It begins with a cough. Fatigue. Confusion, and concern. Karin has been sick, and my sleep has been either disjointed or consuming. The two are not directly related.

It's day zero today. Conception and creation. We have an appointment to make things more official than they ever should perhaps be. And that is the edge of uncertainty and hesitation in my otherwise glorious high. Stephen, aus Deutschland, schreibt: "Wow, a house!" -- upon which the chain of events leading up to this evening and something big and scary called a deposit happens.

Papers are to be signed.

Images -- most definitely images -- will be captured of lots, and shadows falling across broken bits of dirt and lumber.

Hands shaken. Deals struck. Pages printed. Appointments plotted. Numbers discretely passed like they are the dirty words in fairy tale.

And then. Then. Then... well.

I should avoid turning this into a sporadic thought-stream, rippling with emotionally charged words. I should really avoid that -- even though it might be too late already. Karin and I are going to spend a medium-sized fraction of our money this evening. Forget life for a moment. Forget classes, work, volunteering, and the fact I spent most of my evening last night at the gym teaching my sister how to set up a quick and dirty training circuit. Forget all those things. There is something so much more enduring about building a home. Like, digging in or something.

I was in Vancouver this past weekend. (Well, Richmond, actually. I never made it to Vancouver-proper. Flew in and out for a conference, had a few beers, shook a few hands, and gave a few presentations where I stood up and explained my wacky existence.) Besides reminding me how good and how bad the sushi and the traffic are -- respectively -- I found myself in an airline window seat both ways. I swooped down over my old coastal home, and I picked out my old apartment from the sky over Burnaby. I located my old office amongst the scatter of uptown buildings. It felt familiar. But it was still so foreign.

On my way home, we slid under a thin layer of clouds and the south-west corner of Edmonton materialized out of my window. From the air I could locate large, familiar landmarks, narrow down locations relative, and eventually pinpoint an approximate circle of land that contains an even smaller uneven rectangle of land with our names on it. Saved. Held. Waiting for something bigger to happen, maybe.

That felt kind of funny. That's where I'm going to live, I thought. Odd. And now: day zero. Zero.