We’re in the United Lounge at Heathrow, with an hour or so before we board. We ate a highly mediocre lunch in the main part of the airport, and have determined that it’s definitely time to go home. That said, this has been a truly awesome trip overall.

It’s going to be a busy few days coming up. Lots of packing—obviously we have to strip 80% of our stuff out of the house in order to show it. The plan is to get a storage unit in Oxnard. That way, when we move in, we can transfer stuff as we need it for another month or two, rather than shoving boxes in every corner of the house and trying to work around them. In the meantime, I have a fair amount of reading still to do for the Work-for-Hire Workshop, for which I leave horribly early on Friday. Then there’s all that little stuff, like laundry and mail and bills and food shopping. But it’s all do-able, with a little focus and organization.

Related to both things is that I’m still fired up about AETW. I had another revelation: It’s going to be set in Hay-on-Wye. I wanted to find a place that had a certain level of tourist or other outside activity (originally it was set in St Andrews, Scotland, both a tourist and university town). So this dovetails perfectly, especially since I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Hay-on-Wye—some of it not in the bookstores, even!

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On the plane now. We watched “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, which was extremely weird (did the writer also write “Being John Malkovich”?), and “Laws of Attraction”, which was mostly awful (I expected so much better from Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore. What were they all thinking when they read the utterly predictable and tacky script?). I think I’ll stay awake and watch “Connie and Carla”. I’m tired, but I can never sleep on planes.

It occurs to me that I should go to bed whenever I feel like it tonight. We land at 7:30 and should be home about an hour after that. Since I have to get up so damn early on Friday, I might as well have jet lag in that direction, right? It remains to be seen if I can pull it off, of course.