Little Miss Sunshine

I don’t know where I got the idea that spring is this beautiful season when flowers start budding, plants start growing, people dress in beautiful colored coats and enjoying what seems like the perfect weather - not bitingly chilly but not harshly hot either, the perfect in-between of cool and warm.

After coming to Canada, I have disappointingly found out that spring is this bipolar season of summerlike hot one day, snowing the next, and pouring rain the day after. People don’t dress in attractively bright coats. Instead, you’d see people shivering in their sweaters and people in their winter coats when it’s 20 degrees outside. All because there’s just no way of telling what the weather will be like.

And spring is when it becomes warm enough for snow to start to melt, and melting snow is not the picturesque white blanket of cotton fluff you see in Hallmark Christmas cards, Melting snow is a mix of dirty grey and yellow dog piss. And when all of it has finally melted, you’d see brown dead grass and dog poop. Lots of dog poop. All left by irresponsible dog owners who should be banned from ever owning animals. Along with dog poop, spring also unearths a lot of trash thrown out by people who don’t know the existence of this seemingly complicated and very intimidating invention called the garbage can. I learned, pretty quickly, that littering, very much like spitting in public, is not only an issue in third world countries like the Philippines. Turns out, when you’re low-classy and likes to litter like that, regardless if you’re from a third world country or the progressive first world, you’d always be low-classy.

This is Mont Tremblant, Quebec. 

These are photographs from 360 days ago, so anything I wanted to say about being successful in preserving my life by pushing for staying in and playing a lot of board games instead of going out skiing have long since been forgotten. 

I have a memory of a fish. I wish I am exaggerating; I’m not. Last week, I went in for an English language assessment because breaking news, I’m finally! starting to look for a job, and the assessor(?) played this 10-second audio clip and later asked me, as part of my listening test, to tell her everything I heard. Guess what I told her? That’s right. Nothing. What I wanted to tell her though was that I was seated right across her office window which had a full view of the school yard where a young boy just smacked another kid in the face with a backpack. And that I thought I heard the speaker in the clip say something about how she loves school.

We are probably the only ones in the whole of Canada who still continues to pay Rogers for a “so 2005″, really outdated service called cable. Everybody we know just download stuff or watch everything on Netflix. So last week, after talking about it 782 times, Richard finally called to cancel. Of course, Rogers did everything in their power to retain us. After all, we are practically the lifeblood of their company, and their cable services division exists solely for and because of us. So now, we still have cable we pay $10 less for, plus, a two-year free subscription to Shomi. Which means to say, I've semi-permanently glued my butt to the couch and watch movies non-stop for the past three days, only pausing occasionally to give Lili a walk and do all sorts of things the animals have enslaved me for.

Speaking of pets, Lili is constipated. So I could only assume it must have been disturbingly awkward (or awkwardly disturbing?) for anyone who saw us earlier at our neighbour’s front yard - Lili hunched over like she would never come out of her yoga cat pose and me coaxing her in that irritatingly high-pitched voice I always use when talking to the pets, “One, two, three, push!” Yes, I was well aware she was pushing poop out, not a baby. I don’t know why I was saying what I was saying. I told Richard when he came home from work that it felt like I was a mother helplessly looking at her suffering daughter but unable to do anything to ease her off of it. He just said I was being OA (short for overacting, a term Filipinos often use when someone reacts exaggeratedly) which I can’t believe because I taught him that Filipino slang and now he’s using it against me! (Remind me to never teach this guy any more Filipino anything at any point in the future ever again.) So anyway, Lili has successfully pooped her “babies” out and was soon happily scampering away, sniffing at every patch of yellow snow like it was cocaine. Or something. I did tell her to drink a lot of water as soon as we got home, but of course, this was all just senseless jibber jabber to her, because, DOG.

Lulu doesn't have any bowel movement updates, but she just reported an emergency to me: her dish is empty, which cat owners all over the world understand as code for “I could see the bottom of my food dish because there is approximately four kibbles missing from it. FILL IT.” So fill it I hastily did. No one dares cross Lulu ‘round here.

I am losing grasp of time. These are photographs taken from our west coast adventures in August 2013, but I feel like this was just last summer. Even the Philippine homecoming we had almost two months ago seems like a vacation that is yet to happen. So excuse me while I go get another cup of coffee.

And maybe contributing to my time warp experience is me going over last year's journal. I wrote something on October 15, 2014 that is still very true and I still struggle with till this day. Here's me being emo:

Last Wednesday, I went to watch Richard's floor hockey game (like I always do) at a school in the Quebec side. I've been there countless times, but somehow, I just noticed the poems about winter the kids wrote. They were all displayed in a glass case mounted on the wall. I read most of them, and they were really good. But like a lot of things in my life nowadays, it caused me to pause in random self-reflection: When was the last time I wrote a poem? Were they as good as the children's winter poems? 

And suddenly, self-doubt: These kids are a lot better than I am.,The poems I wrote in university, they were...bad. I never liked writing poems. I hated it. I still do.

Very quickly, self-doubt turned into defiance. Then bitterness: Maybe if I read more as a kid; read more classic literature, that is. Maybe if I took the novels we were required to read in university more seriously. 

And everything just went spiraling downwards from there: Am I good enough? It seems like everything I think I could do, someone else, in this case, grade school kids, could do better. Why can't I bike? Why can't I swim? Why can't I run long distance? Why am I not good in yoga? Why am I not a good skier? Why am I not good in floor hockey? Why don't I know how to drive? Most of all, why can't I write better?

Self-doubt is evil. It breeds discontentment, bitterness, hatred, and other evil things that destroy self-worth and confidence. Self-doubt is an incessant voice in your head that says you are nothing special, and all you are meant to do in this world is watch in awe at the special ones.

Self-doubt is that comfortable space that loves to fence itself with mediocrity but has enticing gates that swing wide open for anyone lured by it. It invites you to just lie around, in comfort, and do nothing, say nothing, be nothing, and just look, with mouth gaped open at bright shining stars.

I watched the weekly weather forecast last night. It doesn't look too promising - nothing over 10 degrees C anytime soon. And lots of rain. Still. Which could only mean one thing for me. I get to start setting up my pillow fort in the living room couch where I hibernate until the next warm weather. This is a good thing. Because then I get to cultivate my superpower, which is watching blog entries write themselves.

So this is Montreal in the sweltering August heat. Our friend, inspite being born and raised in Ottawa, hasn't been. We felt it was our civic duty to take her. At least that's what we told her, because really, we just wanted to go down for the Cat Film Festival. But she doesn't have to know that.

At the Mont Royal lookout where Lili made a lot of friends. Perk of being cute.

There's 380 steps from the foot of the mount(?) to the summit. We were in for a workout.

We walked Rue St. Catherine where all the shopping happens. But that's not what "cultured people" do, is it? So we watched the First People's Festival parade instead where the Philippine contingent misspelled Philippines. I gave them an evil glare and walked back to the air conditioned H&M store. At least they never misspell my country when they mark their clothes Made in the Philippines.

No visit to Montreal is ever complete without walking the cobblestoned streets of Old Montreal and taking pictures of beautiful buildings and strolling at the Old Port.

Some phone pics.

Richard and I went back in September because we had a Montreal quota we needed to reach. This time we had a truly different itinerary - beer, riding the subway, trying out Airbnb, and...Lion King!!!

When your husband asks you what you wanted to do on your birthday and your response is a very unimaginative "Window shopping? Massage? Dinner? Pecan chocolate cheesecake?" - all of which are ideas recycled from last year's birthday, you should expect him to not listen and totally overhaul what otherwise would have been a blah birthday celebration. That's how I found myself in Denholm, Quebec - a little, little town an hour and a half off of Ottawa. I was forewarned there wouldn't be any internet or cell service. I got a little defiant - what good is going somewhere when you can't post a status about it. But then I realized, what's to Instagram about a cabin in the middle of nowhere anyway? Apparently, I was about to eat my words everyday for the next four days as Lake Cardinal was absolutely stunning, every angle totally picture-worthy. And Instagrammable, even with a hashtag no filter.

Also, it turned out, you get to do everything in places where you think there is nothing to do - read crime novels, drink Caesars like it was Brita filtered water, chase around a dog who doesn't seem to know what to do with so much yard space, get all wrinkly from spending too much time soaking in the hot tub, talk to the husband about anything until the fire he built burns out. And of course, eat pecan chocolate cheesecake. That was a non-negotiable.

Some pics taken from our very outdated Samsung Galaxy S.

This is Calgary, Alberta.

Last week it started snowing in Calgary and the rest of Alberta. Yes, SNOWING. In September. What has the world come down to? If this is Mother Nature's payback from all the hairspray humankind used in the 80's, I think I should have a ray of sun hovering over me all the frickin' time because I never used any of that thing way back when. Though it made me green with envy, to see my cousins and classmates, and some other kids with perfect poofed up hair that never moved even if a tornado would hit it. Mother never stocked up on spraynets, as we called them back then. She must have wanted to, too, but there were far more important things to spend on, like a meal for her three kids, for example. Spraynets were expensive, but people gladly spend their money on them. For a moment of vanity. And a lifetime of misery. Okay, maybe not, I just said that because it rhymed. And sounded dramatic. I was watching the news a few days ago and the United Nations reported that for the first time in a long time, the ozone is beginning to recover. I read the study on how two chemists explored the question of what happens to chemicals found in most household items in the 70's, and how it led to, as UN puts it, one of the greatest success stories of international collective action in addressing a global environmental change phenomenon. Science is awesome. And people are, too. Sometimes.

Meanwhile, in a less globally-impacting news, today is the first day our community yoga started offering a yoga tune-up class, which is a type of yoga that uses rubber balls slightly smaller than the ones used in tennis. The class bonded instantly through our shared experience of pain. It was brutal. We can't stop laughing at each other, and ourselves. There wasn't a moment when we couldn't hear bones cracking and people cursing and yelping like a Nazi just made a special appearance and started breaking bones - ribs, spine, and all. The pain was addicting though. We will be back next week.

Tall Ships Festival, Brockville, Ontario, summer 2013.

Two things that I've started doing quite consistently these days that I'm quite proud of - writing in cursive and practising yoga at home. I have always written about how I like to write and yet how I struggle to write. Sometimes, I feel like it's all I can ever write about on the off-chance I sit myself down and attempt to blog. I want to stop writing about it because I'm annoyingly becoming like a broken record, and really, who wants to listen - or read - something about someone complaining about the same thing over and over. Like you know how people constantly wrote about the supposed psychology of Justin Beiber at the height of his rebellious stage? You know, that time when he was throwing eggs at his neighbors and drunk-driving and all the hey-I'm-Justin-Beiber-and-I'm-badass-like-that stupid stuff he did? It was all over the news and it was all I could read about in Yahoo! Okay, I realize that's my mistake right there - reading Yahoo! "news". I mean, I think I'm the only one who does that nowadays, am I? Because smart people are supposed to be reading real news from hardcore sources like...like...damn! I don't even know any reliable, hardcore news source. I think I just made it official - I'm not smart. That sucks. My ego is shattered. And oh, I've been blabbing but I didn't forget. WHO ELSE IS INTERESTED IN JUSTIN BEIBER?!?! WHO!!! Show of hands. Anyone? **cricket, cricket** Yeah that's right, every single intelligent person I know reads real news from hardcore news sources - not Yahoo! - and reads about the situation in Israel and the Middle East. Meanwhile, I follow rich, teenage celebrities whose idea of fun is having their photos taken for a mugshot. Since when have I sunk to this new kind of low? My life is pathetic. Well, not really. I'm just saying that for some drama. My life is still awesome, well, not because I'm awesome or whatever, but awesome because I have wonderful people who love me, I have a roof over my head, I have access to food all the time, I can go places because I love travelling and not because I have to flee for safety, I can go to sleep at night without worrying that a missile might land on me. You know what I mean? That kind of awesome. And yeah, I even get to practise yoga at home. Who cares about being smart when you can do a warrior pose, right? Um, no? You have to be able throw in a headstand, or a crow, and all those things I can't do even after almost two years of practise. Man, this yoga thing. So. Much. Work. So that's it, I'm ending this post and getting back to my pigeon. God, I hate pigeon.

They have a very special bond. So when eight-year-old Noah Aldrich heard about a youth triathlon happening in his local area, he immediately knew he wanted to take part with his little brother.

We were in Toronto in December of last year and I picked up a journal called 642 Things to Write About at the Distillery because I wanted to practice my writing and I felt, at that time, that a journal filled with a lot of writing prompts, 642 of them, to be exact, is exactly what I needed to do just that. I wrote on it once over the winter, and then Richard and I went through a manic phase where all we wanted to do was repaint the walls, re-organize furniture around our house, and declutter. In the midst of it all, a nice-looking journal called 642 Things to Write About suddenly looked nice in a now near-empty bookcase. So it stayed there for a long while until I pulled it out again last week because guess what, I felt I wanted to practice my writing again. I wrote on it once, then we went camping over the weekend and I thought, "We would be busy hiking and swimming and doing all sorts of camp stuff there wouldn't be any time to write." Turned out I did have time to write but because I left the journal, I settled on doing a crossword puzzle about Mike the Painted Turtle which was intentionally meant for five-year-olds. I took the journal out again earlier today and wrote on it. I'm currently debating if I should tackle just one writing prompt a day or if I should just write as much as I could. I read once that to better your writing skills, you should practice writing at least 500 words a day everyday for at least a year. I follow one person here in Tumblr who drew herself everyday for a year because she thinks that the art of masterful drawing is a learned art, and so if you do it everyday, it teaches your hand to be better and/or make drawing more natural to you. I could not say it as beautifully or half as passionately as she did, but everything she said brings to mind the 10,000-hour concept in Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers. I'm not sure how to end this, because usually, when people write stuff like this, they always end with a resolution of what they will do, like write everyday for 30 days maybe. But I've been burned a lot of times by my inability to commit so I'm just going to end it like this, hoping that tomorrow, I find the will to write again.

Like most of my blog posts before this, these photos have been hanging out in my Drafts folder far too long. I've been tempted to just post the pictures, because what the heck, only my husband reads my blog anyway. But then I remind myself my reason for doing this. Cliche as it may sound, I am not doing this for anyone, although let's be honest, my heart expands every time someone actually reads my blog (which is why I shamelessly plug it on Facebook). I remind myself I am doing this for me, because I want to be able to write again. I majored in English in university, and the program required us to write lots and lots of stuff. We were writing all the time, and the only time we stopped was when we read those piles and piles of novels (which explains my aversion to reading after I graduated. Ugh, the trauma!). And then we write again. We wrote short stories, we wrote poems (and I hate writing poems), we wrote essays, we wrote a bazillion book reports. I used to love writing (except poems, I hate writing poems, but then I already said that). My decision to take up English was partially influenced by my love for writing, although it was hugely brought about by indecision, and maybe my total lack of self-belief? Who knows. Anyway, I still love writing. I am not good at it anymore. Evidently. But I still love it, and I want to get better at it. So there. My life's goal in less than 200 words.

Drumheller is this little town in the badlands of Alberta that I have not heard of until I watched Amazing Race Canada. It used to be a mining town, so people flocked to it to find whatever work they could. But as our guide explained to us, working conditions at the mine was very poor, as was the miners' living condition in general. They spent hours and hours hunched inside the mine, chipping away coal, only to bring home a couple of cents at the end of the day. Cents they save up to send back to their families back home. It was heart-wrenching reading some of their stories. You know how at times you complain about your life and you wish you have this and that? Well, try being a coal miner in the early 1900's.

Drumheller is also home to The Hoodoos, the gigantic mushroom things that are actually sandstone pillars capped by a large stone. It takes millions of years to form but erodes very easily. It has long since become a protected site, but throughout the years, because of natural weather processes - wind, rain - combined with the effects of human traffic and vandalism, the hoodoos have become much smaller than they were in the early 1900s.

Yep, that's me zigzagging the ski slopes of Mt. Packenham. Okay, let's be honest. That's me TRYING to zigzag the beginner's hill at Mt. Packenham, Ontario. And no, I'm not even going to show any photo evidence that Richard took of me crashing (very sweet of him), without the slightest hint of provocation from anything (unless my total inexperience counts as anything?), in the middle of the hill and right in front of three, four-year-olds who ski like champions. To be fair, I was not the only adult who looked like a total wimp at the beginner's hill, there must have been at least five of us (with some falling more embarrassingly than others, I tell you), and after my fall, I redeemed myself by not falling ever again and learning how to turn on my own. Wait, is that a slow clap I'm hearing? And a what? Formal induction to the cool kids hall of fame? Thank you, thank you. lol.

We made it in time for the Oscar's awards show though and as fun and super funny as Ellen was, all I was secretly hoping for was a performance of my - and everybody's - favorite, "Let It Go" (if it's not your favorite YET, then...WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? lol) by Idina Menzel (or Adele Dazeem according to John Travolta, much to the confusion and collective heartbreak of eight-year-olds everywhere).

And since we're already talking favorites, here are my favorite stars from last night whose hair and makeup really made them shine (as far as my expert opinion is concerned).

The very pregnant and very glowing Kerry Washington in Jason Wu.

The always beautiful Jennifer Garner in an Oscar de la Renta number I'm not so crazy about.

My forever girl-crush Emma Watson in Vera Wang.

And the world might crucify me for this, but JLaw's look, I'm not completely digging. And I'm an "expert", remember?

Richard LOVES, LOVES, LOVES to travel. Even before we met, he has already flown and visited places I could only dream of - the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the beautiful castles of Munich, the beaches of Cuba and the Dominican, the red light district of Amsterdam (okay, this one I didn't exactly dream of). He went on a game drive in the African safari, bungee jumped from the highest commercial bridge bungy in the world, witnessed friends get married in Jamaica, watched a U2 concert in Boston, met new friends in Greece, partied with university friends in Spain, walked the streets of Prague, got lost in an airport in Thailand when he was five, watched the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And I'm not even halfway through his list. Seriously, how could this guy be so lucky? Plus he got to marry me, so he's like, the world's luckiest guy, like, evahhh. lololol

In my moments of insecurity, I always ask him if he has ever regretted marrying me and not being able to travel the world anymore. (I am applying for my permanent residence and until I get approved, I could not leave the country.) It is in moments like these when I get a really tight hug from him and a very reassuring, "No regrets. And I am still travelling...in Canada. And the best part? I'm travelling with you." Ahhh, luckiest girl in the world.

Lake Moraine, 14 kilometres from the Village of Lake Louise.

The beautiful Lake Louise. 

The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, built in the early decades of the 20th century.