Air shipment arrived this morning. Three boxes containing the microwave, the scanner, some clothes, a few books, and a new tea set. Don't have room for it all in the small space I'm renting. Will take some better health and a few creative juices to arrange it carefully. Scanner managed to show up without the cords. Hm. Must be on the Pacific somewhere, scheduled to arrive in Philadelphia mid-May.

I feel better even if one of my ears is aching and popping. The weather is gorgeous and teasing summer-like. From my seat at the computer I can look through the houses across the street to Mt. Constance, tall, blue, and snowy. Didn't see anything like that these last three weeks.

The flight between Singapore and Rome was twelve and a half to thirteen hours. Had walked the entire day in ninety-degree heat and some unbelievable percentage of humidity. We were sticky and exhausted and looking forward to the flight for respite. I was asleep before they served dinner in that first hour of flying. Woke once at about the 4th hour when the GPS screen showed that we were traversing the Indian Ocean. The cabin was dark and I looked out the window at the vast celestial ceiling, more articulate than I had ever witnessed it. Some thousands of feet below us a thin blanket of vapor caught the rays of the waning gibbous blue moon. Floating above heaven, we were. It was so beautiful and soft and larger than us. A tiny airplane skipping along a vast ocean of spirits. A part of the world I'd never seen lie below. Still not seeing it, but awesome to be there - not Europe, not Asia, but the Middle East. When I awoke again we were turning a hard left to avoid Iraqi air space, crossing onto the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Still the moon followed and there was not yet any sign of daybreak. At Beirut we turned hard left again, for Crete. Avoiding Yugoslavia. Not much later, bright flashes of light to the north startled me. Diffused and magnified by cloud cover far below, I did not realize what they were at first. I thought it was lightning.