Did, like, one hour of packing today. Instead, caught up with Double M, recently back from her sister's wedding, and BC, who's heading out of her Pacific NW hometown tomorrow too, in the morning, then ate lunch, then went out for a long walk and margaritas with Co-Intern, whom I am very sad to part from. Best line today: "I'm a yuppie, and I don't hang pictures of my family up unless they're in black and white and everyone looks sullen." I extracted a promise from her that she'll write back to me if I email her.

I finally did some errands in the evening, like dropping off some clothes at a donation dropoff box, returning library books, and buying $100 of gifts for people in Korea and Japan. The gifts freakin' cost more than my frequent flyer ticket! But I'm going to return whatever stuff I don't give away. Heh heh.

And still, I have done little packing. I figure I'll wake up in a panic tomorrow around 6 am, stuff everything into my pack (part of the problem is that I can't decide which luggage to use), dump everything else into a box and shove it into a corner of my room to deal with when I get back, and have Roommate drive me to the airport about 30 minutes before my flight takes off. This is the tried and true hk method of travel, and I'm sticking to it. Ooo, I AM going to a foreign country tomorrow, so perhaps an hour before my flight would be good...

Speaking of waking up in a panic, I woke up this morning with my hand pressed over the right side of my chest, breathing laboriously. Why? Because I thought I'd been hit by an assassin's bullet, which had punctured my lung, and was causing me to slowly suffocate to death. Dreams are funny, freaky things.

I'm off to Vancouver (if they let me on the flight -- my frequent flier paper tickets have not arrived) tomorrow for about 18 hours, and then I'm off to Tokyo to see the beautiful and kindly Maiko. And then I land in the homeland, a good year after leaving it. I wonder how that will be. In the meanwhile, I'll write up an excruciatingly detailed account of how I avoided death in multiple forms in Denali this past weekend. Now if I could just avoid death in my dreams...