I went digging for my toga party photos in Rome because I miss the summer already. I think our toga dresses are superb and we’re practically designers. Bedsheets from our hostel, leaves from the bushes outside of our hostel, and headbands from London, England’s PRIMARK – we bought the headbands because they were cute and cheap. They were meant to be brought back home to wear in Toronto, not quite at a toga party in Rome, so that’s more bang for our buck.

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Today I delivered my first mini presentation at Canon – the audience was just over 100 people. I am so, so, so grateful for opportunities like this. It is obviously scary and gives your heart a nice workout without actually being physically active. But with each scary moment, comes improvement and progress. Embrace scary moments! Whether or not you handled it well is really quite minuscule compared to the real value, which is in experiencing and going through it. Whether you realize it or not, the experience, even if the whole thing blew up in your face, has STILL made you even just a tiny bit better than before. I want to avoid comfort zones for as long as I can. Can’t run low on scary moments – not for a long time! Go write an exam or something. Go do something uncomfortable. It’s good for you.

I really seriously wish. I don’t even want to try and understand you because that day will never come. So I just want to fix you instead.

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I’m missing LG Fashion Week right now and my heart is bleeding and my soul is weeping. I had no clue about it. This is what happens when you’re no longer working in a fashion house. Big fashion things happen and you don’t have a clue. I’m deeply saddened. This cannot happen again when Spring 2011’s LG Fashion Week hits the runway or else I will explode into a monster.

We laughed until we cried and we cried until we laughed. This was my very productive 2:00-3:00pm today: a colleague and I worked together on a teaser video for a project and spent one hour laughing to sweet tears, and choked on fluids in our mouths, and coughed up our lungs, and struggled to gasp for air, and went on to vomit rainbows, and added roughly five extra years to our lives, all while slapping together a neat little video (that we obviously think is hilarious) and got the job done with flying colours given bare minimum skills and resources. Love the task that you’re given, make things funny so that you can LAUGH and stop being so serious, and genuinely work as a team and become a synergy-producing powerhouse and the job gets done completely effortlessly. Bada bing, bada boom. None of us is as smart as all of us.

Two more from yesterday’s shoot. This is such a different style from what I would typically go after, so I was way out of my comfort zone. I loved it.

Here’s a quick one from today’s makeup shoot with four beautiful girls and one talented makeup artist. I wish I could post more but I gotta run. More on this tomorrow!

Busy day at work with all sorts of loose ends but I’m letting go right… now.

Do you plan your outfits the night before or the day of?

I’m too tired to think of anything decent to write. I just want Popeyes combo #4 and a movie.

Oh, I have a makeup photoshoot tomorrow afternoon for a talented makeup artist and I’m stoked!

Make it a great weekend, everyone.

This photo was taken at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto during Nuit Blanche. Didn’t think I’d ever post it but it’s just so appropriate considering the rain has taken on an obsession with Toronto – if the rain could sing to us, it would sing Just Can’t Get Enough (of Toronto) by Depeche Mode. I always hate the rain except when I’m curled up in bed under my blankets. In that case, let the thunder and lightning join in because I love sleeping to the titter-tattering of rain on my window coupled with the unpredictable, staggering roars of thunder and together, making the perfect symphony of sleep. But otherwise, snowflakes would be my preference over raindrops.

Also – now that we’re headed the way of Winter, there is talk of the Winter blues. I don’t get the winter blues. I get the grey-sky blues. The cold is not what gets me. It’s the big thing of grey that hovers over my head and makes my world dark in any day of any season. I can sport a hot winter coat and be lifelong friends with the cold if you can promise me all day every day of blue skies with just the right number of puffy white clouds that look like coconut-flavoured cotton candy.

Bumper to bumper traffic on the 401, 427, and QEW when I had only 35 minutes left to get to the train station to catch the 6:43 train to Toronto for the Raptors game. The fact that I couldn’t possibly hop on the train without my camera, so I had to go home to grab my camera before heading to the train station, which meant that I had to rush even more. The fact that I got to the train station on time but practically dying of a panic attack from all the rush, only to find out that the train wouldn’t come for another fifteen minutes. The fact that on the way back from Toronto to Mississauga, Chivalry died on the GO Bus. I had to stand in the aisle the whole way and not a single gentleman even faked to offer a seat.

But you know, it’s about getting up and showing up. This photo is from the game tonight. Don’t ask me who these people are.

“Summer romances end for all kinds of reasons. But when all is said and done, they have one thing in common: They are shooting stars – a spectacular moment of light in the heavens, a fleeting glimpse of eternity. And in a flash, they’re gone.” -The Notebook

I was walking down Queen West and stopped to snap a photo of this pretty mailbox. The mailbox reminds me of letters and letters remind me of The Notebook, that’s why I’ve quoted The Notebook just about everywhere.

But more on letters… I wish we still wrote handwritten letters to each other. Nowadays, we’ve got Microsoft Word and a few fancy fonts that make a nicely typed, impersonal letter that take a fraction of the effort of a handwritten letter. The closest we get to a handwritten letter is a greeting card with a personal message, which really isn’t the same thing. The worst is when you go the way of e-cards – the utmost effortless and impersonal. Nothing feels quite like the sensation of half crinkled, crunchy paper in between your fingers and the comfort of familiar scrawls on a page. When I was at a couple of stationery shops this weekend (The Paper Place and Valhalla, both on Queen West), I was like a kid in a candy store and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Stick me in any stationery store and my heart starts to feel every emotion in the world. Pretty pens, papers, envelopes, stickers, notebooks, journals, binders, notepads, stickys, make me gaga – and they do have to be pretty because I’m not talking about stationery at Walmart or Staples made by Hilroy, Crayola, and Post-It. I’m talking about real stationery with neat, intricate designs and absolute creativity – think Japanese stationery.

It was at The Paper Place that I was suddenly struck with a new mission: I am going to start handwriting letters to friends on pretty paper, wrapped in pretty envelopes and send them out in the mail in time for Christmas. Christmas won’t get any more personal than this!

Worked for an hour and now I’m ready for playtime for the rest of the day. :)

Anybody seen The Road? FANTASTIC film.
Going to tackle The Reader tonight. Kate Winslet blows me away time after time.
On a day like this, there is nothing I love more than to sit in bed with my man, some good food and a good movie.