Counting Down the Days

20: Realizing that we leave in 20 days. Going to the library and elementary school to invite the teachers and the library women to the party.

19: The destruction and scanning of the psychology textbook. The planning of the novel continues.

18: Boredom. Unproductivity

17: 17 days aren't enough. We leave too soon. I won't finish anything. There's so little time!

16: I have a plan and there's enough time to do everything. (Later that night: WE'RE LEAVING, YIPPEE!)

15: A normal day but a productive one. I read.

14: Church. Watched the Phantom of the Opera. 

13-4: Scanning guidebooks while watching movies, and reading between scanning rounds.

3, 2, 1: There isn't a free moment. We work from sun-up to sun down.

0: We're off. I still don't feel that we've left.

If I do have any sentiments, it's that we're going on a vacation to Japan.

We're in the car that we rented from the airport. Dan McCauley drove us to Elmira: thanks! It's a huge car, especially for us. I can actually sit in the back and type without my shoulders coming up to my ears.

This morning I woke up later than usual: at 6:30 instead of 5:30.
I came downstairs and started reading about schizophrenia. This is because I have a character in my NaNoWriMo novel (a kind of contest where peolpe try to write 50,000 words in November) who has this sort of disorder. I wanted to see what sorts of things I could put into the novel and what I couldn't to make it as realistic as possible.

By the time I finished that, the others came downstairs and the work began: moving the files I don't need around the world, deleting the files I don't need, period. Writing to the people in my writing group. Buying the music which we didn't get to buy until now.

And on top of all this, we had to pack up the entire house, too. We put sheets on all the surfaces. We unpacked and repacked the bags. We finished the food.

In short, by 4 something we said goodbye to the house and started towards the McCauley family. The girls were very happy that we had brought pistachios and two heavy-duty garbage bags full of clothes. The kids especially liked the car ("it's so CLEAN!"). Their parents took some pictures of us with the backpacks and in our Scottevests and then we set off with Dan towards Elmira.

When Dad said that we have too many bags (and we do: six backpacks and five winter coats), Dan laughed and said that he'd never in his life seen a family of five taking as few bags as us for a weekend, much less a fifteen months!!