  We review what is currently known about the structure of interstellar
material in the solar neighborhood, emphasizing how observations from the
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have improved our understanding of how
interstellar gas is distributed near the Sun. The nearby ISM is not uniform but
shows variations in both temperature and metal abundances on distance scales of
just a few parsecs. The observations also show that nearby gas does not have a
single uniform velocity vector. Instead, different components are often seen in
different directions for even very short lines of sight. However,
interpretation of these components remains difficult. It is uncertain whether
the components represent physically distinct clouds or perhaps are just
symptomatic of velocity gradients within the cloud. Finally, since it is the
local interstellar medium's interaction with the solar wind that is the primary
application of ISM studies considered in these proceedings, we also review how
the same HST data used to study the local ISM structure has also been used to
study both the heliospheric interaction with the solar wind and also
"astrospheric" interactions with the winds of other stars.
