Tuesday, February 9
Snowpacalypse part two is set to hit tonight, so get out of the cold at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, where the 10th Annual Flamenco Festival is just heating up. Tonight’s Gala Flamenca event will feature performances by Pastora Galván, Manuel Liñán, Belén López, and Rocío Molina. Ticket holders who can’t make the show due to snow can exchange their tickets for another performance later in the week by calling 202-994-6851. The foot-stomping fun starts at 8. Get tickets ($35 to $65; $20 for students and alumni) here.

Who needs a date when you’ve got wine? That’s the philosophy behind Tallula (2761 Washington Blvd., Arlington) restaurant’s Let Wine Be Your Valentine dinner tonight. The four-course meal—with treats such as beet-and-mascarpone raviolo with crushed walnuts, tarragon, and Meyer-lemon confit; and dark-chocolate molten cake—will be paired with wines from Greece, France, and Spain. The event is $60 per person, and dinner starts at 7. Call 703-778-5051 to make reservations.

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Saturday, February 13
Find your canine Valentine at Nature’s Nibbles (2601 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria) when the store hosts an open house for Greyhound Welfare. Greyhound foster dogs will be on hand, and volunteers will answer questions. 11 to 1.

From noon to 2, the Washington Animal Rescue League will have cats and kittens up for adoption at at Living Ruff (8517 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring).

Love is in the air at Chateaux-Animaux (524 Eighth St., SE), where the Doggy Lama kicks off a new series of presentations on “the language of love” between you and your dog. Topics include communication, behavior problem solving, and animal needs. The free seminar starts at 4 and goes until 6.

With blizzard 2.0 on the way, it’s time to start making good use of all this snow. My grandmother used to drizzle maple syrup on a bed of icy flakes, so it’d harden and we could eat it like candy. Then there are the more grown-up ways to dress it up, such as whiskey slushies or the cream-vanilla-and-sugar-based recipe a reader sent into Todd Kliman’s chat earlier today. So we want to know: How do you take your snow?

Thinking about going out to dinner this Valentine’s Day? Yes, you can still get reservations at of-the-moment restaurants such as Masa 14 or Ris—if you want to eat at 4:30. But a scan of OpenTable shows there are plenty of prime-time alternatives—a 6 PM table at Rasika; 7:30 at Corduroy—which will hide any traces of planning procrastination. We’ll keep the list updated frequently.

It’s the time of year for moving trucks loaded with client files to roll down DC streets under cover of night. “[Law partners] want to leave stealthily,” says James Durfee, a vice president at the Kane Company Office Movers.

The start of a new year is a busy time for Durfee’s company, which works with a number of local law firms. Partners often wait till January or February—after they’ve received their final payouts from the annual profit pool—to jump to a new firm.

Forget the cheery office goodbye parties common in other professions. Law-firm departures routinely occur within 24 to 48 hours of a lawyer’s giving notice to partners that he or she is leaving. That’s because once a partner resigns, the competition for clients begins.

Princess Noire By Nadine Cohodas

True callings often stir in the dust of jilted dreams. William Faulkner wanted to be a poet, George Bernard Shaw a painter, Martin Scorsese a priest. Eunice Waymon was dead set on becoming a classical pianist when Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music rejected her application in 1951. That washout, as Washington writer Nadine Cohodas writes in Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, turned into a watershed for Waymon.

In response, she started tickling the ivories at an Atlantic City nightclub. It turned out the pianist had both pipes and panache. She added ballads and show tunes to her repertoire of Bach and Debussy, learned to dress down boisterous onlookers, and, to avoid her Methodist mother’s rebuff at playing the devil’s melody, took the stage name Nina Simone.

The career in jazz and soul music that followed was turbulent and seminal. Simone camped on the fringe of the pop-music charts yet gained iconic status by sticking to her songbook and crafting evocative, sometimes confrontational, live performances. Like Frank Sinatra’s, Simone’s voice—which in songs like “Sinnerman” and “Feeling Good” could both seduce and scald—became richer with age yet remained “the third layer,” as she called it, “complementing the other two layers, my right and left hands.”

Jeff Dufour, 35
DC editor, UrbanDaddy.com

What he’s wearing:
“The jacket is Filippa K, a cool Canadian designer from the long and dearly departed Alex Boutique that my friend Liberty Jones ran. It was a great place to shop. It’s cool for the daytime because it’s kinda professorial. It’s got these snaps instead of buttons, which jazz it up a little bit. I’m wearing a lot of layers today because it’s Arctic outside: The sweater is a gift from my wife a few years ago, the shirt is Hugo Boss from a trip to Los Angeles, the jeans are Rock & Republic from this great store in Nashville that sells a lot of rock-music T-shirts—I can’t remember the name. The boots I got pretty recently from Bloomingdale’s.”

Is shopping in Washington a challenge for guys?
“Absolutely. It’s hard to find stuff here that you couldn’t find anywhere else. We have Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Barney’s Co-op. But we don’t have anything you couldn’t find anywhere else. There’s Lost Boys, Farinelli’s, and a couple of boutiques on 14th Street like Caramel. There might be a piece or two at Foreign Exchange, Lettie Gooch, Rue 14, or Redeem, but those are all somewhat casual. And there’s the fact that Washington is somewhat conservative.”

So where do you shop?
“My strategy is pretty simple. I generally go to the Barneys Outlet in Leesburg once in the spring and once in the fall. And then I sort of augment that with whatever else I find around: Barneys brand, Varvatos, and Hugo Boss are the brands I generally get at Barneys. I have a lot of Ben Sherman, too. And Billy Reid is sick.”

Pretty much obsessed with the Peony bridesmaid dress. [Quail Bridal, via Daily Candy]

Erin Jang's sweetly modern Valentines invites.  

Smathers and Branson offers locally designed, preppy groomsmen accessories we can get behind. 

Bloginity's interview with Trash the Dress photog Mark Tierney.  

Help an ingenious rent-a-gown project in Liberia! 

Monday, February 8
Diamonds are forever, but a good meal goes a long way, too. Men can learn to cook a dinner that will melt a loved one’s heart with Open Kitchen’s (7115 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church) class “Cooking the Perfect Valentine Dinner for Your Special Someone.” While the menu for the hands-on class is being kept under wraps, we’re told it covers the basics of food preparation and serving. The class, $75 per person, runs from 7 to 11. For more information and reservations, call 703-334-1504.

Tuesday, February 9
Learn to shuck and prepare oysters at Zola Wine + Kitchen’s (505 Ninth St., NW) “Local Oysters” cooking class. Participants will see how to make oyster pie, fried oysters, and oysters Rockefeller. The class, $50 per person, starts at 6:30. For reservations and information, call 202-654-0999 or click here.
[THIS CLASS HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER.]

Monday, February 8 
The Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage kicks off “Broadway: Today & Tomorrow,” its weeklong tribute to New York’s theater district. Tonight, Broadway stars Matt Cavenaugh, also known as Tony in West Side Story, and Kate Baldwin of Thoroughly Modern Millie take the stage along with musician and lyricist Peter Mills. 6 PM.

Tuesday, February 9
The Library of Congress offers its annual Love Poems reading by poets Heddy Reid, Margaret Mackinnon, and Kate Harding, winner of the My Bright Star Love Letter Contest. Following the reading, the library will host a special showing of Bright Star, a biopic on poet John Keats. Noon.

Wednesday, February 10
Food blogger and former DC resident Ann Mah, an occasional Washingtonian freelancer, is in town for a reading and signing of her first novel, Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself at Borders’ 18th and L streets location. The event starts at 6:30.