Say g'bye to vacation

It happens.
You return from vacation and you have to go back to work.

Everyone knows this.

But sometimes I guess you hope you can hang on the vacation feeling. The shoulders that have scraped themselves away from the bottom of your earlobes. The unfettered sleep. The openness of the mind. The absence of seering pain in that spot between your shoulder blades and neck.

And then it happens. 800+ emails to respond to or DO something about. The phone calls. The items that you'd put on a list for someone else to do that they either screwed up or didn't do. The follow-ups from when no one got back to you. The to-do list you left for yourself.

And then there's the general day-to-day stuff. And the weird someone-wants-to-choose-right-now-to-be-a-pain moments that you have to deal with -- put on those kid gloves.

Today I resolved many personal items that were overdue: house insurance problems, paid bills, followed up to see if anyone was doing anything about the gashes in my floors caused by the fridge delivery guys, and with the furniture guy who's holding my dining set hostage, read the email from my contractor who hasn't been able to do anything since I left on vacation (and decided to cool down before responding). But all at the expense of not leaving my desk for lunch.

And I'm sure I did lots of really productive stuff at work... but barely put a dent in the stuff that has to be done.

On the good side, I did manage to make a lovely dinner of Asian soups with Gordon. We're discovering that we like to cook together. And I read a diary entry from about a year ago (we figured that we've been dating a year and a quarter now!) and smiled as I read about our honeymoon period and realized that it hasn't really changed since then.

I guess there's always the good stuff to focus on.