Leaving town

There are a million other things I should be doing before I leave at 5:30 tomorrow morning to catch my plane to Sweden. It's going to be a long trip with a ten hour layover in Singapore. I had been dreaming of all the great books to get at Bondi-books with the credit I had from trading in some of my used books. I figured I had enough to buy me 24 hours worth of reading material... but I'll be danged if I didn't find out that they are closed on Tuesday's untill I lugged a pile of used books there this afternoon. The credits good forever though, so...

I still have to saw up the old hand-made birdcage so it can go in the trash. The birds aren't happy at all, living in a tiny book-shelf converted to cage right now. Once Tomoe leaves for USA next month, they will have to move into a hopefully slightly larger cage at her mother's house. They wont be too happy there I suppose. For one, they wont have free reign to fly all day and poop anywhere they please. They wont be able to eat dinner at the table with the rest of the family, they wont get their head scratched every night, and probably worst of all, we have to clip their wings for the first time in their lives to make it easier for Tomoe's mom to catch them and put them in the cage once they are out.

I hope it's not too much trauma for Klee who broke her leg last week (slammed in the door). She couldn't use it for a week or so, but she seems to be walking nicely now with only a slight limp. Of course it is not healed yet, but she doesn't know that... a bird after my own heart. I remember the only time I ever broke a bone, I broke my leg skiing, and skied the rest of the day on it. It only hurt when I turned left, so I made sure not to do that very often.

Tomoe was supposed to leave at the same time as me, or even before me, but because she is extremely terroristical, she has to wait longer for the visa than her company thought. I think I actually feel worse about leaving for the first three weeks than I do about the rest of the year. Once she is in America, we will both be distracted by new surroundings, but until then, she has to live alone here in the huge six-tatami apartment. I would not be happy about it, so I hate that she has to do it. To make it worse, tomorrow is the start of her vacation, so there is not even work to distract her. I remember several weekends when she was in England for school a few years ago, I would try to sleep as long as possible in the morning to reduce the time spent alone.

Anyway, I gots me lotsa work to do, so I'm gonna go now. If all goes well, I will be posting photos from Sweden in a week. Of course I still have tremendous backlog from Japan, and the photos today are backlog from January in Chicago (in case you couldn't figure it out).