The life we lead

Since Kates and I both will be busy on Valentine's night with work-related things on Tuesday, and since we have little extra money to spend, we celebrated our Valentines last night by having a wonderful homemade dinner (salads, steak and baked potatoes, what else!) and doing a puzzle together while watching the Olympics.

Then we both zonked out on our couch. ... How romantic are we?

* * *
The other night, while watching TV, Kates and I caught a vintage popcorn commercial featuring Orville Redenbacher...

'Ah, Orville,' I sighed after it finished. ... Then added, 'We should name our kid Orville.'

'Yeah, we could call him Orve!' Kates' eyes lit up.

I continued. 'Orve! Oh, Orve. Couldn't you just see little Orve walking around the house? His little glasses and dark curly hair?'

We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

* * *
Remember our litte popcorn escapade that nearly burned our house down last fall? Yeah, now my buddy Brian kinda knows how I felt. Only he nearly burned down the office building ...

I arrived back at the office just after it happened, so I wasn't there to see it, but the story goes: He placed a bag of popcorn in the microwave and set the timer for two minutes. Then he walked out of the kitchen to answer a question. ... when he returned to the kitchen, it was full of smoke, he opened the microwave and found the popcorn bag burning...

Luckily (or not ...) no fire alarms were triggered, and I arrived within minutes afterward to the smell of burnt popcorn spewing into the newsroom.

...But perhaps the funniest moment of it all came nearly an hour later when a wide-eyed and bewildered pressman came up to the newsroom to inquire what had happened. After we told him, he told us the presscrew had just finished tearing apart our press and ripping paper stock apart, thinking there was a fire in the press room.