Valentine 1989

I'm sure 1989 will go down in our children's minds as the year that Daddy was out of work. I had finished a very long set of contracts with Hewlett Packard, and the last one ended on December 18, 1988. I had been sort of looking around for about a month for something to do when it ended, but the end of the year is not exactly the best time to find a new contract. So I had pretty much decided that I would have to wait until the first of the year to do my serious looking. Well, January came and went and February was half over and still no work. This isn't altogether too unusual when you are self-employed, but it hadn't happened to me for about 5 years. This was the first time that my children had been old enough to remember it.

We had cut our expenses down to nearly nothing and had drilled it into the kids that we wouldn't spend any money that we didn't really have to. Well, when Valentine's Day came, I got a glimpse of how well our preaching had been accepted. Suddenly everyone was looking for construction paper and scissors. It seemed that the whole family was in the process of making valentines. Well, that is almost everyone. I have almost no artistic abilities. I have a pretty good eye for layout and design but almost no ability to draw. Generally, when I have something like that to do I turn to the computer for graphics and then use my ability to lay things out to put something together. That is how I have illustrated all of my poems. I think I had thought that even on an austerity budget I would still buy a valentine for my sweet wife and write something clever in it. But with the current climate of "build your own" seeming to prevail in our house, I thought better of it. So unless I wanted to give my sweetheart something that looked like it had been scribbled by a first grader, it was obvious that I was going to have to turn to the computer.

This poem is the verse that I wrote to put in the card and the graphics are the ones that I used in the card.

Gale L. Wolfenbarger
14 February 1989

Valentine 1989

I love you in the morning
When your hair is all askew.
I love you in the evening
For the special things you do.

I love you for the simple things
And things that are sublime.
I love you more than life itself,
My lovely Valentine.

Gale L. Wolfenbarger
13 February 1989