#ottawa spring

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.

There is, I think, an unwritten social rule that one must, after a period of absence, give an accounting of his whereabouts, or at least a semblance of a reason for his absence. Mine is winter, and maybe some writing jobs here and there. But it's spring now, and some days it feels like summer. So it's time for some blog action.

These were taken during the Tulip Festival last month. Richard was off from work and it was warm enough to wear shorts. Every time we go out shopping, I always gravitate towards summery clothes, so over the months, I've accumulated so much of them I decided it was time for them to come out. I'm wearing an H&M top and Old Navy shorts which I got from the kid's section. I like when I score something from the children's section because I pay lesser tax for it. But I still find Canada's tax rules weird, even confusing.

Richard always tease me about crediting him in all the pictures I put up in this blog or in my Facebook because I get so many compliments and Likes for them. He really does take beautiful pictures, and I wonder what he could do with an SLR. It was part of our Boxing Day wishlist last year but decided after a lot of discussions that we don't really need it.