11 hours to go

I leave in 11 hours. There is a long list of things I should be doing right now, and laying in bed isn't one of them.

I had a rather long day - especially considering I didn't plan on doing much more than laundry and taking a long nap to try to start messing with my body clock. I spent probably 4 hours at the CDC office today dealing with some paperwork, contracts, debriefings, and other stuff. By the time I got home I took a short nap and then started getting ready to go to dinner. Alma and I went out and got some food at a restaurant that thought it was fancier than it was. Clearly I wasn't the only one who thought this since Alma even said the food wasn't that great.

After getting home, I downloaded lost, started my laundry, watched lost, folded my clothes, and am now in bed. My shuttle for the airport comes at 11:38 so I will plan on being downstairs and ready to checkout by 11:15. Between now and then I need to repack my 3 suitcases and carry on. Also, I need to figure out where I plan on hiding all of my cash. Due to having some things that need to be paid for upfront, I will be traveling with a rather sizable stack of greenbacks tomorrow. However, I'm not entirely worried about that. The fact that I will have 2 computers with me has me slightly worried since I think if someone feels the need to go through my stuff they may give me a problem.

Something else I was supposed to do today (but didn't) was learn some simple (but important) Russian vocab. Mainly essential things like: Do you speak English, where is the bathroom, and would you like fries with that? I also need to find my ticket in my email and print it off.

At the moment I'm not sure when I'm going to do any of these things. Part of me wants to stay up considerably late and deprive myself of sleep so that I can start adjusting to the 7 hour time difference ahead. Another part just wants to go to sleep and get up really early for a similar effect. Oh yeah, there's also the part that wants to just sleep until 8 and do everything in the morning. If I packed up everything I had in Knoxville to my car in 3 hours, certainly I should be able to do everything in 2 here.

I wish I had taken more time to see some of DC, but quite frankly the only free time I had was at night. I did take one run around town and run a circle around the White House. I've also gotten a fairly good look around the metro system here.