Tickets are booked to Paris; tickets are booked to San Francisco.

We will be six in San Francisco, with tagalong extras depending on the day and the inclination of our local friends.  We have nebulous plans:  look for us in the cheap seats at the Giants-Astros game on July 4.  I'll be the one in the bleachers with the beer; that's all you need to find me in the crowd, right?  We'll do a night tour of Alcatraz and I'll relearn the San Francisco bus system and pictures, pictures, pictures!

A week in San Francisco.  We'll celebrate Suzan's birthday and tag along behind Asai in Chinatown.  Asai learned last night there's a temple there; amidst the touristy time and stomping all over the city, we'll probably take a few minutes for prayers. 

CNN reported that Dr. Jerri Nielsen has died. If the name tickles a memory in you, she was the sole doctor in Antarctica when she diagnosed herself with breast cancer during Antarctic winter, requiring her to treat herself for breast cancer until a risky South Pole rescue mission could be undertaken as soon as winter ended..

A quote of hers struck me as particularly memorable; it put into words something I've been trying to say a long time but never formulated properly:

"The things that make you strong, and make you feel as though you've accomplished something, are not the easy ones; it's the things you had to work and struggle through. Those are what give us our depth -- that make us not gray and plain and nothing but give us depth and texture and longing."

Indeed.

It had to happen eventually, but it took a bottle of mead and a late night and finally signing off of work to realize it.  I am going. I am really going. I have this sleep, the one that's coming for me fast even as I type this entry, and one abbreviated one more, and that is it. A little over twenty-four hours and I am gone.

I am lying on the guest bed next to a surprisingly small pile of items that must go with me. Is this all I need of life for two weeks?  Really?

I've turned off all the lights except the lava lamp, whose glow is strangely soothing, and put away my books.  (Wizards of Earthsea is for the plane, so quit dipping into it already, Amy.) I need to wind down, and sleep, and yet suddenly it is all too real and all too soon and all too horribly far away.