It’s on now: T-minus 3 hours, and counting, until I roll out of the driveway, leaving the New England snowfields behind in favor of spending the bulk of the next 24 hours cruising 7 miles above the crust of the earth. Bags are zippered up, last hot bath is steaming and beckoning to me as […]
Hubble-bubble is another name for hookah, one of those funky, elaborate long-necked water-pipe smoking devices in common use across the planet. Today, I’m more interested in my rapidly diminishing access to one of my own favorite haunts–the bathtub. Sigh. I’m getting separation anxiety already. So as a grey dawn breaks across western Massachusetts, revealing the […]
As planning and equipment provisioning are reaching a fevered pitch, I lulled myself to sleep last night wrapped in a cocoon of stress, with the vague sense of being not-yet properly prepared beginning to take on clearer features, the contours of the last-minute-breakdowns and clarifications of the still voluminous to-do list dancing like rancid little […]
Leverett, Massachusetts, USA 8p.m. Well here we go, in mad prep for launching to India and Afghanistan in less than 2 weeks. The snow just started falling and it’s a good night to be indoors and huddled ’round the propane heater.
Some days of genuine winter around here, I tell you. A recent New England classic: inches of gorgeous powdery wonderfulness at midnight, by dawn a dense wet slushy concretion of doom. Even getting a narrow path shoveled before one of my few remaining morning baths for some time was like digging a trench through cold […]
