According to the countdown on my google homepage, I have 3 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes until my plane takes off from San Francisco for Turkey. I have occasionally woken up in the morning with total anxiety about leaving but being in Canada for a week was really relaxing. Today, today I must start packing my suitcases.

For a miser like me, I've bought what seems like a gazillion little travel items. Here are some of the best:

• Digital luggage scale ($25) -- a worthy purchase because there's no other way I'll be able to keep my checked luggage to 32 kilograms each.
  
• Amazon Kindle -- I'm so excited about my e-reader. I read a review that called it the equivalent of a Victorian iPod. I'm ok with that. Reading is a dying art and though putting tomes into a machine doesn't help the romance factor of curling up with a book, we've got to keep reading alive however we can. Besides, there's no way that I'm schlepping pounds of paper around the world. I'll take the entire Oxford Dictionary, fluffy novels, history and linguistics, travel books about Turkey, and some resources for teaching English, all in a featherlight 10.3 ounce gadget. The digital age has its glory.
  
• Canada patches ($2) -- I had mixed emotions about buying Canadian patches to sew onto my backpack. Am I copping out of being an American or just being smart? Aren't terrorists and other unsavory types smart enough to know that lots of Americans pretend to be Canadian? Technically I am Canadian but it would be impossible to deny that I'm a born and bred American. In the end, I'm sure I'll end up stitching one of the little flags onto my backpack for good measure.