Lovey Dovey

This past Valentine's Day has got to be the best one by far. There were no cards, flowers or presents, but that's the last thing I need to know that Jason and I love each other. Instead of giving gifts, we piled into my mum's big van with my uncle and his girlfriend Zita and my brother and his girlfriend Vivian, and trucked ourselves up to Ottawa at 7am on Saturday morning. 3 cute couples on a little road trip up to the capital to spend Valentine's Day 2004 on the ice turned out to be a lovely idea. After much driving and napping and some getting lost, we found ourselves with skates strapped on our feet standing on the World's Longest Skating Rink, the Rideau Canal. It was a beautiful day out and I was in the bestest of moods, even though I was a bit nervous becuase I hadn't been skating since last Christmas. So at first skating on the canal was nothing more than a slip 'n slide 'n try to stay standing. But after a few kilometers, we all got the hang of it, and had a bunch of fun. I tried maple syrup with snow on a stick for the first time and had my first Beavertail too.

7.8 km x 2 in skates proved to quite the task. The first 2 hours was fun; going from beginning to end seemed like this wonderous adventure, filled with sunshine, trying new things, and keeping Jason from falling. And the 3rd hour wasn't too bad, we needed to rest a bit more, and every now and then I really wanted one of those kiddie sleds to sit on...but the last hour was absolutely terrible. My legs were tired, I couldn't feel my feet and my fingers felt increasingly frost bitten. By this time, Jason and I had stopped holding hands and weren't even talking to each other anymore. We just skated and skated and skated. Finally, we made it to the end, took a victory photo and pulled our skates off. I couldn't recognize my feet and I felt like an old lady because not only did my feet hurt, but so did my knees and my back. So yes, after 4 looooooong gruelling hours, yours truly did indeed skate the entire canal. Twice (there and back). That's more than 15.4 km (because I like to count the forks in the canal that we skated too) in just 4 hours. That's enough exercise to last me the rest of the school year.

We warmed up with a pasta dinner and some fun family photos. Jason and I ended up stayed the night with his relatives while the others went home. We played with the kids and spent Sunday at Byward Market, The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Parliament Hill open house. A Lebonese lunch later and we were on our way home.

So in the end, I discovered that love isn't about giving a card or chocolates or flowers or anything, really. It's about napping together in the backseat of a van, skating over 15.4 km even though you're dead tired just because the other person wants to do something wacky as a couple, sharing a cup of hot chocolate or tea, sharing a toothbrush, holding hands to keep the other from falling on the ice, going into a store because you know they want to, giving the other person your socks because theirs are wet from writing their e-mail address in the snow for all of Parliament to see (I'll give you one guess as to who that was), eating the others' pickled turnips or onions because they don't want to, signing your names on the same line in the guest book of an art gallery.

4:22 pm