Marching Orders

I finally got my travel itinerary for deployment yesterday. I'll be leaving next Friday (9/25), and will spend all the way through to 10/9 in Denver doing various training sessions, orientation, psychological evaluations, etc. I'll then fly commercial airlines to Los Angeles, Sydney, Australia (losing 10/10 crossing the international date line, which isn't as scandalous as it sounds), and finally arrive at Christchurch, New Zealand. Once in Middle Earth, I'll spend an undetermined number of days waiting for my flight to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, but will get to definitely go through all the rigmarole of receiving my extremely cold weather (ECW) gear and getting all my various articles of luggage headed in the correct direction. Hopefully I'll be able to work in a bit of Greek food at Dimitri's in Cheech before making the leap to terra australis incognita. But, I'm getting way ahead of myself.

Today I made the "big commitment" of sealing up some of my packages that I will mail to myself at Pole. They'll arrive eventually, and hopefully be intact and unspoiled by pilfering freebooters. I speak not with cynicism, but from experience.

So, with one more week remaining I'm pretty much ready to go, minus a few of the details. Last night my immediate family and some close relatives met for dinner at the Hays House. I'd been wanting to go there since way back in grad school, when I'd read their menu at my office computer while eating the ubiquitous PBJ sandwich for lunch. It was a tasty meal and a pleasant outing along the old Santa Fe Trail, at very long last.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called 'Spannungsbogen', which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
~Frank Herbert, Dune