Valentine's Day '09

I'm pretty proud of my husbandly planning skills for occasions like Valentine's day. I had the day planned well before the end of January, and had mapped out our day with a detailed itinerary like something my brother would do. I was worried that Jess would somehow find and interpret the itinerary so I had carefully cloaked the itinerary in complex code, such as calling each destination "A" "B" "C" or "D." I know, I'm awesome. I had four destinations, and we actually only ended up doing the first two, but that was by conscious choice and NOT because of poor planning on my part.

Our day went something like this:

We arrived in Reseda at 9:00 am for Valentine's day photos with Lukas Van Dyke, who, if you aren't familiar with his work, is a very gifted photographer, and who is an all-around cool guy. We took photos with him as a part of his "Portraits For Missions" promotion, in which he takes all your photos for free basically, and just asks that you make a donation to missions on your way out. He's uploaded some of the photos from that day (including ours) on his blog that you can find HERE. If you're crazy and want to see our full session (74 photos), click HERE.

After photos, we drove down to the Getty Villa museum. It's not the one off of the 405 on that hilltop coming out of the S.F. valley.  This one is on PCH in Pacific Palisades, basically right on the beach. It was actually there before the Getty Center (the one you thought of first), and it's all ancient Roman, Greek, and Etruscan sculptures; no paintings here, this is all the original "hard rock" sort of art.  My two favorites were these guys:

Did you read "The Odyssey" in high school? Do you remember when Odysseus and his men were hiding in the cave from the Cyclops ("Help, help, 'no one' poked my eye out!"), and after poking his eye out with a stake, Odysseus and his men escape the cave by hanging onto the bellies of sheep. See it now? 

This sculpture of Zeus (which stands about three feet tall or so) was lost at sea for around 2,000 years!  You'll notice the left (Zeus' left) side of his face and body is all sculpture-white, while the other side is blackened and full of holes.  The white side was all buried and extremely well preserved, while the black side was exposed and served as home to many a mollusk.  Cool.

Here are some other cool shots from the museum:

Me and the man: Hercules. He's naked.

The front entrance of the museum. It's modeled after a Roman country villa.

Special Valentine's day brownies from the cafe. Free is always good.

My pretty Valentine in the villa garden

I honestly can't remember who this statue is, but Jess is pretty

The closest thing to a painting in the whole place, it's painted directly on a piece of wall.

You can see the big, blue Pacific ocean from the cafe. It's really beautiful.

I had planned for us to go down to Santa Monica's 3rd Street for a bit after this, and then get happy hour appetizers at this cool French restaurant down there, and then see a movie, but we were so relaxed and content that we just stopped by Trader Joe's on the way home and had a relaxing dinner and evening at home.

Happy Valentine's Day!