Today is our last day with Elmer. Tomorrow morning in the pitch dark at 4:30 am, we check him in at the airport to begin his voyage to Boston and his new home.

Elmer, of course, has no idea that today is unusual or special in any way, so when we try to spend time with him he's like "It's hot. I just want to lay around and not be bothered."

Because yeah, our weather feels uncomfortably hot right now. The temperature isn't that high, but we have no breeze, which usually happens when a hurricane is coming. Hurricane Kiko is a few days out, but is unlikely to affect us much.

Elmer's carrier is fully assembled and ready for the trip, including water bowls attached to the inside of the gate door, all the necessary paperwork and stickers, a bag of food in case of an unexpected layover, and extra rugs taped to the top in case he has an accident before leaving Honolulu. Once he's on the plane from Honolulu to Boston, they won't be doing things like checking to see if he's peed on the rug, but our pet transport company will be taking care of him during his 5-hour layover in Honolulu tomorrow afternoon, so they could put in the new rugs before he leaves there if necessary.

I'm unexpectedly emotionally numb today. I know I'll be a wreck tomorrow, though. Luckily, we have a new emergency to deal with that will distract us while Elmer is traveling. Our chest freezer in the garage has died a dramatic and putrid-smelling death. We aren't sure when it stopped working, but neither of us hadn't gotten anything out of there in weeks, so when we opened the door this afternoon it smelled like a family of warthogs had crawled in there and died. And the bottom of the freezer was filled with a sickening soup of vomitous liquid that had dripped down from melting food to combine and ferment. When we were pouring the freezer vomit into the gutter (and trying not to vomit, ourselves) and rinsing everything out, I kept thinking, “Our neighbors will smell this and think we’re Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Shannon had said he wanted to do our usual weekly shopping on Monday as a distraction from worrying about Elmer, and now we get to add a trip to Home Depot and discussions about whether to buy a new freezer to the itinerary.

Cleaning out the befouled chest freezer was horrible but will probably someday be funny in retrospect. We wouldn't have cleaned it out so thoroughly if we'd realized it was completely dead, but we initially thought it had just come unplugged or something. But nope. It's dead.

Now a few hundred dollars' worth of rotting food is attracting flies in our garbage can, but at least it happened close to garbage day. It'll all disappear tomorrow morning. Probably around when we're leaving with Elmer.

I know I'll be fretting all day tomorrow and will probably be feeling sad in the coming week, so I came up with a list in advance of some things I can do to keep myself busy, distracted, and comforted. I’m going to watch the movie KPop Demon Hunters, watch a k-drama starring one of my favorite actors, and re-read Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, which was my favorite book for most of my teen years. I'm curious to see what I think of it after several years of therapy processing my own childhood stuff.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out exactly what stuff I need to get done tonight, and then Shannon and I are going to try to get a few hours of sleep before waking up at 2 a.m. to get things ready before taking Elmer to the airport. I want to spend some time with Elmer before we go to bed, too. It’s our last chance. I hope this change is going to work out great for him, but it's hard to say goodbye.