Love Is...

...25 years of sharing Valentine's Day with Big Daddy. To celebrate this particular milestone, we spent the weekend at Le Rustique using and admiring our gift of love to each other - a new kitchen sink! I'm not kidding. And I'm certainly not being facetious. The sink that came with the farm house that came with the land we bought last spring was arguably utile, although it was shallow and only had one basin. Washing dishes in a rubber dishpan wasn't all that hard, but it sure wasn't fun, especially since the dishpan wouldn't hold a plate laid flat or more than two coffee mugs at a time. Yes, there's a real dishwasher installed, but it wasn't draining right, thus making it pretty useless.

Even though a new kitchen is in order "someday," its priority falls a little bit after "all new windows" and "all new flooring." And that means not real soon. But Big Daddy, generous guy that he is, offered to move a new sink up the list a bit. Even though he doesn't do dishes (never has, and never will), he did use the old faucet once in a while, and he could tell what a chore it was for me to have to hold the faucet lever way over to the left to get water hot enough to rinse dishes. Hence the love offering.

Billy the Plumber came on Friday...

...And took special care to get everything installed perfectly. He even fixed the jury-rigged plumbing to the dishwasher so it will never again take on the gray water from the garbage disposal and smell like mildew by the time it's discovered, which happened twice already. When Billy was done, I had the best Valentine's present ever...

So Big Daddy and I broke out the champagne to celebrate - which we've done every year on Valentine's Day for 25 years! And then I happily washed dishes. Note how the biggest cast iron skillet we have fits very nicely into one side of the sink? 

And that is truly what love is. Ain't it grand?