Warning. Convoluted logic and unmarked segues ahead.

        My tickets for Europe arrived in the mail today. For some reason it seems very odd to me that I’ve been planning on this trip for nearly three years, and now it’s finally going to happen. It hasn’t seemed very real to me yet, until today when I held the tickets in my hand. My itinerary looks something like this:

        There’s about a month between my arrival in Dublin and my departure from Amsterdam that I’ll be spending wandering around: Ireland, England, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. There’s a lot of planning that I still need to do, and with the move happening in less than two weeks, I’ve had quite a bit on my mind. Fortunately, with this on-line journal entry system that I created for myself a couple of years ago, I’ve got a great tool for updating and editing my journal on-line; all I need to do is find cyber-cafes in Europe where I can have web access and all will be well.

        I’ve also finally been able to return to the Healthy Weight Program at the hospital. With our release finally finished at work and my travel brought back down to reasonable levels, I’m finally finding time to actually get back into a regular workout schedule. It’s funny that all of the trainers at the program remember me, as do the other members of the program. And they always ask me the same things: "How is the house coming?" and "How is Jennifer doing?" and "How is the new job?" I give them the details of my life, and pester them for details of theirs, and exercise heartily. I’m hoping that in the one month that’s left before my trip, I can get myself into at least a little better shape than I am now.

        I’m excited about my upcoming trip, but I’m pretty nervous about it as well. I suppose that a large part of my anxiousness has more to do with my normal tendency to imagine the worst about everything: what if I get over there and have a severe asthma attack and wind up in the hospital? What if I get lost in Amsterdam and miss my flight back home? What if all of my belongings get stolen on a night train from Italy to Switzerland? All possibilities, of course, but none of them very likely.

        So I’ve been reading up on Europe; Bill Bryon’s Neither Here Nor There has been a great source of inspiration, and so has Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door. I’ve participated in on-line forums at Eurotrip, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have made the same sort of journey. And yet, I feel so unprepared. I’ve never been to Europe, of course; I don’t know any languages outside of English (aside from a few simple phrases such as je ne parles pas Français, which I believe means "I do not speak French".

        But in spite of my worries, I know that this trip is going to be fun and important for me — probably even life-changing. It’s in my nature to be anxious about these things. And somehow, they always turn out just fine.

        On another note, one of my other pipe dreams has come true, and I’ve finally gotten around to making The Big Leap from Windows to Linux — this computer I’m running at the moment, in fact, is running Red Hat Linux 7.0 (it’s really a dual-boot machine with Windows 2000, but I haven’t started up Win2K on it for a couple of days now). So far, I love Linux much more than I do Windows; it just seems a lot more intuitive to me (and it gives me a lot more power over this computer, as well as plenty more ways to break it). As a Linux evangelist, I felt it was my duty to suggest to Jennifer that when we install our home network in our new house next fall or so, she should switch to Linux as well. Our server will probably be a Linux server after all (at least it will if I have my say — FreeBSD is fine but I want to have Java EE running as well as an Oracle back end if possible, and there is no reliable port of JSEE to FreeBSD, go figure), so it only makes sense. Jennifer sniffed haughtily and said, "I’m happy with Windows, I know Windows, and have no intention of ever switching." Perhaps, though, she can be converted from the Dark Side. As a co-worker of mine told me when I worked at the University, "If Windows 95 was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me."

        Perhaps. I suspect, though, that Jesus would probably have been an open-source platform kind of guy.