So, I know I have to catch you up on the most fantastic wedding ever (i.e., mine), but right now I am primarily concerned with how woefully unprepared I am to fly to Europe in about four hours.

Leaving aside for the moment that I lost my camera at my own wedding, which eliminates about 50% of the things I was planning to do in Europe, and that I don’t currently have any power adapters/converters appropriate for my laptop, which was how we were going to coordinate the other 50% of the things we were planning to do in Europe, I am only about halfway packed and I’m missing some very important items like pants and shoes.

Also, my time to practice speaking French in 2008 was absolutely null, so though I continue to read it at a surprising intermediate level, my speaking vocabulary is basically limited to conjugating lots of verbs – which would be great if I wanted to rudely boss people around the entire time we’re in Paris, but in that case I could just speak English.

Placing that on top of the fact that I really and truly despise extended travel to begin with and will be traveling sans guitar, right now my desire to leave the country – or, in fact, the house – is about equal to my desire to watch a week long marathon of Two and a Half Men, breaking once a day to re-watch all of Donovan McNabb’s worst throws from yesterday’s utterly perplexing (yet entirely unsurprising) loss to the Cardinals.

I’m registering all of this now so that hopefully we can all appreciate the difference when I am delightfully basking in the decadence of my longest vacation ever.

Lest we get too optimistic, please recall that I was requesting an airlift home after about 36 hours of Bonnaroo, which cost about a sixth as much as this international nonsense, and at least there I was surrounded by music.

Back to packing.