[caution: whingeing]

Didn't I make a resolution a while back, that this blog was going to be Relentlessly Positive? Whatever happened to that...?

That just gone was a terrible night, that was. Just the kind you do not want, before heading off across the country and around the world. Call it booklag, call it stress, call it sickness: whatever you call it, I barely slept at all and I feel - well, pretty much as you would expect a man to feel after a sleepless breathless night.

Also, my teeth hurt. I have mentioned before, I think, that I have terrible teeth? But over the last year I've had relentless pains that move around for indetectable reasons. They cost me a tooth in the lower left that was apparently fine once he'd pulled it; for the last month they've been settled lower right, on a tooth that was root-filled twenty years ago and has again nothing observably wrong with it. Last night they shifted to the upper right, where I have a bridge of long standing. This morning it is specifically and exceedingly sore, the tooth that supports that bridge. I'm terribly anxious about it; I'm fairly sure it's going to come off, probably in mid-flight tomorrow. If I don't swallow it and choke, then we'll have all the fun of emergency dentistry in a foreign land, oh joy.

Or of course the nasty pain could just migrate again, but... Well. I'm not confident.

*whimpers*

Now I must pack, yes. And organise. And do all those things I didn't do yesterday, because I was writing. Writing! How did that happen...?

Heavy bag is heavy

*removes cat*

Heavy bag is still heavy. I am taking books for Karen, books for other people, books for me. I am not taking my big fat read-on-the-flight-home book; I shall have to find Another. Gosh. I can haz buk?

I have packed many medications, some of which will probably get me arrested but hey. I got scrips for them all.

I have packed the camera, and the marmalade. I am going to go downstairs now and check my passport neurotically (it's in a backpack inside another backpack, for complicated reasons that will involve a whole load of repacking at Juliet's).

I have packed the teddy bear.

Clothes. I should probably pack some clothes. Also toiletries (tho' half my toilet bag is actually devoted to further medications; I am a flying pharmacy).

*removes cat*

What else do I need?

[EtA: the boys are very clear that Something Is Up, and that they Do Not Approve. I don't know if their little fuzzy heads have figured out that packing-of-case means absence-of-Chaz, I don't know if cats can do that kind of deductive thinking; but they are restless and suspicious and following me about. And packing themselves, obviously. That could just be a game, the inevitable lure of a suitcase; is it sheer bloody anthropomorphism, to wonder if it might be more?]