Almost packed...

The main suitcase is packed, and I'm about 80% finished with the duffel and have yet to start on the backpack. It turns out one of the rooms here is used as a storeroom by quite a number of people between campaigns, so I left my green rucksack with a few items that I will never miss: some underwear, socks, a couple of tee shirts, my pocket French-English dictionary, and the martini glass that I aquired by "breaking" it at the Palermo (I paid for it as if it had been broken, see?).

(Okay, so I will miss the martini glass if I never come back here. I was speaking generally.)

I am to the point where I could pack everything else, willy-nilly, within about 10 minutes if I had to, which currently is not the case.

Don't ask where I found the time, but last night, I started playing around with FreeMind, an open source mindmapping program that works in conjunction with the Java 1.4 runtime environment to produce graphical mind maps along the lines of MindManager. Aside from the obvious plus of being free (as in beer), the software also supports Cyrillic characters, which is going to be fairly necessary as I start to craft a series of mind maps to help me with Russian case endings.

Time to go get some rest, it's been quite a day.

Cheers...

Marking time...

I got up in time this morning to say goodbye to pretty much everyone else. One fellow from Astrium and I are the only Westerners in the hotel, and we'll be joined on the plane by about a half dozen people headed for Toulouse, including several of the Pinkerton staff.

Everything is packed (and my backpack is on the easy chair in front of me, with a space reserved for this computer). The trash can is full. My jacket, I recall now, is in the bottom of my big bag, but I should be able to get to it without much of a problem if it gets too cold.

I've spent a little time finding out about Ulyanovsk, especially where, exactly, it is. Although I dare say my knowledge of geography is probably in the 90+ percentile (certainly so for an American), my knowledge of the specific geography of Russia - especially the locations of major cities - is fairly skimpy. (Not true any more for Ulyanovsk, I am happy to report.)

My next post will likely be from Moscow, unless I get lucky.

Cheers...