I took the dog out for a walk/run tonight and found myself in the midst of a rather impressive fireworks display. Why fight the traffic downtown when you can sponge off the hundreds of dollars the neighbors spent on their own explosives? Except that the Doobie Brothers were playing downtown....

A year ago tonight I was sitting in an apartment in Vienna, where my Independence Day celebration consisted of a lone leftover Christmas sparkler and the first couple lines of the Star Spangled Banner, sung with an Austrian accent. The year before that I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan, watching the wild gyrations of my teammates as they scrambled around a rocky soccer field, waving tiny American flags and trying to light each on fire with sparklers. This year, a quiet evening in Houston. Next year... who knows? I doubt I'll be overtly celebrating American independence and freedom from my flat in north Africa. Not that I'm celebrating it from my parents' house in yuppy Suburbia right now.

Only a few more days until I fly to Virginia. The start of my "great adventure", as one of my friends called it. I'm calmer about this than I was a week or so ago. I'm moving to Africa! How could this fail to be at least somewhat a good thing? And I never thought this would be particularly easy. Especially the way I'm going. But it's what I want to do more than anything else right now. And, as has been suggested, I can always go lose myself in the desert.