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.

Richard and Pema have something amazing in common. They are both fathers to great families. Richard and Gaye have five boys, the oldest 14. Pema has two boys and two daughters, the oldest about 20. Pema’s daughters are of course out of the house and off to college, while his boys are also out of the house. They spend most of the year in a boarding school in Kathmandu. Rich’s two oldest boys and Pema’s boys are getting special time off from school to come along on our trek and even the full hike up Kalla Pathar. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ll be backing off of even a conservative pace at gaining elevation for our trek. The standard is between 1,000 and 1,500 feet per day of elevation gain, but our plan is to keep that down to 700 feet daily. Now that I think about it, gosh, that’s almost nothing. Of course we won’t just scuffle up a few steps and plant a new camp, but that’s really going to drag on.

Over the summer as the days passed I watched for the first signs of a change in season to fall here in Utah. Just a few weeks ago I noticed the slightest change in the colors at the top of one of the peaks nearby, and now it has cascaded half way down to the valley. The change was gradual, and I start to imagine how different the landscape will look when I get back from Nepal at the very end of October. Typically the mountains all have a light blanket of snow and you have to start dressing pretty warm. (I dread this because I’ve lived around palm trees for the past 14 years.) The 30 days I’ll be gone to Nepal is not a short stretch of time, so I need to mentally and practically prepare for being gone that long.