Home from the Hills

There seems only a small correlation between how long you're gone from home and how much you have to do when you get there. We were in western Massachusetts only a few days (we left Tuesday morning for the family celebration of my mom's 96th birthday, got back late Friday afternoon--560 mi each way), yet the parade of demands awaiting us seems to stretch to the horizon--and beyond. Here's a wee list of what we've done since we got home, presented not in order of importance but in the order of my remembering ... always tenuous:

• get gas in the car (we were nearly empty when we got home)
• go to grocery store for things we will need until our regular shopping "date" (Thursday afternoons--chosen because the stores aren't all that crowded then)
• go to Post Office to pick up held mail; sort said mail (99% junk these days)
• update my Quicken files, entering the expenses we incurred on the journey
• update my journal (I was pretty good about keeping it while we were in Mass.--but pretty is just a generous, self-flattering word to replace not very)
• deal with some email/messages that were difficult to deal with on an iPhone in the car 
• text family members that we'd arrived home safely; my waggish son, by the way, having received my text ("Home"), replied: "Office," which is where he was, I guess
• print out and file pages from my Daily Doggerel blog  (I keep hard copies of all the drivel I publish online)
• re-package and prepare for shipping a book that came while we were gone--a book I'd already bought earlier (I seem to do this more and more as I age and decline into dotage)
• remember how to use our new-ish Keurig
• laundry
• turn the heat back up on the hot-water heater (we always drop it while we're gone)
• get the furnace ready (when we left it was in the mid-90s; today, the furnace is on, and I'm no longer wearing shorts-and-sandals, my default warm-weather uniform)
• check and deal with the voice-mails on the home phone (only two: a reminder of an appointment with a doctor, a sales pitch from someone earnest)
• sleep
• watch squirrel (as I am now) trotting across the yard with a black walnut in his mouth and feeling grateful that I'm not a squirrel
• think about cool things I thought about on the trip that, upon return, don't seem all that cool
• hook up computers to their home base
• reclaim "my" seat at the local coffee shops (employing violence, if necessary)
• feel a flood of gratitude for my mom, brothers, niece and nephew--whom we saw in Mass.--and for the others whom we could not see for various reasons
• feel a second surge for being home--for having a home--for Joyce ...