Foundations

Yesterday saw the most glorious spring weather - the kind of afternoon that makes up for nearly a month of grey skies and rain. Everything burst into bloom - audibly. A perfect late April read-outdoors-with-a-cuppa kind of day. Crowned in every way by Nasser's successful viva. A house of two doctors we are!

It's funny - I've always explained that we're moved here to do our PhDs and now we're finished and that's not the most interesting, most compelling, or most important thing keeping us here. We live here - we've lived here longer than anywhere else. This is, in so many ways, our home. I've been thinking that I always understood 'home' as singular and felt guilty about using it to describe anywhere but Canada. But I don't think that it is a singular thing anymore - Canada will always be my home but Britain is my home too. The only thing that I continue to miss - strongly enough to return to - is my family. It's strange that we all live so far apart now. And I do feel guilty about staying here sometimes - worried that they don't know how much I miss them, or that we'll drift apart and be strangers. But I'm also not ready to leave here - I love it: our garden, our (new!) flat, our little community of ex-pats and Brits... I guess I feel like I have to say that - we aren't here anymore 'for school' - we're here by choice because this is where - for now and I don't know for how long - we live. I'm home.

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I really must express this or it will come out in some horrible repressed and displaced fashion: I really really intensely dislike the use of ultrasounds as avatars on Facebook. Please stop. It's horrible.