Valentine's Truffles

Extensive research shows that buying flowers is not what women really want for gifts.  Instead, you're supposed to spend time together doing and creating something - an experience to remember.

With this research in hand, Jami and I have been making Truffles on Valentines day for several years.  I only buy flowers if I have something to make up for :).  Just kidding.  I buy flowers just often enough to keep her guessing.

This year's truffles start with ganache:

1.  White chocolate with vanilla bean and orange zest.
2.  Dark chocolate with peanut butter and vanilla bean.
3.  Lavender infused milk chocolate with fresh honey (from Mom's bees in Eureka).  http://www.hvmag.com/Hudson-Valley-Magazine/September-2013/Honey-Lavender-Truffles-Recipe/

Cassay Marquette Pavers - Pattern

We're doing a patio around the hot tub and chose Lowes' Cassay Marquette pavers - they're heavy but you get more done quickly.  They're listed as 24x13.5 but that's the whole width of the chevron = 24", and the height of a side being 13.5.  The actual paver is more like 24x18 with missing space on the edges and middle-bottom.

They've got a cool chevron pattern and come with four different designs.

The problem is, they don't provide a pattern to lay them out (like they do for some other pavers).  We tried laying them in rows, with 1,2,3,4 on the first then 3,4,1,2 on the next but there were really ugly lines going down the patio.

Lots of hunting online turned up only one good starting point:

Some time fooling around in Excel with the drawing object and we came up with this repeating pattern that we liked.  There are 12 pavers used, 3 each of the four patterns.  We tried to minimize the number of areas where there are few lines as well as areas where there are lots of tiny lines.

Hope this helps someone...