Blissful

When I was single--particularly before I'd ever had a boyfriend at all--I used to imagine the sort of dates I would go on when I had a boyfriend. I got most of my ideas from movies or TV shows, I think. Mostly these fantasies involved things like cooking spaghetti dinners together or going for hikes by waterfalls or sharing a bowl of popcorn on the couch while watching movies or other ridiculously girly things. I think everybody does that, imagines what life would be like with someone to share it with (although when I mentioned to Penn that I used to fantasize about the going-on-dates part of dating he admitted that when he was single he pretty much only imagined the having-sex part of dating, so I guess we all have our priorities). Anyway, it's fun now to realize how often my coupled life fulfills my fantasies of what it could possibly be, in both major as well as fairly superficial ways.

This weekend was my first free weekend in three weeks, so Penn and I took full advantage of my free time. Yesterday we took our bikes down to City A and biked to a museum I've been wanting to go to for a while. Mainly I wanted to go because I'd heard the food court was awesome, and it was. It had a huge variety of food from different regions, random things like buffalo tacos and fried yucca and beet and purple potato salad. Yum. It was a really nice day for a bike ride, too. The weather has been perfect this weekend.

Today we went up to City B to check out a reenactment of Edgar Allan Poe's funeral (I'm not sure that "reenactment" was exactly the right word because I think this funeral was much better attended than his actual funeral probably was) and then we went to an art museum to check out an exhibit of paintings and book illustrations of Poe's stories. So it was Poe Day, I guess. We biked all around for this outing, too, from the museum to the church where Poe is buried and back. I love my bike so much. It makes getting around so much easier, and I get the satisfaction of working out while just going about my daily activities.

Anyway, there were a bunch of little moments this weekend when I was so thankful, when I looked around at my interesting surroundings and my handsome, smiling boyfriend and my only concrete thought was, "I have such a nice life." I wouldn't exchange my life with anyone. Even my troubles are not real troubles, just annoyances and frustrations. I'm so lucky, and I feel so thankful for how nice everything is right now. Life can be a total crapshoot, and I know there will be troubles in the future because that's just how life works. It can't be this good forever, no one gets a charmed life forever. But I'll keep stockpiling weekends like this while I can.

Oh, and speaking of lucky: I'm going to London in a month! I know I mentioned that we were planning to go to Europe this fall but things were still up in the air. Well, it seems like plans have finally started concretely falling into place. See, one of my professors got a grant to do research into starting a study abroad program in London, but he's too busy to do the research himself. For some reason he thinks I'm competent enough to do the research into setting up this new program, so when he got the grant he told me that he was going to send me to London for a couple of weeks to meet with people and observe programs currently in progress that are similar to the one my department wants to start. So I've known since last spring that there was a pretty good chance this research trip was going to happen provided the funding didn't somehow disappear (you never know, these days), but I didn't know when exactly it was going to happen. Meanwhile, Penn has also been planning a trip to Europe because his sister and her family are currently stationed in the Netherlands and Penn and his mom wanted to go over there for Thanksgiving. Penn invited me to go with them, too. For the past few months it's been a puzzle of trying to figure out if schedules can work out so that I can somehow tack the Netherlands onto my London trip, thereby saving myself a lot of money, or whether I was going to go to London in the spring, in which case I was going to have to buy a plane ticket to the Netherlands but I wasn't going to be able to go to Europe for as long as Penn and his mom were planning to go since I'm allowed to leave for school-related business but otherwise leaving all my assistantship work for three weeks wouldn't go over so well. Anyway, I still haven't bought my plane tickets yet but I got confirmation from my professor that I can go to London before Thanksgiving. Perfect! So now we have a plan. I'll take my most-expenses-paid (!!!) research trip to London and be there for two weeks. Meanwhile, Penn is taking some time off work and for the first ten days I'm in London he'll be in the Netherlands and Paris with his family. Then the last weekend I'm in London Penn is going to come over and meet me and we'll either hang out there or take a weekend trip somewhere else if my research is done (we both love London but we've also both been there several times, and in my quest to see as much of the world as possible there's something appealing about trying to see somewhere else I've never been before). Then we'll go back to the Netherlands to have Thanksgiving* with Penn's sisters family and then Penn and his mom and I will fly home the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And then Penn and I will be home for a little over two weeks before flying to my hometown for Christmas! It's going to be a crazy couple of months, but I'm so, so excited about the fact that there's a very good chance I'll be in London a month from now. I told you, life is good!

*Yes, I'm well aware of the fact that technically there is no Thanksgiving in the Netherlands, but since all it really involves is eating a lot of food as a family, I think we can manage to make our own.