Today is the last full day in Socal before we fly east and south to S Africa. We have everything ready, including extra security on the homeplace. Today was also the first time I got off my butt and got out to play 18 holes of golf. That went surprisingly well after being a couch potato for five solid weeks. Weirdly, I always play better after I’ve had a long layoff from the game.

One small glitch remaining is that British Airways won’t let us select our seats until 24 hours before flight time. After paying business class prices, they want to charge us about $200 per seat, per flight, to select our seats “early”. It’s free inside the 24 hour window, but that practice is just BS. I hope the rest of BA’s service is more customer-friendly than that.

My health seems up to the trip, and my MD assures me that another stone attack during this trip is very unlikely. That’s one of my worst case scenarios, along with eaten by lions, bitten by cobra, and smash-drowned by hippos. Now that I think of it, Cabo or Hawaii are sounding better and better. But we’re committed.