We are back home in DC after our five-week sojourn to the shores of Puget Sound. It was great to go; it is great to be back. No matter what I do or where I go or whom I see, it always feels good to be back in my own house and sleep in my own bed. Once the return date starts to get close, I start getting antsy -- S does too -- and we start to wish we had booked our trip a day or two shorter. But as S rightly pointed out, it has little to do with our actually trip length, as we do it when we go visit her parents for just a week too. I think for me, it's mostly the anxiety of travel. I just want the return trip to be over with, and so my mind subconsciously does the first part of the logic and concludes that it would already be over with if we had left yesterday. But it doesn't then do the second part -- the obvious deduction that were that the case, I would have just felt the anxiety I'm feeling now a few days earlier.
And to be honest I don't really mind flying. Although I do sometimes get stressed out by the auxiliary tasks -- getting to the airport, going through security,* getting home from the airport, etc. Provided we have a direct flight, I'm good once I'm on the plane. It's my movie watching time. I messed up this time though. I rented Miller's Crossing, one of the few Cohen Brothers movies I had never seen, without knowing what it's about. Turns out it's an old-timey mob movie, which would have been fine, except I the other movie I got was The Many Saints of Newark, the prequel film of The Sopranos. I put it on after Miller's Crossing ended and was like Eh... I don't really want to do another two hours of this right now. I should have gotten a comedy or at least a different type of drama -- anything that didn't involve rackets or snitches or shooting people in the head. I turned it off after ten minutes and spent the rest of the flight vacillating between attempting to sleep, listening to podcasts, and trying to read the ESPN crawl one of those tiny-ass airport-seat screens.
*The security line was so freaking long at Sea-Tac for some reason. In the many, many times I've flown out of this airport, I've never seen it like it was. It actually went down a set of stairs and back up a different set and ended on a skyway near the parking lot. It was insane. For as long as it was, it went relatively quickly though -- about 45 minutes. Still quite long, but when I first saw the line, I was worried about missing my flight, and I had 2.5 hours to spare. (There was no traffic on the way to the airport, surprisingly, and the rental car return was super quick, which is why we were there so early.) S has TSA-Pre for her and the kids, and she always tells me I need to get it, but I haven't yet because the vast majority of the time you only save a few minutes, but I guess this is why she says that. They all got through security in less than half the time I did.
Anyway, it was great to see my family and spend so much time with them, and I definitely think we will do another extended stay at some point in the future. And we went from one family to the next, as S's family, parents and sister, were here waiting for us when we returned. They are staying with us for three weeks, with a trip to Iceland in the mix. (Yes, we are going to go to Iceland in a week. I would have liked a little more buffer time between two big trips, but S has to go for work, so we didn't get to pick the date.) Sw (S's sister) just lives up the street, but she's staying with us for a few nights, because she's leaving her dog with us for a bit, and she wants him to get used to the house while she's here before she goes. I don't mind. I kinda like the full house. Why have it, if you're not going to use it? Almost every sleepable surface in the place is being used -- S and I in our bed, Lil' S2 in his bed, Sw in the guest bed, S's dad in Lil' S1's bed, Lil' S1 on the basement sofa, and S's mom on the foldout sofa in the living room. If only we had a reason to break out the inflatable bed.
Alright, that's enough for now. I'm going to post some pics and call it and entry.
Until next time...
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