We’re back!  I know you missed us.  It has taken nearly a week to readjust to our “regular life” from our fabulous trip (details here).  Why so long?  Well let’s start with the pain of the alarm clock which we avoided for nearly three weeks.  Then there’s the regular flow to a day at home: get up, go to work, run errands/gym, cook & eat dinner, passive evening entertainment, bed.  We had none of that for the entire time.  We got up when we wanted, did whatever we felt like for the day, “cooked” in our rental flat (usually involving heating up ready meals), and rarely watched TV. And had some drinks.  Sometimes, lots of drinks.

So upon return, much of the routine was broken.  For example, I had to think about which way to turn when I got out of the elevator to get to my office.  It took ages each morning this week to get out of the house to go to work because we kept scrambling to find something, make a lunch, pack this or that. I lost the muscle memory for which key strokes lock my computer screen and the ones I picked kept rebooting my computer.  All signs that the holiday did exactly what it was supposed to do!

But (and you knew there had to be a but!), there is a price to be paid for this level of disconnecting.  And it’s not money – we have been saving for a year so that shouldn’t be an issue (but the credit card bills are just coming in so…)  It’s the time lost for other things and the number of items on the “To do” list that are still there.  We’ve been in a bit of a state of suspended animation for household stuff.  We didn’t want to make any major changes until we’d been here a year and once we passed that milestone, it was too close to the trip to start anything.  So now we have a hundred “as soon as we get back” items to take care of – and no more hours in the day to do them!

And we are ready for a bit of a reboot in our everyday lives.  The routine we had settled in was very nice but not sustainable in the long run.  Our love of wine had bred bad habits for both pocketbook and waistline so we need to reconsider a few things there.  The habit of going to the gym on the way home from work most days (or getting up and going for a run) has also been broken so now it’s time to reevaluate and decide what actually works and makes sense.  And we have new interests and responsibilities.  We do want to continue to embarrass ourselves at tennis, for example, which takes some time.  I have a new gig teaching at a local university which will also take time.  We are now subscribers to the symphony so we have the same seats for the half of the symphony season that we have chosen (couldn’t jump all the way into 14 concerts so we picked 7).  So it’s time to think about how to get done what we said we wanted to get done, how to enjoy the things we want to enjoy, and how to not lose the important things that we want to keep from our life before the “reboot”.

There’s not a minute to waste! Let’s get started – call some contractors, get some house cleaning help, start writing lectures, finish fixing the cars to be sold.  Let’s move people!  But wait, the sun is out and the clouds are not.  It’s going to be a picture perfect day for a hike – just like we got for a few days on holiday.  Today had no alarm, we have no real schedule.  Maybe we can grab one more “holiday” day and the reboot can start tomorrow. 🙂