you're gorgeous, you old hag

Start flexing your ordering fingers! It's time for the semi-annual gimme, gimme, gimme post: Valentine's Day 2015 edition.

• exotic jewelry. Tourmaline earrings? A topaz necklace? A pink sapphire ring? Nothing wild in design, just a different sort of stone.
• Red-bordered ecru note cards from Crane & Co. Classy, perfect for every occasion, and wonderful to receive.
• A date to the dance.
• As always, gift cards work well for a home-body like me. Target, Amazon, iTunes. Somewhere that I can get a replacement sheet of glass for one of the large poster-sized prints that got a little ouch in the move.
• socks. I've had to face the fact that about a quarter of my footwear wardrobe was in reprehensible shape, and discard it. Even my remaining socks are looking threadbare and letting the cold air in. I wear two pair to work every day now!
• A "real" camera and/or a new phone. (Specific details available upon request.)
• Subscriptions to Amazon Prime + Kindle Unlimited. Going to the library is just not something that I enjoy (or can I fit it into my ever so busy schedule) anymore.
• 
  Photographs of water. Nope, not kidding. Take a picture of the body of water that you live closest to, and send a copy to me. I have a sort of collection, and if/when I buy a house, I plan to display this sort of thing--probably in the same general area as the shot-glass collection from around the world! Along that same line, shot-glasses are always good. And small rocks, of the sort that you might pick up while walking on a beach someplace exotic....
• The "Lend Me a Paw" doorstop from Modcloth. A little creepy, but silly enough that I love it.
• Cash, of course, is always the best present of all--and even more so now, because it would go toward the down payment of that maybe-not-so-mythical house. (Must be accompanied, of course, by a standard gift letter like this one, to satisfy the underwriters before they even have to ask.)

[the title quotation is by David Nicholls, from One Day, and reads in its entirety: “You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.”]