he was a hard-headed man, he was brutally handsome

My dear Tool Man is a very giving man. Yesterday afternoon, he raced home from whatever far-flung mystery locale his job takes him bearing two bottles of Mike's Hard cranberry lemonade, a smile, and eyebrows that were wagging maniacally up and down. When he gets like this, I like to pretend I'm a naive little waif who just escaped to the big, bad city and I'm confused by the advances of strange men (seriously...it's called role-playing and it doesn't involve any fancy costumes, which is nice, because we're on a budget, people)(and in case you're wondering, he brought the beverages home from the hotel he'd just stayed at, tucking them away from the free evening cocktail hour the night before)(yes, we are very, very classy).

"Why, my good man, I do believe you are hoping to get me drunk and take advantage of me!" I declared. Tool Man is not a drinker, nor am I really, and I question the potency of something that looks like weak Kool-Aid, but I'm willing to take one for the team, which is good because Tool Man actually said "Well, my dear, I was thinking these might help me score with you!"

Swoon!!

This is just one reason I love this man. Aside from still acting like a high school kid trying to get me drunk on prom night, he puts up with me in moments when even I wouldn't do so. He lets me sleep in on the weekends, does everything he can to return home from out of town jobs so he can drive us to our son's basketball games because he knows how utterly lost I can get on my own, handles making phone calls I don't want to, and is willing to watch zombie movies with me even though it's not his favorite genre.

Tool Man is also incredibly thoughtful. The bottled cocktails he bore? They were the low-calorie version! "Because I'm watching your figure," he said. Swoon again!! He also sent me flowers and had them delivered to the house yesterday. Sadly, the delivery person left the box of what I assume would have been very beautiful irises outside on the block of ice that is our front steps in temperatures hovering around the low 20s. By the time I returned home from work, the flowers were frozen, water-logged and decidedly dead.

They say it's the thought that counts, though, so I still put them in a vase and right now, these flowers are stinking up the living room like a rotting zombie corpse ("Did Dad get you those flowers?!" my oldest son asked, seemingly shocked at either the sentiment or the perceived poor choice. "Maybe," I replied. "Or maybe I have an incredibly terrifying secret admirer trying to scare the bejesus out of me by sending me dead things."). They're also a placeholder for the flowers that are coming to replace these. Oh, yes, my Tool Man is a take charge kind of man, and he called to rectify this issue immediately while watching various petals and leaves fall from the bouquet and drift soundlessly to the floor. He even asked that another cheekily worded card be attached to the new flowers. I look forward to his clever play on the word 'tulips.'

So even though he hates Come On, Eileen, still seriously worries about Dennis DeYoung, and can no longer watch episodes of Bones in peace thanks to my smoking hot crush on David Boreanaz, I'm pretty lucky to have a valentine like the one I do. How lucky can you be to have someone you still want to score? That's the kind of tainted Kool-Aid I'll keep sipping from.