally unsurprised when Ahmed tells me he didn’t load that part of the map onto his palm pilot. We guessed our way back – it wasn’t really that difficult, it’s quite rural around the edges of the townships and there were signs, and found Hampton Bays. We also guessed our way around the streets and roads looking for the beach. But no go – there was no public access to beach areas. It seems that if you got there first and built your holiday house on the shore, it’s yours to keep. Lord knows why anyone would want to build or buy a home down there with no beach access. Other than the privatisation of shoreline, the area we saw looked like the holiday homes on the Prom in Melbourne. A few mansions, but mostly simple dwellings. It’s probably nicer in good weather and if you’re escaping from New York city, an infinitely better place to spend summer, beach access or not.

There were more Hamptons further around which I suspect have better and bigger mansions and more beach access, but it was getting late in the day so we found a diner and had dinner. They were renovating the building and had a large sign asking diners to excuse the mess, so we weren’t surprised to find an off-cut of electrical wire in M-i-l’s dinner. She asked us if the diner concept was like the chain restaurants as they all look the same and serve very similar food. But they are privately owned and the attraction is home-cooked American food, reliable and safe. As long as you don’t mind the odd bit of home improvement material with your meal. Yasmin ordered a kid’s meal of spaghetti and had a plate the size of Texas put in front of her. Honestly, it was a serving too big for an adult – for a four-year old. Obesity problem here? No surprises why.

After dinner it was too dark to see much more so we drove home via the highway. It looked like it would take hours but we made it in 2½. Long Island is actually quite nice. It has a semi-rural feel to it if you head off the main highway but it does get the brunt of the winter weather here. In the recent blizzard eastern Long Island got significantly more snow than we did – it still hadn’t all melted when we visited.

We didn’t do a lot of sightseeing other than looking out the car windows (it was still very cold), but we did stop in at an open house. M-i-l and I were very curious to see just what these new homes have inside. What was it like? Let’s just say even Henley on a bad day would do a better job of the finish. Cracked and broken window surrounds, cracks in the skirting and cornice work, cheap materials all round – and that’s without looking too closely. The house we saw was on the top of hill with little useful backyard. It had four bedrooms upstairs, a formal lounge/dining, a family lounge/eating area (in the kitchen), laundry and a two car garage – very much the standard layout as in the outer suburbs in most of the cities in Oz, but built up rather than out. The extra bit we liked was the basement area. Two-thirds of it was carpeted and useable as a play space or rumpus room, one-third was a concrete cell with exposed piping and looked like the place they keep the kidnapped hostages in horror movies. I even said to Ahmed when I looked it that this would be where you keep the bodies (but be assured, this is not why I liked the idea of a basement). Don’t know if they guy on-site thought it was very funny. Maybe we should check his basement. And at over half a million USD, we weren’t about to buy it anyway. For the same money we would be much better off at home. But don’t tell too many Americans - they might decide to emigrate to get a decent health care system, a (relatively) gun-less society and a lot of particularly lovely weather.