Valentine’s Day is a little more than a week away. The stores are decked out in pink and red, restaraunts are booking reservations, and cards and balloons and flowers and raunchy playthings jump out at you from every corner. It’s the day to say “I love you,” goddammit.

I know I’m not the sole Valentine’s groaner out there. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t need a special day set aside to say “I love you” or to have “I love you” said to me. It’s as trite as Valentine’s Day itself, but I know I’m loved by my husband everyday. I know it when he sets aside a Q-tip for me each morning. I know it when he makes breakfast for the kids every day. And I know I love him when he sends me email about pistachios and when he casually performs trigonometric functions on a Saturday afternoon.

We’re in the midst of a minor home-improvement project in the Hansen household. The “we” part being that I watch the kids while Tim builds custom shelves for our storage room. Yesterday afternoon, Tim came up from the workshop and asked me to pull up Excel on the computer. “Calculate the arcsine of 3.5 over 2,” he said to me. Calculate the arcsine of 3.5 over 2. Sexy. How often do you hear that on a Saturday afternoon? Curious, I asked him what he was doing. He showed me a sketch of the shelving brackets, some of which must be attached to an angled ceiling. He was using the function to figure out the angle of the ceiling and thus the angle of the cut.

I said to him, “Do you just know the trigonometric functions off the top of your head?! Certainly, if given a textbook, I know I could figure them out with ease. But do you really know them without review?”

“SOCATOA,” he answered.

“Huh?”

“SOCATOA. Someone taught it to me and I’ll never forget it. Otherwise, nah, I’d never know ‘em.”

“Huh?”

“SOCATOA. Sine: Opposite over hypoteneuse; Cosine: Adjacent over hypoteneuse; Tangent: Opposite over Adjacent.”

“Aaaahhh.” Now I’ll never forget ‘em, either.

Knowing he had a mnemonic to help him with the trigonometric functions didn’t douse the flame that he’d lit with his initial question. Hardly. Call me a hopeless geek, but there’s something terribly sexy about using math in your everyday life. We’re perfectly matched because I know he feels the same way. In fact, I wonder what type of fire I’ll light when I’m given the opportunity to calculate the derivative of a quotient.