With Valentine's Day around the corner, my inbox is a swamp of cliched press releases, each one of them attempting to sell me the idea of romantic travel -- a trip to Paris, perhaps, or exotic chocolates from far away places, or little extras that you can pack to transform the sturdy beige interior of your hotel room into a rose colored tent in the desert. Yeah, okay, maybe.

I always thought that I was pretty old when I had sex for the first time (19), but Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that I was completely average. It turns out that 70% of unmarried teens in American have sex by the time they are 19. (OK, fine I was on the older end of the spectrum, but whatever.) I waited, despite intense pressure from a boyfriend in high school, because I wasn't ready and I knew it. It was a good decision for me. Other girls may be ready earlier, and those are their decisions, too.

It wasn't until recently that I became interested in decorating. When I was living with my sisters throughout my late teens to mid-twenties, doing anything with my apartment other than the bare minimum wasn't something that ever crossed my mind. As long as I had furniture that looked all right, a TV and computer, something on the walls...I was good to go. Things have changed since then. I'm much more interested in how things are put together. All the options we have. Colors, fabrics, furniture, lighting.

A good friend is someone who will call you out on your stuff - kindly, lovingly and, most of all, honestly. A good friend did this for me the other day. She pointed out that I seem to be overthinking and that it was leading me to inertia. Inertia is a fancy word for being stuck.

Did you know your microwave uses up more power when you're not using it than when you are? Yes, the microwave draws a lot of energy when you start nuking something, but the vast majority of the time, the machine's sitting idle while slowly sipping energy to light up its display. According to Umbra at Grist, that slow, daily sip ends up being about 80% of the energy your appliance consumes!

Win or lose, the Saints playing in the Super Bowl is like a healing, a laying on of hands for New Orleans, La. As I wrote on Twitter February 4, followed by hash tags #whodat and #Saints, "Super Bowl mania hangs in the air, palpable like Mardi Gras beads in trees, like August here, thick and hot, like a good rain."

It takes me a while to see all the movies I want to see. So it is no shock that I just saw the 2008 Helen Hunt/Colin Firth/Bette Midler film, "And Then She Found Me." One line in the film haunts me, grabs me by the scruff of the spirit and will not let go. "Dive in and blog me," it says. "Figure out why, later."

A few weeks ago, my husband Michael forwarded me the NY Times article, "Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes" As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.

"When times are tough, you tighten your belts," Obama said Tuesday in a town hall meeting in Nashua, N.H. You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage," Obama said. "You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices." -- LA Times

Panda Fans - brace yourselves: Tai Shan, born at the National Zoo on July 9, 2005 (no bigger than a "Butterstick," his eventual nickname) will be FedExe'd to China Thursday morning, thus concluding Washington's four-year love affair with the only giant panda to survive beyond infancy at the zoo.

1. Spread the handmade love. Why buy a single Valentine for one person when you can get bargain package deals on Etsy for all your lovers?

I recently got together with a dear friend that I had not seen in years. She was traveling through Massachusetts, and decided to visit for a couple of days. It was major catch-up time. The events of my last five years have had a few deep difficulties in them, and as I was catching her up - with what seemed like one trauma-drenched-tale after another -- an odd thing happened. I got tired of having trauma in my past. Through unforgiveness, I had been dragging it into my present and presumably my future.