i am here on the westcoast and my life has been all about work and dogs. which isn't a bad thing - there are so many lush parks and the seasonal temperatures are absolutely spring like, especially compared to the snow storms that toronto is experiencing right now! **please note i am only wearing a hoodie and not a down-filled coat**

duke and i flew over for a break from toronto life and to also keep cooper company while his parents are in hong kong. the two beagles became fast friends and on walks, they love sniffing the same things and sometimes walk together side by side. too cute!

hopefully i can finish up a bunch of my work so that i can see my friends next week and romp around old haunts with my family. the forecast calls for a lot of sunny days. yippy!

i'm finally reading the curious incident of the dog in the night time - see it's all about dogs in my life right now!

paper

amazingly, it was nearly a year ago (16th feb to be exact), on a chilly but bright winter morning when i got zipped into a vintage 70s white dress, put on my new strand of pearls, slipped into my 3-inch heels, put a borrowed hairclip into my straightened hair, and got married in the centre of london.

i probably (somewhat foolishly) hadn’t given full and exhaustive consideration before i got married that it is an act of making a new family where there is no blood connection. you are tied to another, someone who biologically would not normally have the inclination to care for you year-on-year, through the good and the bad -- what a strange and beautiful concept, if you really think about it.

i used to think this was a bad thing -- needing a piece of paper to tell you to care about someone -- but now i realize perhaps this view was a bit ungenerous and certainly unnecessarily unromantic. getting married (an amazingly easy and quick process) is like getting a new birth certificate -- something that says, congratulations, you’ve chosen to be born into a new family; please take good care of each other.

i know i’ve always been head-strong and independent, and i would have thought in my early 20s that this meant i could do it all better on my own -- no consulting someone else for their opinion, or feeling embarrassed when i cause someone else to be held up. but when i think back to the happiest (or best) moments in my life, they have always involved other people: laughing over a meal with friends, the chaos of family gatherings, a walk on a nice day hand-in-hand.

i never understood until coming to london that meeting people you connect with in any significant way is truly a very very rare thing. london is a notoriously difficult city anyway, regardless if you’re a foreigner or english. i suppose i was spoiled early in my life, in both my birth city and my situation, and maybe it’s a bit late to be appreciating it now -- but i think, in a way, this realization must have helped me to decide the importance of taking that leap a year ago.

anyway, in the lead up to v-day, try to think of something nice to do for your honey -- whether your honey is your other half, a treasured friend, a rarely-seen family member, or just the lovely city you live in -- because none of those things should be taken for granted.