And home again

 The trip back was mostly uneventful. Stricter rules on this run (they emphasized that you *had* to eat in your accommodation or back at your seat, there was no cafe-car seating and in fact, no diner car - at it looks like (boo) the dining car isn't coming back on the leg of the Texas Eagle I take, so for as long as I continue to take this run, it's Flex Meals forever, ugh)

Also they made a deal about "you can only take your mask off in your compartment if BOTH the door and the curtain are closed" and I didn't want to test it so I just complied but, again - I am a rule-follower but I get frustrated when the rules seem arbitrary, or are arbitrarily enforced, or are apparently enforced (not necessarily in this case) to give the enforcer a feeling of power. 

The drive back seemed long but I guess it was normal. The whole way back I thought about things I might have to deal with upon arriving home (did the mousetraps I set catch anything? Is my refrigerator - going on 20 years old - still working*?)

(*a colleague once had a refrigerator spectacularly die during the first few days of an extended vacation and when he returned home he had a real mess to deal with)

And yeah, also all the yoke of responsibilities I must pick back up - time to start summer research, time to finish up that manuscript and get it in, doctor's check-up next week and I doubt I've lost the weight she suggested I might try to lose. And new things - church this morning is going to be HARD as it's the first meeting after M.'s death. 

I put my (clean) clothes away, I emptied out the stuff from the carry on - I'll take photos of the finished objects and post them over the next few days. I'm happy I finished a couple long-term projects (one started summer 2020, the other started in early 2019, as far as I can remember). I probably need to look at my other long-term projects and decide to either finish or unravel. 

And I need to clean house. I need to have an exterminator evaluate under the house/behind the pipe chase before I consider a new dishwasher (and this time, I am splashing out on one with the stainless-steel interior). I also just need to get the place better organized. I've decided I either have too much stuff or too small of a house, and moving to a bigger place is not logistically or monetarily possible at the moment, so instead I should pare down and just have less stuff. Or at least better organize what I have. I've decided to *try* to spend a half-hour or so a day on various tasks, or else go "I will do five cleaning-related things over and above the normal daily tasks" and hopefully work it down over time. 

It was good seeing my mom after a whole year. We didn't do as much as I might have wanted to; she's still wary of case counts (despite being fully vaccinated; I think she is concerned by the news that "older people might not mount as strong an immune response) but also had to go out several days for continuing treatment for a sebaceous cyst. 

What would I have liked? I don't know, actually. Maybe go to the bookstore once? Maybe go out and go to the museum? One thing I have decided HERE is that I am going to consider taking a day either every 2 weeks or every week and just go somewhere (most likely in my state - I still don't love crossing that under-construction bridge, though coming back it was a lot better). I can spend four days a week working...