Valentine's Adventures

This may be a rush job, as I've already used up all my available writing time today on personal projects, but I wanted to give a quick rundown of possibly the most over-the-top Valentine's Day my husband has yet put on (which is saying something).

He spent all sorts of evenings and weekends on errands and holed up in the basement before the holiday itself, and then the day of he took the whole day off work to arrange a complete Secret Agent/Spy Mission for me.  He made a thematic playlist to start the day off.  He brought me flowers with a secret note lodged inside, leading to a Walkman hidden in a vent with a cool tape-recorded message as to when I would be "extracted" since I had been a sleeper agent and our network was compromised.  Then at the appointed time, he actually handcuffed me (plastic dollar-store, of course) face-down on the driveway and put a bag over my head to drive me to our lunch reservation.  Let me just say: you totally get car-sick inside those bags, and that's if you're not even scared for your actual safety.  Then he gave me the most amazing vintage photos with a guy circled in each one and fed me the "backstory" for the fictional villain I would be trying to keep ahead of, sent me off for a few hours by myself until I should check a "secure terminal" for some kind of message.  If any of you read our family blog, that's the explanation behind the recent enigmatic post...

So, then I had to proceed to that place and retrieve a dead drop, which was almost out of my reach and would have landed me in a decently deep river if I stretched too far.  Inside was a sling shot and two kinds of candy to use as ammunition (and, ahem, as snack while I waited for the go-ahead) when I infiltrated the palace in Tangier, Morocco to retrieve the stolen thumb drive before the villain could get it.

The kids were guarding the house -- I mean, Moroccan palace -- heavily, having gotten home from school by this point and being in on the game with S.  But though I received some water gun spray and tripped the lasers (fishing line strung all across the stairs), I made it into the house where fancy dinner was to be served while I looked for my contact.  S. got into his old, extremely oversized tuxedo and served a beef/sweet potato stew, spicy jumbo shrimp, and a serpent cake, all on his own from our international cookbook.  Wow.  Wow.  (OK, so I helped out with the shrimp in the interest of time, but he really planned ahead and pulled off more cooking than I think I've ever seen him do at once.  And no, the serpent cake is just coiled up like a serpent, no snake meat involved.)  He had the kids in cool construction-paper fez hats (fezes?) and fake mustaches, holding up magazines in front of their faces when I came to the table, and they dropped the magazines in unison to reveal the full get-up.  Hilarious.  Oh, and another themed playlist with indigenous-type Moroccan music in the background.

Finally, the end-game took place in which there was a sudden treachery, a faked death, and an electric-shock key fob.  So much fun.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/playlist/Secret+Mission/82861596

http://grooveshark.com/#!/playlist/Secret+Location/82861139