It's almost like spring here. My friends in the midwest and on the eastern seaboard are experiencing record colds, the temperature in Boston yesterday got to -15 deg F. Here it was raining lightly all day and low clouds were lurking between the mountains. This morning there is a great bright fog all throughout town. The temperaure is cool but not at all unreasonable.

My parents (almost certainly my mom) sent Nina and I a valentine's day gift which arrived yesterday. It was some walnut carmels (I hate walnuts) and the french card game "Mille Bournes" which my family used to play when I was very young. This is very odd, considering that I have never received a valentine's day gift from them before (aside from chocolates when I was a kid). The carmels basically went straight to Nina and some friends we had over last night, but mille bournes is still a lot of fun and holds a certain amount of nastalgic value for me.

I got Nina some roses, but otherwise Valentine's is one of those holidays I don't really get into. She had some flowers delivered to my office today - more stargazer lilys, a redux of last year. There were some complications because the lab is at security condition 2 which means flower delivery guys can't even get onto lab property and I had to hike out to the road to find him to get them. Add to this that his message on my voice mail about a delivery for the Otowi building (not my building) got deleted as voicemail spam, oops!

The stargazers haven't opened yet, but once they do I expect to have a very... fragrant office.