Back home and forging ahead

I got back to the States on November 17, a Wednesday night. Awake at 7 a.m. in London, I didn’t fall asleep until midnight in Miami, extending my waking hours to 22. That helped arrest my jetlag before it could get started.

Thursday morning I was up bright and early, but not too early. By midday I was in Chicago, and by dinnertime I was in Seattle. As the plane rolled to the gate at SeaTac Airport, I looked out and saw tiny raindrops sprinkling the damp tarmac. Immediately I felt I’d come home too soon. I’ve always dreaded the long, wet, gray winters here in Washington. My mood is greatly affected by the weather, as I suspect is the case for many people in this part of the world and others. Maybe that’s why we drink so much coffee around here – to give us the man-made sense of energy and euphoria that nature neglected. Whether or not that’s the case, the time between October and May has only gotten easier to bear as I’ve grown older and the years have gotten shorter in relation.

Luckily for me, a winter blast hit the Northwest a few days after I got home and the drizzle was replaced with snow. The white blanket was beautiful the way anything rare and different is beautiful. But it didn’t last more than a few days. It quickly disappeared and turned back to rain the way it always does.

Since then, life has gone on pretty monotonously. Some things are different from the way they were before I left – my brother has a puppy, I don’t have a job or money, I haven’t left the house as much as I’d like to – but it wasn’t hard to settle into a routine.

Now I’m trying to find work, which isn’t as easy as I imagined it would be in the fantasy that duped me out of planning my travel properly. I’m about ready to settle for any type of menial labor, just to get some cash in my pocket and start paying my debts. Which is probably what I’ll do later this week.

All the while, I’ve been working on my writing by rewriting and taking editorial advice from knowledgeable friends. The intent is to pick out a handful of experiences from my recent travels and craft them into pieces good enough to send to travel publications. In the meantime, I’ll keep using this blog as a way of developing my voice and keeping my fingers and synapses loose, with some short posts about my travels.

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