Happy 60th Birthday to Me

It's been awhile.

I've covered a lot of miles, seen a lot of places, met a lot of people since my last post. I've even changed the location of home base ... something I had long considered unlikely. Looking back along my collected photo timeline since my last post I am treated to flashbacks of Stockholm, Madrid, Paris, Canmore, Quebec City, Vienna, San Francisco, Vancouver, Orleans, London, Goiania, Kawaii, Wyoming, Maine, Rome, Denver, Jasper, Caldas Novas, Panama, and Edmonton (more about Edmonton in a minute). One day I will regret not having pulled the trigger to write notes here on those trips.

But no time to wallow now. Tomorrow afternoon we're off for two weeks in Japan, a place I've dreamed of visiting since 1967. That was the year Mr. Drake's 4th grade class hosted an exchange teacher from Japan. (I wish I could recall his name.) We studied bits and pieces of Japanese geography, history, and culture that entire year, and somewhere a long the way I made a promise to climb to the top of Fujiyama some day ... and I got sick and threw up a belly full of the first sushi rolls I ever tasted.

Anyway, I've come a full turn of the Asian calendar without having visited Japan, and so this Earth Dog and his Fire Horse wife will wait no longer. Eleven months ago we burned some frequent flyer miles on first-class tickets, and tomorrow afternoon we depart on the first leg. We'll overnight at ATL and then on Tuesday get an early start to MSP, and from there to HND in Tokyo.

It was Gi's idea to start taking "special trips" in years where our birthdays end in "0". That Kawaii trip was in celebration of her 50th. Even if I don't have blog notes for that trip, I'm glad I have the photo collection. We stayed just east of Princeville and Hanalei, the area that was wrecked by flooding last month after they caught more than two feet of rain in 24 hours. They will be a long time recovering. I wonder how The Blue Dolphin Restaurant fared -- Gi and I enjoyed a terrific sushi lunch there to celebrate her birthday.

With eleven months (or a lifetime, if you prefer) to plan for this trip you would think we would have it in the bag, and in some respects we are quite ready, but last-minute events have conspired to make our departure much more exciting than I would like. I was in Edmonton the Thursday and Friday before last to attend the final TRIA-Net Annual General Meeting, and I had every intention of starting my packing and list of odd jobs last weekend. But such was not to be. At some point while I was in Canada I came into contact with someone (or someone's child, perhaps?) who passed me an adenovirus. That bug put me flat on my back for Sunday and Monday -- I missed the first day of the CALS Department Heads retreat -- and turned my respiratory system into a phlegm factory that is still pumping out copious amounts of green goo a week later.

Of course, this thing hit Gi even harder. She was down within 36 hours of my return, and has been bed-ridden most of the past week. I'm sure we've both progressed far enough that we can pass through customs without setting off the epidemic alarms, and while the literature says we're likely to be shedding infective virions for days, if not weeks, we should be able to minimize spread by practicing careful and meticulous hygiene. Fortunately, this should just make us look normal while we're in Japan ... or so I hear.

So that's the preamble. Time to get crackin on packin.