I feel like, at this age, life keeps giving.

In your teens and early 20s, it's all about waiting; everyone daydreams about the things they want, who they want to be with, where they want to go. And it feels like a million years away when you're 17, under your parent's roof, and you haven't really figured out who you are.

Now I'm 27 and almost every day I hear about someone getting engaged, or having a baby, or buying a house, or starting an awesome job. I know artists and world-travelers and some really amazing people and it makes me so happy to see them receive good things. I'm a sucker for these optimistic times.

Because, I know, statically, that it can't all last. Some of it will crumble. That's life. You don't get everything, all of the time, forever. Every day I try to hang on to little bits of the good things -- I'm sure I hug and kiss wee man a hundred times a day. I tell my cats I love them. I try to memorize my husband's hugs.

The other day he (husband) came into the room and said he was a bit worried.
I asked him why.
He said that, since the seven-year anniversary of the two of us meeting is coming up, he has a superstitious paranoia that his luck is going to run out. What if he's only allowed seven good years? He's just been too lucky, he said.

I assured him that I'm not really some kind of devil-person who has been playing a ruse that will evaporate after seven years (he seemed oddly reassured -- haha). Then I said that the best thing to do is focus on being grateful instead of being worried. If we only get seven years, they've been seven lovely years.

And the things I see now are lovely.

It's been one year now and little bits of homey feelings are starting to creep in. I still compare most everything to Newfoundland, but now I've started to wonder what I'll miss about Ottawa when we're gone. And I wonder when we'll go (we still haven't given "if we'll go" much weight).

We're making friends. Fella has some guys in his program that share his passion for comics and borderline OCD obsession with completing collections. They took an afternoon off a few weekends ago to go to some "it" comic book store out of town and they were so excited. One of these guys just got engaged and I really like his fiance. We've bounded over wryly poking at our academic partners.

Academia is a whole world onto itself. I'm sure it's irrational, but sometimes I worry that I'll completely lose my husband into it; that I'll wake up one day and the books will have eaten him. There's just, so much. He's reading his comps list now: 70 books in a few months. He reads all day, it's a full-time job. Stories and perspectives that are getting crammed into his brain that I never see. Activists and theorists and dead poets.

We went to a board game night tonight with his (our?) program-friends and one of the board games was about naming authors/titles of books: you read out the first line of a book and one team has to guess the author or title of the work. He and the other Ph.d. students hummed and hawed about whether a sentence sounded Modernist or Romantic; Keats or Crowley. Fella knew so much. I guess I just hadn't realized how smart he has gotten. Well, he's always been smart, but he's also always just my husband to me. It was just a little tweak in perspective, but when you've been with someone for seven years, even little shifts can be startling. His journey in school became a little realer to me.

 My program is going well. I've just started my last semester.  I love the work; it's creative, but structured and seems like something I could do. I've been getting all As. It just fits. I've informally promised myself that I'll stop talking about the things that I want to do and I'd just do them, so I'll spare you all of my ideas. But yeah, it's going well.

Wee man is awesome. We have "terrible twos" days, but not as many as I was worried about. I feel like we've moved beyond the bewildered "holyfucki'maparent", past the "bonding", and into the "form a relationship" stage.

He gives a lot of hugs, they're the best.

We're still trying to do it all, and it's going pretty well.