Dana Burland

I'm not big into Valentine's Day... but I'm also not not into Valentine's Day either. Who doesn't want to feel thought of or celebrated in some way on this day that so, so loudly reminds us to think and celebrate each other? In the past B and I have exchanged gifts, candy and flowers have gotten involved, we've made a night of it going out to dinner. But in the last few years we've settled on what I think is the primo supremo way to celebrate--a harder working, you-wouldn't-have-done-this-for-yourself-but-I-did-it-for-you gift. Our modern gift giving includes me taking his car for a speedy interior detailing and exterior clean, and him booking me a massage appointment. Both require researching, a dedication of time and something in the end that truly benefits the other beyond one day. I always ask/offer if he still wants the Valentine's Day car cleaning, and every year he's totally jazzed about it. Clearly we both the car cleaning and massa...

Or I suppose I should title this “between storms”, right? After a polar vortex week that left us with 12+ inches of snow and sub-0 temps, we got slammed again with several days of ice. The ice storm knocked out power, closed schools for days--again, turned surfaces into ice skating rinks and took down tons of limbs and in some cases full trees. Our neighborhood lost power two days in a row, thankfully it came back on both nights so we didn’t have to find different sleeping arrangements. A full tree fell onto a house in our neighborhood, rendering the house inhabitable. The pictures in this article don’t even show the worst of it. From behind it looked like a tornado went through. We’re super fortunate to have had it somewhat easy. Still, we lost a lot of limbs off two three-story tall mature pine trees in the backyard. Looking out the window after the ice storm it looked like several of the heavy lower limbs were down but that the clean up would only be moderate. Upon furt...

If you ignore the fact that I dropped my phone in cocktail sauce, present in our party spread, we had a real great Super Bowl weekend. My parents and brother were in town for our new Bushi (my mom) birthday/Super Bowl weekend visit tradition. It’s just more fun to watch the game with a crowd, even if the game is lame, and even if you don’t really care about the game at all. Beyond the Sunday night show we took C to a Nature Day at the downtown market where he oogled over a groundhog, pet Jenny the possum, squawked with parrots, tapped on turtle shells and got scared standing too close to a baby owl. You can’t win them all, ya know. We played out in the snow (my brother built him an epic snowman), had dancing and singing parties in the kitchen, cooked together, played together and just had such a good time seeing people from his family bingo poster in person. Also I made these honey garlic crockpot meatballs which were SO easy, SO fast and will likely show up on future football...