4,110.35

Passport: $137.20

In four-to-six weeks I'll be travel-ready. It'll be nice to have a passport with a new photograph that doesn't feature me at 13 with a mouth full of braces and a Dennis The Menace haircut. 

Spent the weekend in Truckee. 

Highlights: Finished the first half of the rough draft of my research paper, got fed, drank wine, watched Bridesmaids and Halloween with the family, saw a lot of trees and tasted fresh air. 

Lowlights: Seared my arm on the edge of the furnace door, heard an earful of family drama, the Raiders were destroyed, had to come back to the city life. 

On the 7th of November I've got a physical scheduled at 8:45 in the morning at Sac State. This, plus some annoying course-work paperwork, is all I've got left between me and Istanbul. I guess I still need official confirmation from Bogazici University, too... But I'd say it's at least 80% green-lighted at this point, barring any more earthquakes or Kurdish skirmishes. I'm pretty much putting all my eggs into the Turkey basket at this point.

Also heard that Uncharted 3 was the best game of all time. Comes out Monday, the same day of the Phantogram show. I'm calling that "Chris' Day."

Gotta thank Kelly for helping me treat my burnt arm and putting together Kick-Back Mondays. I've certainly become less social since Jenny left, so it's nice to have scheduled events like this and the Bonfire where I get to hang out with people. Jesse and Sergio are good people, too. It's too bad we never made it out to the corn maze. 

Things were dark and rough for a while there and a positive e-mail from Jenny really brought me back above the surface. Thank you for that. Long distance is hard. Everyone seems to get that intuitively, but to experience it is another beast entirely. She got her cell-phone so we can message each other any time of the day, rather than waiting for Skype time. I can send her pictures. It's nice to still stay so connected. When I'm in Turkey, I'll be ten hours closer to her. 

For NaNoWriMo I'm going to write a screenplay. 

Now I'm off to Bret Harte Elementary for 45 minutes of tutoring. After that it's a linguistics test. After that... Who knows?