home again, home again, jiggity jig!

Quite officially, I am home again.

Returning 'home' after two years away, without even one small visit in the interim, is a tiny bit like waking from a very long sleep.  Frankly, I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle.  Things are mostly the same but a bit different too.  People have changed a bit and I've missed it all.  I'm not sure if I'm making the mistake of proclaiming to be a loyal subject when I say things like 'I don't know how to use my iPhone' or 'I'm sorry, I have no interest in watching that reality show you are saying is fantastic.'

Yet, home I am and everything is intimately familiar while also being strangely distant.  My house is still home, but Boomer isn't returned yet so if I don't think too hard, I expect to hear her little feet padding after me.  And then they don't and I'm confused, then sad, then weirded out how my brain 'expects' a noise in a familiar place.  The television holds little interest to me, no matter how hard I try to get into the shows I've missed.  And yet the hours drift by and I have no idea where they went.  

At the heart of it though, I feel so completely comfortable and happy.  I didn't experience much of a jet lag- I tried really hard to sleep in sync with America so that would happen smoothly. I still get tired pretty early- around 9:30 or 10 pm, but really, that's the time I was going to bed in Cambodia so I don't attribute that to jet lag.  I wake up at a normal time and drink yummy coffee.  My fingers find things that I thought I'd forgotten if I just let them lead and I don't over think it.  Case in point, I stood in my kitchen looking for the light switch for ten minutes last Sunday.  And then I turned the water on in the shower automatically later that morning, even though it's not the normal 'lefty loosey' situation; my hands just remembered because I did not think about it.

I have boxes upon boxes of things to unpack: clothes I asked Topher to leave for me to go through and other household items that he got tired of unpacking.  I went upstairs to start that process yesterday, saw all that it entailed, and walked right back downstairs.  Well, first I showered and did my hair.  At 3 pm. You know.

Which, I can't really tell you how things have been going without mentioning the small change in hair I decided to go with as I headed home.  Wrapping up chapters and all of that, while opening new ones. I'm a big believer in changing up your style as your lifestyle changes.  So, I decided to mark the occasion of ending my time living in ankle-length skirts and ponytails with a style that doesn't match any of my current makeup and, frankly, won't allow for a ponytail. So, here we are!