I keep promising to go away, and yet here I still am, blogging as before. How can I miss you if you won’t go away, you may be saying to yourself. Well, this time I mean it. I’m waiting for the shipping company to arrive as I type this who will pick up our 27 cardboard boxes. The boxes will go from here [Lapeer, MI] to Chicago by truck. In Chicago they’ll be shrinkwrapped and palletized and sent by train to LA. In LA they will be loaded onto a freighter and sail across the Pacific to Singapore. In Singapore they will be transferred to another ship and brought to Kuching. They tell me it will take 4 weeks.

Meanwhile, we fly at the end to week. From Lapeer, we’ll drive to Detroit where we’ll be checked and securitized and sent by plane to Newark. From Newark across the Atlantic to Dubai, Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur to Kuching. That’ll take about 30 hours, depending on layovers.

So our bags go West, we go East. East or West, it’s all the same. You can’t get any farther away than that before you start coming back again.

I have every intention of blogging as soon as I arrive, but I imagine I’ll be shut down for two weeks or so. So to any first time visitors who may stop by between then and now, please have a look at the great selection of links down the left hand side of the page. In particular, I should draw your attention to the Islamic Supreme Council of America , the most courageous Islamic organization you’ve never heard of.

I’ve been writing about political issues quite a bit lately. I don’t intend to return to that after this break. Less Warblog, More Travelog. Have a look at the links under “Migration” to see blogs of this kind, the likes of which I can only aspire to. Hunkabutta’s got pictures from Japan, BWG has stories from Hong Kong, So Many Islands, so little time has news and more from Indonesia.

To my regular readers [yes, both of you] who I’ve never met, and more to my family and loved ones who I’ll never stop remembering, if there is anything I have done or failed to do by you, by intention or by mistake, by thought or by word or by deed, hidden or evident, please forgive me and pray Allah to forgive me. Emigration is the Blessed Sunnah of the Holy Prophet , and I intend this emigration of mine to be an imitation of that, in the way of Allah, through the example of the Holy Prophet, and in what follows that, Allah is my Guardian and sufficient is He as Disposer of my Affairs. May Allah grant this request and forgive me, bi hurmatil Habib, bi hurmatil Fatihah.