Love is like music. Life would go on without them but it would be lackluster and and somewhat shallow. Music like love, is what gives substance and color to a life worth living. Ergo, the music fest on Facebook and here this past week. So maybe it is serendipitous that one of my love affairs online should come back on Valentine’s Day.

Blogkadahan, my online family is back with a vengeance and you can read about our love affair on our newly designed and revived site, thanks to our blogging goddess, Ate Sienna. We are a group of bloggers who felt a connection with each other through our blogs and we decided to get to know each other better away from our blogs. We first formed an email group on gmail. One thing led to another and we decided on a collaborative blog away from our individual ones. Blogkadahan was that baby.

My love affair online of course does not compare to my real life love affair with my husband of 18 years, and my three daughters. They are my life and when I think of love, they come foremost to mind. Most of the things I write about are about them. With the re-opening of Blogkadahan, one of my old posts is reposted on the new site. This is my thanks for the loving man I am married to who continues to shower me with love and attention even after the craziness of eighteen years.

I was going to post this yesterday, on Valentine’s Day, but you know how real life always gets in the way of blogging sometimes. So how was your Valentine’s Day weekend?

I was going to share this with you yesterday on Valentine’s Day but as usual, life interfered with my blogging schedule. So I greet you a belated Happy Valentine’s Day and hope that you had a great day.

Yesterday was a day like any other at our house, nothing special really. My daughter Jade and I got out of the house at 7:30 a.m. to attend an exploration day at the school she is applying to. We didn’t get home until 4 in the afternoon so that didn’t give me much time to fix anything special and we were too tired to go anywhere. We ended up spending the rest of the day at home. I cooked a little bit of something for everyone: sinigang pork, Chinese noodles with beef & vegetables and, for The Clone, spaghetti. We ate well and that was enough celebration for us. Like my daughter says all the time, “you should show you love someone everyday not just on Valentine’s Day”.

I am blessed to have a beautiful loving family and doubly blessed to also have great friends who love each other like family. That’s how it is with my online family. We have been together for four years (I joined the group when I first started blogging) and we have shared with each other and supported each other through weddings, graduations, funerals, births, and all the other milestones in life. A few of us have met each other but many of us have never met in person. Not having ever met each other has not prevented us from feeling as close to each other as families though. We’ve had our disagreements and we’ve had our bonding moments. We’ve gotten mad at each other and we’ve made up. We’ve laughed until we cried and cried until we had to laugh. Through it all, we’ve gotten to be better friends and better family. One of my online sisters, Mec, made the following video to celebrate the love among the Berks.

These are my online berks, visit their blogs and you’ll see just how apt Mec’s video is.

We are a mix of a little bit of this and that, but like our halo-halo, it works together somehow and it’s refreshing.

I always joked that the reason I married him was because he promised to always wash the dishes for me. Friends and family told him he was crazy to want to marry me. MY friends and family warned him. The poor guy went for it anyway, claiming he was getting a great deal. I happen to disagree. I got the better deal.

The Blogkadahan topic this month is all about the things that we are thankful for. I am thankful that we have been relatively healthy, the girls have been doing well in school and as things go, I think we have all been happy. This year has been good to us.

This being November when my anniversary and husband’s birthday fall along with Thanksgiving, I decided to thank the little things he does for me all year. They are, after all, what makes the big picture.

Ten years from now do you know where you will be, what you will be doing? Will you remember what you were doing ten years ago? Will your hopes and dreams still be the same? Will some of them have been realized by then? Will you be spooked when you receive a letter from your past self?

The answer to all these questions is, I DON’T KNOW. Only time will tell, I suppose where and what I will be ten years from now. I wrote myself a letter, to be emailed to me ten years from now. I wonder how I will feel about it then? We’ll see. Would you like to send your future self a message? Check out FutureMe.org. It doesn’t have to be in ten years as I have done. You could send you a message to be delivered in a year or two, or maybe even next month.

Writing to our future selves has been the theme on blogkadahan.com this month. If you’d like to see my letter and those of others, just click here.