Getting my reading material together may be a loose end on my mind, but here’s an issue that actually bears meaningful implications to my microcosm. I STILL HAVE NO PASSPORT! The fact is that there can be no good outcome to winding up with no passport once our day of departure arrives. With no passport I’ll be unable to join the trekking group. The tickets are locked in with an extreme discount airline reservation, so I doubt I could delay my departure any less than, oh, 3 months. I can’t just stick around in Utah since there’s nothing for me to do. I think I’d be asked to go into exile under a rock somewhere (on an uncharted pirate island, no less). Not that it offers any mitigation, but I did send out my passport application over six weeks ago. During the last week I’ve been pestering the perimeter defenses of the bureaucracy (though I’m not complaining; the USA is not the worst), and they’ve just assured me that it’s not done and to go away and suffer the sleepless uncertainty somewhere else. As a courtesy though, they add that I can call back in three business days to reaffirm that there is no hope.

Apart from salamis and tubes of Desitin, we’re going to need further diversions to pass the slow afternoon hours as we camp along the trail. For one thing I’ve been gorging my iPod on music CDs to load it with every imaginable musical craving I may have over the next month. But that only covers 6 days of continuous listening (trust me, I can do it), and at best the iPod will fill out to 10 days. What will I do with the other 20? Richard is packing a good stack of books, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to bring along a few of my own (but I can still read and listen to music at the same time, as well as walking and talking at the same time, but not driving and talking). A few titles I have in mind are: The last 3 months of Wired magazine (I’ve lapsed a bit), Harry Potter (I promised I would read them within my lifetime, but you can trust I’ll cheat and watch the movies where I can), “The 7 Habits…” by Covey, Jon Stewart’s “America (The Book) “, and oh, I should include something to feed my paranoia about having my own Himalayan tragedy, “Into Thin Air ” by Krakauer.