Now What? ~ Post Vacation Blues

Now that I have been back from Arizona for a month and finished documenting my adventures, what do I do next?

It's not been an easy thing adjusting back to the status quo on the East Coast. And the energy that I had in Arizona and hoped to bring back home must have accidentally been put on another flight and lost by Northwestern Airlines. Or maybe it decided to stay in Arizona.

I haven't resumed my grand studio renovation. The room is still littered with the empty cartons from my new computer.

The energy and motivation to work on my proposed home business is still playing hide-and-seek. So far, it's been doing a great job in hiding.

Of course, part of my time and energy were occupied by the many things that needed to get done.

For starters, I had tons of laundry ~ both my own from the trip and the 2 giant garbage bags of dirty clothes that Ariana collected when she and her friends cleaned the "chill room" upstairs.

There was this ever-growing glacier of dirty dishes that was inching its way across the kitchen floor.

And these dirty dishes gave way to an annoying colony of fruit flies that wasn't there before I left on my trip. That in itself took a while to rectify ~ especially since I could not use insecticides in an area where there were too many surfaces that came in contact with food.

Also, it would have been difficult to relocate the parrot, whose residence was the kitchen, because the goat paths in the rest of the house were too narrow for his ginormous cage.

So, I had to use a more passive method of fruit fly control by drowning them sweetly in a small plastic tub of wine.

And let us not forget those rats. They were smelling nice and fresh just before I left. And now, each of the 3 rat tanks were ripe and smelly.

Speaking of ripe and smelly ~ so were the litter boxes and the parrot papers.

Gee! It certainly sounds like I am doing a lot of whining. Perhaps I am.

But then again, going away on a trip and coming back to sing the Post Vacation Blues is a whole new experience for me.

Unlike most people, I have never taken regular vacations or trips. The last time I've been away for longer than a 3-day weekend was 26 years ago, when I was a senior in college. I never knew the immense benefits of R & R as a working adult.

I finally learned and experienced why going away on vacations and trips is such a bigh deal.

And what else I learned is that I do not want to wait another 26 years for my next rejuvenating escape from the status quo.

If I'm going to sing the Post Vacation Blues, then I am going to need lots of practice to get it right!