Goodbye, Montreal

4 a.m. precisely and I plan to be in that taxi by 4:45. Went to sleep at 8:30 or so and slept like a baby, thanks to Brigitte fending off the furry hordes . . . woke up at 2:30 wanting to sleep more, but Brigitte was up and about, getting ready to wake me up at 3:30 . . . poor her.

She wanted me to move all my stuff from my medium roller bag to the behemoth one, in order to accommodate all the clothes my mother and Kay bought Tai-chan a couple of years back -- but that bag is so big you could drive a truck through it and I refuse to be rolling that all over the Earth, clothes or no clothes. As it is, you'd have to clear a path between the atoms at the top of the medium-size roller bag in order to fit anything that wasn't visible only to a scanning-tunnelling microscope.

So, here goes my umpteenth trip to Japan. One day I will sit down and try to count how many times since November, 1988 I have flown back and forth to that accursed realm. Who knew, in little old 1986, that for the rest of my life I would be linked irrevocably to a California-sized Asian country on the other side of the world?

Frankly, as a life option, I do not recommend it to anyone.