Valentine's Day Games...

Every year, my wife likes to play the same little game on Valentine's day.

"You don't have to get me anything this year for Valentine's. Flowers are too over-priced and expensive. Just get me a card"

Yeah. Right.

"I mean it," she'll say. "I don't want you spending a lot of money on Valentine's this year."

I usually reply with a terse, Tony Almeida like, "Yah."

She knows I'm not that dumb...

This year I figured I was being sooo smart... Instead of going to the grocery store on Valentine's Day and battling with 100 other flower hunting husbands and boyfriends for the best looking bouquet, I'd beat the rush and go to the grocery store the night before Valentine's Day, on Valentine's Day Eve, so to speak. I'd get a nice, perky bouquet of un-trampled flowers, aaaand, I'd still have my pick of the best cards, because all the normal dumb-asses would be decending on the card section tomorrow.

Ha! So shrewd! After all, no normal man ever thinks to get a Valentine's card ahead of time...

Wrong.

The first part of my plan worked out ok and I got a nice bouquet of flowers, but it turned out the card section was completely barren. It was devoid of 'To My Wife' cards. The only cards that were left were 'To My Husband' cards.

What the hell?? I figured I was set getting to the store a whole day early to get my Hallmark Holiday, oops, I mean, Valentine's Day cards.

Thankfully, there was a CVS in the same plaza as the grocery store, so I headed over there. They had a more 'robust' selection of cards available and after some jostling and bumping of shoulders, I managed to target and acquire the card that I needed. I could not find a good 'To My Wife' card, those had been cleaned out, but there were still a lot of good, 'Sweetheart' and 'To My Soul-Mate' cards left.

After I got my Wife's card from myself taken care of, the next challenge was finding a card for each of my kids to give to Mom. For some reason all those cards were cleaned out too. All the good 'I love you Mommy', little kid style cards were gone. All that was left were those obnoxious, 'Teenager to Mom' cards that say stuff like, 'Even though I never pickup after myself and I go out drinking with my buddies every night and worry you to death, I still love you Mom. Happy Valentines. (Um, can I borrow 20 bucks?)'

Slim pickin's

To make things worse, the cards were totally disorganized. It was a complete mess, with all the different cards stuffed into the same slots or the wrong slots, (and of course, no envelopes).

Thankfully, after a lot of digging, I managed to find a couple cute cards that the kids could give to Mom.

Mission complete.

I feel bad for you saps who are reading this right now and haven't gotten your cards yet... good luck. I hope You didn't fall for the, "Don't get me anything for Valentines Day" thing.

Happy Hallmark Holiday Valentines Day.