Clarion West begins in two weeks. While the official first meeting takes place on Sunday afternoon on the 17th, most of us will be arriving at the dorms on Saturday.

My plan is to get my own stuff over there as early as I can manage on Saturday, and then I'll be picking up several of the other students at the airport throughout the day. This, of course, means packing on Friday the 15th. Friday the 15th also marks my last day of work before the program begins. Thus, I have two weeks to try to get everything squared away at work and to get everything ready at home for me to pack and head off.

Work, naturally, has been a bit hectic. Not only am I attempting to smoothly transition my work to various co-workers who will share my duties while I'm on leave, I'm also finding myself in a bit of a crunch as two of my bigger projects are coming down to the wire. One has already been delayed by at least a week (meaning it won't launch until this next Friday at the earliest) and is actually likely to be delayed by an addtional week. The other project suddenly involves a presentation to our President and CEO this coming Monday. You can imagine how this adds to the excitement in one's work day.

And so, I need to pull that all together and gracefully make my exit, all while trying to get ready for Clarion. No big deal, really. Add to that the fact that we're wrapping up the Commercial Fiction Writing Course at the Unviersity of Washington this week (which means finalizing my big project *now*). Now, the fun is starting to pile on.

I also am most delinquent on getting things rolling for the Cornell Class of '90 website. Bad, bad, bad. And, then there's this novel I'm trying to advance. In the words of Bill the Cat: "Ack! Pth!"

This is all by way of saying, I have an exciting couple of weeks ahead of me. Perhaps the six weeks that follow -- those that belong to Clarion West -- will seem like a cake walk after all this.

When people ask me if I'm excited about my upcoming Clarion adventure, the truthful answer remains: I don't have time to be excited. Yet. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to it. I just have a wee bit of work to do in the meantime.