Happy Birthday Hubby

My sweet hubby is having a birthday today. I'm writing this post while observing him teach his seminar class. We have birthday snacks, of course :).

Every year hubby objects to getting a year older, but every year I think he gets better.

At 19 -- we were on a break... I knew him at 18 and at 20, so I can guess that he was a passionate conservative deeply into being a geek and playing D & D. He was living in Japan and missing home. A couple of years later he'll be stationed in Colorado and come home for Christmas to change my life, but at 19 he was a geeky A1C running a BBS.

At 29, --we were married, about 8 years -- due to debate, he was coming to see that there were reasonable people, even smart people, who were liberals. He was coming into his own as a debater, finding out that he can be scarily persuasive and winning lots of trophies. He was living in Red State, full-time in the military and part-time in school. About this time he was beginning to realize that the military wasn't exactly the place for him anymore, although it took a few years to realize this.

At 39, -- we are still married -- he's a political moderate and nearly done with intercollegiate debate. We are still running a debate tournament together, but otherwise he's pretty uninvolved in debate. Instead, he's thrown his passion into teaching at his undergrad school and writing in political science -- and he's good at that as well.

I wonder what 49, 59 and 69 will look like. I'm sure we'll still be married. I'm almost as sure that we'll have some cats, some good friends and lots of books. I'd guess that at 49 we'll be in Red State, after that -- who knows?

I do know that the person hubby is replacing this year is 70 and taking on a new career in a Middle Eastern country. I wonder if we'll be doing the same, leaving our lives in Red State to go on a new adventure elsewhere and leaving the next hubby to house-sit for us.

For tonight, we'll go to his favorite kind of food.. the Japanese steakhouse where they cook it in front of you. We'll enjoy a good show and some decent food. Tomorrow morning 'birthday week' will end when I go back to BN state. He'll follow me home on Thursday for a few days at home for Spring Break.