See, I have to decide what pants to wear. I have to dress to leave as if I were in Hobart, Tasmania. That's the coldest place I'll be, some time in June, winter there and about 10 degrees Celsius. I have a turtle-neck long sleeve T-shrit right now and a corduroy shirt-jacket. When I get to Hong Kong (temp there is between 24 low and 31 high, with showers), I'll put on a sleeveless blouse and a skirt, and I have a very civilized dress to wear for High Tea at Raffles at 4:30 tomorrow afternoon or whenever March 21st is there.

I'm still packing. I'm still pretty hyper. Once I get into the airport, I'll calm down. If there's WiFi in the Hong Kong airport I'll do a blog, otherwise, hang in there until I get into the Pan-Pacific hotel - I think that's the name of it.

What a world! In other times, people going off like this knew that they would never see their loved ones again. That, of course, is why so many women, so many emigrant women, kept diaries. Their journals were their letters home, never to be mailed, or read. Who knows who is going to read my blog, aka my letter home?

I found a cartoon in an old New Yorker this morning: two little kids in a playground and one is saying, "I thought I'd be a successful fashion blogger by now." I'm taping it in my diary.

Anon,anon.

--not yet

It was another day of frantically trying to get ready to leave. GST today (not finished); plus cruise papers and notes to people re my absence, plus cooking for people, plus another small party, before an unexpected dinner. I don't think my dishwasher is going to miss me. It's going to be so nice to be on that ship with a routine and quiet (I hope). I'm gettin' there.

I keep checking the weather in Hong Kong and Singapore. It's going to be a climate shock. But I am also apprehensive about air conditioning. I don't really like AC. I'm taking shawls and sweaters and socks, even though Singapore's temperature is abut 32 degrees Celsius.

I've waited too long to write today My mind is jelly or maybe yogurt - it's a culture, anyway....

I'll tell you one irrelevant thought from my inner dialogue today. I picked up an old clipping from the NYT with pictures of 3 small antique biscuit jars. My mother used to collect biscuit or cookie jars, or maybe my father did. He kept bringing them home to her after she had evinced some interest. He had a source of supply: the homes he visited (he used to make house calls). He'd see something he admired or maybe even things he didn't admire, if the people appeared rather close to the bone (i.e. poor). That's how we ended up with 6 family Bibles. He would admire the object and offer to buy it and pay the owners anything they asked. Hence the cookie jars.

There were so many cookie jars, not just special ones but everyday household cookie jars, that my mother used them as kitchen canisters. No labels on them, of course; you just had to remember that the green & yellow one contained raisins and the browny-gold one had cornmeal, and so on. I was too young to understand the reason for this use. When I got married, I bought plastic canisters for everything, and I still transfer the contents of store packages to nice jars and storage containers. That's how traditions and habits are formed: out of necessity and then out of habit. Mother needed to use the cookie jars, and then I thought that was the thing to do.

Now there was an irrelevant thought to sleep on....

Anon, anon