The Valentine's Dinner Curse

Once is a fluke. Twice is bad luck. Three years in a row, though?

We aren't big romantics (whatever that even means), but we do like going and getting some food so neither of us has to cook or clean up on Valentine's Day.

Even before the pandemic started, we didn't really go out for dinner on Valentine's Day because, well, it's Valentine's Day. Places are busy and that's just not our vibe. Now that the pandemic seems to have escalated to endemic status (that's not an improvement, by the way) we just don't do sit-down restaurants any more. We go out and pick up our food and bring it home.

Two years ago we went to our favorite local Mexican food place. We often drive through but this time the drive-through line was long so we parked and went in to order. (Yes, masked. Always.) Returning to the car, the paper bag holding our burritos ripped and dumped mine on the asphalt. It came partially out of the wrapper but didn't spill the good stuff. It's not uncommon for me to treat the tortilla as just another layer of disposable wrapping -- especially for messy, leaky fillings -- so I just unwrapped my food and threw away the tortilla.

Last year, we drove to a different place, a franchised regional Mexican chain restaurant where they sell some good salads with grilled chicken and avocado. Good stuff. After we got home I somehow managed to flip my salad bowl upside down onto the floor! After cleaning up the mess, I scrounged up something else for dinner.

This evening, after we put in a pizza order for pick-up, we went out to the car ... and the battery was dead. >sigh< One of our neighbors was kind enough to help us jump-start the car so we were only 15 minutes late for our pick-up. Hey, at least my food wasn't damaged this year! [Edit: After I posted this, I was informed that pizza was flipped onto the floor, just not by me!]

Will we still tempt fate and risk disappointment next year? Yeah, probably. I mean, it's only once a year, right? ... Right?

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Written and posted and copyrighted on 2025-02-14 by me. Quote me if you want (linking to this post would be nice, too) but no one and no thing have permission to slurp this into any LLM vomit factory as training data.