Travel and No Travel

It is time to buy a big brisket, and cans of stewed tomatoes, and flaked coconut for the macaroons, and oranges and olives, and get a piece of horseradish for the vodka, and make sure there's an egg to hard boil and find a lamb with a shank and dig up new potatoes from the garden.

Once again, it appears that Mummy Plotnik cannot make it next week. Plottie has asked her fifteen times and she has forgotten fifteen times. The stumbling blocks are the inconveniences of air travel and the stairs at World Headquarters, and if it's cold out where will she smoke? Plot has been advised by all members of the family that it would be unhealthy for her to come north, and to instead go down there later on in the week and carry-on some leftover brisket.

That'll work out.

Meanwhile, The Great BZWZ should have left the island of Sulawesi this morning -- her route takes her on a puddle jumper from her part of the island to Makassar, the larger airport on Sulawesi, and then onto a flight to Jakarta and another one to Singapore, then an all-night layover in Singapore Airport followed by a flight to Tokyo, another to Detroit, and then finally on to Providence. It takes days and days, but it's worth it to consider that she's been on a lake on the other side of the Earth. Doing stuff like that makes you even a better person than you were before you left. You see the planet more clearly, as well as your place on it.

And, unlike her flights a month ago, this itinerary does not include stops in Mumbai and Goa and wherever the hell it was Indiana.