Five weeks ago, we were saying, “Baah…we have five weeks. Plenty of time!”

Could you please tell us what happened to the last four weeks? Somebody stole them.

Final preparations began in earnest today.

After the soccer game, Carmi went shopping sans Eliana to buy gifts for those people in China who play an important role in our trip like the orphanage nannies, the orphanage director and our guides. The gifts are small and inexpensive but practical for them.

Somewhere along the way, she managed to find her way back to Kohl’s.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I prepped our laptop for it’s very important job. There was 2 years worth of junk on there so I copied all of the digital pictures to an external storage device and then reformatted the hard drive. Doesn’t sound like a tough job but it took 3-4 hours to update the operating system and reinstall the other necessary software.

It’s coming down to crunch time.