Living local

I absolutely love farmer's markets.

There's something lush about so much fresh produce assembled together in one place.

I think my first experience of a farmer's market was in Bellingham, when I was a student at Western Washington University. (Isn't that sad? That my first experience with a farmer's market was when I was in college? Yeah, I agree. It's very sad.) But it wasn't exactly a farmer's market -- it was a Saturday market, so there were a lot of non-farmer venders. The most memorable stands were Holmquist Hazelnut orchards, and somebody with honey. That's mostly what I bought -- nuts and honey. Those were high ticket items, and I was on a pretty restricted budget, so it was a big indulgence to go.

When we moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1998 they had a Saturday market, too. It was extravagant and very enjoyable -- all kinds of craft venders, a performance stage, lots of food options. Oh yes -- and flamboyant tie dye clothing. There was a beautiful farmers section, but it comprised only about a quarter of the total market. They did have highly memorable melons - watermelon and cantaloupe so sweet... I salivate at the memory. It was still a treat to go, rather than a regular occurrence -- something that we did when family or friends were visiting, or to take advantage of some specific, hard-to-find item (like local melons.)

In Seattle it's possible to find a farmer's market somewhere in the city almost every day, but no guarantee how close. The one that's closest to us is about a 20 minute drive, and it's on Wednesdays, so I don't go often. And it's still a special deal. I go to a farmer's market in Seattle to buy queso fresco from Samish Bay Cheese, and I used to get bulk ground beef for a good price. But...not so much any more -- so again, I don't go often, and when I do, I go for only one or two specialty items.

When we arrived in Szeged I asked my local host if there was some kind of farmer's market, and he said -- oh yes, there's one over by the bus station -- about a ten minute walk from where you live. It's open every day, he said, from early in the morning until early afternoon! Every day? I thought. How is that possible?

Well, it's possible. I guess it's possible because this is where people shop. It really is a farmer's market, too. It's almost all produce, eggs, honey, nuts -- stuff like that. It's huge. And almost all grown locally. (A few venders are probably from stores, since I occasionally see things like avocados and lemons.) But apparently it's open from 4am until 3pm. I'm not likely to go at 4am, but it was already very busy at 8am when I arrived today -- even though it had just rained.

The big difference between the farmer's markets in Seattle and the one here is that I can actually afford to buy the food! Everything is reasonably priced. (Of course, some of that has to do with the significant difference in the cost of living, but still.) I feel like the proverbial kid in the candy store. There's mounds of grapes, vast piles of peppers, cucumbers stacked like lumber, mounds of melons, boxes of garlics and onions, provocative bags of walnuts and beans, mysterious fronds of fresh herbs... I want to buy All The Things!!!

There's also some things there that I don't know what they are, or I know what they are but haven't tried them before, which is always fun. Last week I tried celery root for the first time. This week I bought another one -- I'm making soup tomorrow!

Of course I'm limited by (1) what I can carry on my bike, (2) what we can fit in our small fridge, and (3) what we can reasonably eat before it goes bad. That's my bike there, with the bright blue kid seat on it. (It's also the only one with a bike helmet -- most people don't wear them here.) Many bikes (including mine) have baskets on the front; others have them on sides, or they pile stuff on the rack on the back. I had a backpack as well as my basket, so that helped.

I had around $15 on me this morning, and I spent most of it, but I got quite a haul: a butternut squash, a bunch of beets, two leeks, about a kilo of baby potatoes, about 4 kilos of Mutsu apples, a pile of cucumbers, a celery root, fresh sweet corn, and a watermelon. We bought a watermelon from the same lady last week, and we ate the whole thing in one day. It was an amazing watermelon. I wished that I could carry two watermelons home, but I was already a little unsure I could handle what I had. And I didn't even buy any beans, walnuts, cantaloupe, pears... But here's my gorgeous loot from the day. And there's always tomorrow!...

First days of school

Most years I'm scrambling to get my syllabi done in mid-August, then I'm in faculty meetings and orientations, and I barely get to track my children's first days of school. This year was a little different. Of course we're in Szeged, but it was also different because we all had the first day of school on the same day. This never happens at home. At home Ronan goes in preschool a couple of weeks before my own school begins so that I have a little time to prepare for my classes. Then Tristan usually starts a week after I do. This year was also different because we have all kind of had two "first" days of school.

The official first day of school for all of us was September 3rd. I woke up, showered -- all normal stuff -- and then realised there was a thunderstorm going on. I got the boys up, made pancakes for a special treat, and got us all out of the door by 7:30am. Ronan declined to be photographed for his first day, so here's Tristan wearing his formal school clothes -- it's not a uniform, but I guess everyone wears a white top and black bottoms for special days at school.

Tristan knew which tram to take, and had his pass (Multi Pass!) and ID. I had arranged to take Ronan to his kindergarten by bicycle, and apparently the weather was testing my resolve. (I was told later that in Hungary they say that when the children have to go back to school they all cry, so the weather cries, too -- so I guess the rain was normal and expected!) Luckily, by the time we left the thunder had stopped, and it was just lightly raining. Still. I remembered a lot of things about bike commuting that I hadn't thought about in a long time. (I think the last time I bike commuted was around 11 years ago...) For example: remember to use your flasher lights when it's raining, even during the daytime; also: buses are scary, even when you're in a bike lane.

To my surprise, Ronan wiped his eyes a few times, but didn't cry when I left him at school. (Yay!
That's the first time ever!) I biked back home, quickly changed my clothes, then walked to the immigration office. I'd received a letter from them the previous Friday (right after returning from Balatonlelle, incidentally) that there was some problem with my biometric data (?) and I needed to come in within 5 days to get it taken care of. This wouldn't have been a big deal, except that their office is only open Tuesday through Thursday, and I was scheduled to be in Budapest Tuesday through Friday afternoon for Fulbright training. After some panicking, my wonderful colleagues in Chemistry called the immigration office and arranged for me to come in at 9am on Monday morning.

So I got to the office a few minutes early, the guards let me in, and then I was told that no, it was impossible, I had to come back during their normal office hours. I meekly said that we had called on Friday and talked to someone, and she said it was OK, so they said they'd talk to her. They came back in a bit to say that no, that person hadn't authorized me to come in on Monday, but that they were going to help me out anyway. I said thank you, and waited.

It turned out that there had been some entry errors in the system, and somebody hadn't written my mother's maiden name correctly, so they needed me there to verify what was correct. I mentally agonised that maybe I wasn't spelling my mother's middle name correctly, but I just went for it anyway. Then they took my picture and fingerprints again, and I was all set. Apparently they have already approved my residence permit (yay!), they just needed the updated information so they could issue the card -- so I should have that in 2-3 weeks. (Very big yay!)

So this was all before 9:30am. At that point, I took myself into my office and worked on school stuff. Since I wasn't going to be around the rest of the week because we had Fulbright orientation in Budapest, we arranged not to start classes on Monday. Also, it's apparently normal for the graduate classes here not to start until mid-September, even though the official start of classes is September 3rd. So I had a luxuriously undisturbed three hours or so (first in AGES) of preparing class materials and uploading them to the course software. If you're scratching your head about why that was so pleasant, you probably don't have young children.

Tristan only had a half-day at his school, so I rolled home around 1pm and debriefed with him - he'd had a good day. His head teacher asked me to call, so I did and we made some plans. I picked up Ronan around 3pm, and we finished packing and caught the 4:45pm train to Budapest. So that was our first first day of school. The Fulbright orientation was great. Lots of useful information, and plenty of fun, too. Here we are on a brief stop at Buda castle (you can see Pest behind us.) (Hey look: a photo with all three of us in it for a change!)

Fast forward a week and we were ready for our next first day of school -- this time for real. Tristan had a full day of classes, Ronan had a full day at kindergarten, and I got to teach my first class with my PhD students. All went well for the boys, and I'm so pleased because Tristan really likes some of his classes (and he didn't have any complaints about the others.) He was joyful about his English teacher, enjoyed his art class immensely, and loved the fact that his PE class is really a dance class. I love that he's happy. I also love that art and music are normal parts of the curriculum here. I love that PE isn't confined to team sports. Why wouldn't we want to do dance in a PE class? It means I'm also going to look into dance classes for him to take outside of school, though -- here and at home -- since he actually enjoys it.

My class went well, too. Teaching writing/communication skills is definitely a very different animal than teaching chemistry, though! It's going to be a learning curve for me as well as for my students. But I'm really excited and having fun with it. And I shared two quotes on writing from amazing USA authors they probably hadn't heard of before -- Ta-Nehisi Coates and Terry Tempest Williams. I'm also using Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) and Joshua Schimel (Writing Science) to give tips on writing and science writing, respectively. I figure that introducing science students to non-standard USA authors is probably part of my mission.

Since I'm not a fast blog writer, it's now Friday, and I can report that we had a few bumps this week, too. My classes all went well, but I think that the Master's students got scared -- we went from a fully enrolled class (the max is 20, since it's a writing course) with one or two waiting to get in, to only having 11 students attend yesterday. I tried to be as nice and reassuring as possible, so I hope they'll tell their friends that I'm not scary, and that they'll be successful in my class. On the other hand, I went from 11 students enrolled in my PhD class on Monday to approximately 17 or 18 who are interested in attending (again, maxed at 20) -- and one or two may appear. We'll see. So I'm trying to be optimistic about enrolment.

Other bumps included my bike breaking down yesterday on the way to take Ronan to kindergarten. Nothing serious -- the chain just kept falling off. So we improvised. Luckily there's a lot of busses, and I already knew which ones go near his kindergarten. Also luckily there's a really great bike repair guy that I already knew, too, so repairs are underway. But that definitely interrupts one's plans for a day. It meant I got to school about an hour later than I'd hoped to get there, which made me a little stressed for my class. But all's well that end's well, right? I taught a good lesson, and got everything done that had to be done.

Practical applications of intermolecular forces

So we just got back from a stay at Balatonlelle, a small town on the south side of Lake Balaton. For those who haven't heard of it, Lake Balaton is locally known as the "inland sea", although it is a freshwater lake, because it's quite large. It's about 77 km long, with an average width of about 10 km. It's also amazingly shallow -- average depth is apparently around 10 feet, if you can believe Wikipedia. Our own experience supports this (but of course 3 days playing on a beach isn't exactly empirical) -- we could go at least a couple hundred yards and still touch the bottom. I guess the shallow shoreline is really common on the south side of the lake.

The first day we arrived fairly late, and I'd been up late the night before, so we didn't do much. That night and into the morning it rained and was fairly cold. It was incredible! I hadn't felt cool in a long time. I actually wanted my sweatshirt on!

But the day after that we got to play at the beach. It had been quite a long time since I'd played at the beach. The first day I don't really remember what we built. I wasn't really very into it. I was still having a hard time remembering how to play on a beach. Does that sound pathetic? Well, it kind of is. But I also think it's really common for adults. We don't get much practice with this playing after we become adults. Even adults who are regularly involved in athletics don't necessarily do unstructured play. Sometimes even when we're parents this happens -- rather than playing with our kids we talk to other adults, or do things on our phones, or read a book, or whatever. No judging here - sometimes it's what you gotta do to stay sane. Anyway, the water was warm, and the kids were having fun. I was feeling paranoid about what to do with my purse, which meant I was having less fun, and carrying my purse everywhere. Even with a shoulder strap, that can cramp one's style. (Purses and things like that are another bane on the life of an adult. But I think I may already have mentioned that in my previous post!)

Anyway, I think the most notable thing we did the first day was rent kayaks for an hour. I was a little skeptical, because Ronan is four, and I wasn't sure he could sit in a boat for that long. To my surprise, Ronan was really into it! We paddled around, looked at birds, and picked up floating plant debris. That's probably when I started to get into it.

So on the second day I was much more ready to engage with the sand. It also helped that Tristan started working with another kid who was already working with a pretty impressive sand construction, and then Ronan and I started working nearby. Eventually the two constructions merged. We made a lake, and then the lake was allowed to overflow and threaten the pyramid (like you do.) But Tristan and his friend were clever, so the pyramid stayed up. We didn't mind.

We arranged to meet this cool kid the next day, too, but we got there a bit earlier than they did, so we started building volcanos. Now it's been a while since I played on a sandy beach, but I don't remember ever being able to build up something made of sand and then have the water stay in it. What I remember is that you dig a lake (see above), and then you keep dumping water in it, and the water stays in the lake for about 2 seconds and then drains out -- so you never really accumulate any significant amount of water, unless you've arranged to have your lake's bottom be below the water table. That was not our experience this time.

I'm not sure I really why I thought it was going to work when I started building a volcano, but that didn't stop me. It sounded like a fun idea in my head, so I just started building it, and it was fun. And then Tristan built a town below the volcano so that we could try to demolish it with the "lava" flow. (So were we doing construction or destruction?) I built the sides up and up and up, and then we filled it with water. It was probably 4 or 5 gallons of water that we put into this volcano. Incredibly, the water stayed in it. Well, we didn't wait for hours, but long enough to fill it, then take some pictures, and then Ronan was stomping the side of it and letting the water flow out. And then we did it again. And again. And again. We had some blow-outs where the sand was too wet. I got better at repairing the hole from the flow, and started to feel like a sand engineer. The insides of the volcano became smoother and more even. I was pretty impressed.

Eventually we built 3 volcanos, and had them all wreaking destruction on the poor town. Check out all that water staying in those volcanos! It was pretty incredible. By the end of the day we had built and filled 5 volcanos, but we were pretty tired by that point -- we'd been at the beach for about 8 hours by then, so we only had them destroy things one time, and we had a blow-out at the last minute, so I don't have photos. But still -- I kind of can't believe I could get that much water to stay in what was effectively piles of sand.

So why did it work? Here's where intermolecular forces come in. This is a slight attraction that some particles have for each other. It's kind of like when you rub pins on a magnet and they sort of stick to each other. For a while. Until the bottom ones start to fall off, or you blow on it a little bit. It turns out that a lot of things (like water and sand) are a little like really wimpy magnets. (Except it's not a magnetic force -- it's an electrical one. But we don't really have a good mental picture for what that would be like, so I'm comparing it to magnets. OK?) The particles are slightly attracted to each other, so they stick to each other a little bit. Not very much, but a little. And if you mess around a bunch, then they stop sticking and fall apart. So this is why you get clumps of sand, and this is why mud sticks to your shoes, and it's also why it takes a lot of energy to boil water.

In this case, I think it mostly had to do with the particle sizes of the sand. The sand at Balatonlelle included some extremely fine particles -- it was kind of dusty. This meant that the water was pretty silty and cloudy on the first day because of the storm the previous day - lots of these tiny particles were still suspended in the water, and hadn't settled out yet. Most of the beaches I've played on don't have that super fine dustiness to the sand. The super fine particles allowed for more interactions between the sand particles and the water (and the sand particles and the water, etc. etc.) -- which meant that the sand held together better, even when I filled its inside with water. I just made sure that there was enough sand piled together that it didn't become saturated with water right away. With the extra fine particles around, that made the water-sand "glue" even more effective than it otherwise would have been. It was a pretty awesome experience. Next time you go play on the beach you can check out what the sand there is like and let me know!

Disencumbering the self

A couple of days ago I had the distinct pleasure of going out for the evening...by myself. For those of you who aren't parents, this probably sounds like a really stupid thing to be excited about. But for the parents here, you probably can hear the swell of celebratory music, and imagine the fireworks. This is more significant than usual because I'm currently single-parenting, and don't yet have an established social network on which to rely for babysitters and such. So the trumpets and fireworks were definitely there.

It was especially fun because I went out to see the Pet Shop Boys perform at the SZIN festival in Szeged -- an annual music festival that's pretty awesome. I'm definitely out of touch with concerts, but I haven't ever been to anything in the states that's quite like it. I was expecting something like Bumbershoot (which admittedly I haven't attended in a long time), and in some respects it was similar, but it had a very different feel -- perhaps in part due to the much more casual attitude about alcohol -- but I think mainly in that the stages were closer together, so you never really get away from the walls of music.

The boys and I had gone there during the day and enjoyed the free stuff at community booths, the early concerts, the spontaneous games, and the karaoke. There was a lot to see, and it was early enough that it wasn't too crowded. As we headed out (around 7:30pm) there was a huge crowd of people coming in.

When I returned it was dark, and starting to cool down a bit from the steamy day. It was still plenty warm enough that I got an ice cream and didn't want anything to do with a sweatshirt. I went and stood around with other fans, slowly worming my way a little closer to the stage. It was interesting, though -- unlike other concerts that I've been to (a long time ago) where I was in general admission and on the floor in front of the concert, nobody touched me. We all stood around politely keeping our personal space intact. Even after the concert started we all expressed our appreciation politely, the only impingement being the ubiquitous cell phones that are held up in one's field of view. (This is another new thing for me since I've been in a general admission crowd, and that tells you how long it's been, doesn't it?)

Anyway, one of the best things about the evening was that I didn't bring anything much with me to the concert. As a parent, my normal load consists of a purse that contains essential items like money, wallet, ID, cell phone, and keys. It also contains hand sanitiser, hand wipes, pocket knife, snacks, bandaids, usually at least one water bottle, and anything that my children have recently handed me to hold. If we're going out for a longer time (like we had done that day) then I probably also have a backpack with more water bottles and more food, perhaps sunscreen, and possibly toys that were considered "essential" by my children when we left, and then handed to me to hold about 10 minutes later as they found something more interesting. If we're going somewhere expected to be visually interesting, then I probably have my camera, too.

So most of the time my encumberance is significant. If I were a character in a game I'd definitely have some penalties to my actions. But that evening when I left the apartment all I took was my ID, a small amount of cash, and my keys. No purse. Not even my water bottle (which I regretted a bit, but not enough to change my mind.) It was liberating. One moves around so differently. There is a freedom there that I don't experience very often as an adult.

Even before I had kids I would still have a purse. In college I didn't go anywhere without a backpack. You know what you can't do with a purse or a backpack? You can't run very effectively. You can't do any physical play. Even if it has a shoulder strap, it bounces around. I think this is part of why our bodies stiffen up as we get older. Sure, we age and our bodies aren't as naturally bouncy as they used to be, but we also stop playing, and I think part of the reason is because we encumber ourselves more. The more our encumbrance, the less likely we are to move spontaneously. And then if we're lugging around a bunch of important things - like wallet, cell phone, and camera - we can't just put that bag down and play because we're afraid it might get stolen.

I guess I have as an aspirational goal to minimise my encumbrance. There's not a lot I can do about some of it right now, because I'd rather prevent sunburn, dehydration, and meltdowns. I do want to capture some of the moments (especially right now, when my children are young and we're having an adventure together), but I guess I'll keep this aspirational goal in mind as they grow older, and not forget to leave things behind when I can.

Back from the black hole

OK, so here and I promised I was going to write regularly...and then I sort of fell off the map. Well, of course I didn't really -- I just got a little busy with four intensive weeks of Hungarian language classes. It was seriously intense. But it was also extremely awesome.

Looking through our door

Yesterday was the last day, and I'm really amazed at how far I've come in four weeks. I'm sad not to be cramming Hungarian for 6+ hours a day, but I'm also happy for a little break. So now I can get you a little more about Szeged, and a little bit more about our lives here.

The view to the left from
our door

As I mentioned in my previous post, we are living in a historic building. It's called the Ungár-Mayer house, and it was designed by local architect Ede Magyar and built in 1910-1911. It's a beautiful example of Art Nouveau style. If you're interested, here's a little more about it (and some of the other Art Nouveau buildings in Szeged and a few other cities.)

Szeged is positioned next to the Tisza river, and it's experienced a lot of floods. The most recent big one was the "great flood" of 1879, when the city was under water for four months. (The slope from the river to the city was going the wrong way, so the water couldn't drain back into the river when the water went down. They fixed that since then.) The city was so damaged that about 95% of the buildings had to be demolished, so this made space for a lot of new construction -- much of it in various Art Nouveau styles. We're lucky that the great flood wasn't in the 1970's, right?

Ronan looking at the Belvarosi bridge
and the Tisza river

Another interesting thing about the reconstruction is that the city was built with a ring road system, very similar to Paris' ring roads. I felt clever this week because I figured out that "körút" (which is one of the types of road here, like "avenue" or "street") means that it's one of the ring roads -- since "körül" means "around." Of course I could be wrong about this - I haven't asked anyone about it yet. I'll let you know!

Karasz street, walking east towards
Szechenyi square

So back to where we live: our apartment building is on a pedestrian street right in the centre of Szeged - this is pretty awesome, and I still feel so incredibly lucky that they found us this apartment. One of the obvious advantages to this location is the proximity to lots of things - the university, plenty of different kinds of shops, parks, squares, historic things, concerts, festivals, ice cream stores (lots of these -- yay! Actually no -- it's gelato, not ice cream), bakeries... It's pretty neat. We're walking distance to pretty much everything, and easy public transportation distance to everything else. I've never lived anywhere like this. The closest I've ever come is the first year we lived in Eugene - we lived walking distance to most things we needed, and biking distance to most other things. But we weren't in the middle of town, and of course Eugene isn't a town like Szeged. Well, in some ways it is -- they're both college towns, and they're both by rivers. But towns and cities in Europe have a very different architecture and feel from towns and cities in the USA. But anyway, I've never lived in a city where I'm right in the centre of what's going on, so I'm enjoying this novel experience.

Kossuth Lajos statue, just down Karasz street from us

Arrivals

It seemed like we just kept arriving to places on our way here. We arrived at the airport. (After a long flight) we arrived in London. (After another long wait) we arrived in Budapest. Finally, after a very speedy drive from Budapest, we arrived in Szeged.

I'm happy to report that the flights were all unremarkable. Driving from Budapest to Szeged was much more interesting. The countryside reminded me a lot of driving through western Oregon - lots of farmland and trees, rolling hills. It was very green. We saw a lot of fields of sunflowers (and corn), and I asked our driver what the word was for sunflower in Hungarian. It's napraforgo. (With an accent mark on the last o - I just can't figure out how to type it in here.) There were a lot of trees that I recognized: piles of locust; quite a few aspen and willow. Orchards of fruit or nut trees.

One interesting difference in our drive from Budapest to Szeged was that the freeway never actually went through any cities. We skirted the sides, of course, but I never really saw anything that looked like "city" surrounding the road. Can you imagine what Seattle would be like if they'd thought ahead and said, "You know -- situating this freeway through the center of town might not be the best idea..."

Our apartment in Szeged is really great! It's right in the middle of the city, so it looks like it'll be walking distance to pretty much everything (or easy access via tram.) The building is old and beautiful, and the ceilings inside are probably 15 feet high. It's been refinished so it has air conditioning and modern accessories, but maintains the feel of the original. I'm super excited about air conditioning. All we have at home is a little window unit upstairs that mostly keeps the bedrooms cool enough so that we can sleep in them, except occasionally when we get a string of really hot days where it doesn't cool off much at night. Of course this probably deserves a #firstworldproblems kind of tag, if I were into hash tagging things. Anyway, our apartment is in this amazing building:

We were pretty exhausted yesterday, so it was a bit of a chore to do much of anything, but we got a short tour from my colleague at the university, including a trip through the chemistry buildings. That's right: not science buildings, but chemistry buildings. First clue that the University of Szeged (SZTE) is just a little bit bigger than Saint Martin's University (SMU)? For context, at SMU we have around 75-80 tenure-track faculty members (or so); at SZTE they have around 2000.

The plan for today is to explore a bit more, and start to learn how to find our way around the city.

Divesting

Well, this is the day! We're heading to the airport in a few hours. I tried to sleep in, but my body decided otherwise. On the other hand, at least I didn't have insomnia last night! It's fairly common for me on the night before a trip. I guess this time my brain realized that I had most things figured out, so it didn't need to spend half the night trying to remember all of the things that I've forgotten to pack.

What have I forgotten to pack? At this point? Who knows. I'm pretty sure we have all the critical stuff: passports, visa documents, medication, credit cards, and glasses. Pretty much everything else we could buy if we have to. (OK, I really do recognize that having the funds to buy what you forgot isn't trivial.) But it's fairly liberating to realize that when we get down to the absolutes, most of us have pretty minimal essential requirements.

There's something very interesting about getting ready to go on a trip - especially when it involves flying. There's a lot of prioritization that has to happen. Well, I guess it doesn't have to, but it's a really good idea. I'm a big proponent of Rick Steves' advice for traveling light, so that's what we'll be doing. I've happily done this for short and medium length trips, but I've never gone anywhere -- by plane -- with the intention to stay for 6 months before. My starting plan was three backpacks (one each) and two small rolling bags. Also my purse, but I don't really count that. In addition to our clothes and shoes, I need to bring my laptop, a few books (paperback) (and no, hard copies aren't negotiable), some essential medicines, and...probably some things for the kids to entertain themselves. It's kind of challenging. I expanded the original plan to include a messenger bag for the computer, and another small bag for snacks. So that's 8 receptacles including my purse.

I'll be honest: I was in panic mode yesterday when I had nearly filled up both rolling bags and hadn't packed any of Tristan's stuff yet. But I had forgotten how large my backpack is, and so I'm feeling pretty OK now. There's still a few more things to pack, but they're mostly the kinds of things that you can't really pack until the last minute -- chargers and toothbrushes and stuff like that.

The other thing that's interesting about packing is what you don't bring along. All those little cards for grocery stores in my wallet? Nope -- definitely don't need them. U.S. cash? Not so much. Pocket knife? Move it from my purse into a checked bag. (Darn it. I still think that's silly.) Keys? Not this time. There is a lot of personal paraphernalia that is location-specific. I think I've divested of those things now, so I'd better stop while I'm ahead.

Whew. This is going to be a big day. Wish us luck!