Sylvia's Journal

Labor Day came and went, in a blur. In fact I can’t remember what we did except sleeping in (everyone but me), seeing Sita and Jim off to their newly married life with a car full of stuff that took a full day of loading and off-loading.

Axel got started on his all clear liquid diet which lasted more than 24 hours until this afternoon. It is hard to imagine Axel without real food for such a long time but he managed. It shows once again how endlessly adaptable we humans are.

Tessa plunged back into school and I got to do a ‘back-to-school’ shopping for old time’s sake. Dinner was a stand-up at the counter affair, effective but not much fun. I had everything Axel couldn’t have: sausages, garden salad and tiramisu. Axel had Gatorade laced with laxative.

We made the rounds to friends who had put up family and friends, gracious acts rewarded with Afghan handicrafts. After that it was time to load up my re-set iPod-Touch with all sorts of apps that come in handy when you are stuck at airports or inside places with electricity.

I unwittingly downloaded several gigs of Tessa’s very high resolution (3 to 5 megs) pictures. I got to relive the various wedding parties over and over again as my computer froze repeatedly from the overload. I had to resize all hundreds of them by hand. I think I will finally succumb to buy a digital photo frame to simplify the showing of pictures to my friends and colleagues back in Kabul.

Tessa took me to the airport in spite of the 10 hours of homework she has between now and tomorrow’s first class (something she mumbled louder and louder as we watched the return traffic built up). The things we do for our loved ones!

On the way to the airport Tessa received a call from Jim’s mom who is a nurse in the endoscopy suite that Axel had successfully completed the ‘procedure’ and was in the recovery bay. I hope we can talk before the doors of the plane close. We all hope he will get a clean bill of health and can join me on Friday for the flight to Dubai.