We’re home. We’ve actually been home for about 24 hours but I haven’t had a chance to put anything up here before now. The return trip was uneventful. I don’t think that there’s much to say about it except that nine-hour flights are somewhat awful to endure. I spent most of the time playing with my DS Lite, I think.
Long-distance travel and the resulting change of time zones is just odd. We woke up in Kyoto at 6:00AM (Kyoto time), traveled by plane for about 12 hours, auto for a total of about three hours, and sat around in between for a bunch more hours, and arrived at home in Boulder at about 5:00PM (Boulder time) on the same day, even though our total travel time was nearly 24 hours.
It turned out that there were a few surprises waiting for us at home, and not the fun sort of surprises. Tracie’s mom, who sat with our house and cats while we were gone, had developed an abscessed tooth about a week before and was in the middle of having what we later learned was a very bad reaction to the antibiotics she had been prescribed. When we walked in the door she was essentially paralyzed with pain and didn’t know why. We ended up taking her to the emergency room about a half-hour or so after we got home. I had the presence of mind to grab a banana and a couple of mandarin oranges as we left; we hadn’t eaten much since breakfast. (After United poisoned me on the outbound flight I wasn’t terribly interested in eating anything on the return flights.) We were at the hospital for five or six hours before Tracie finally decided that she had to get off her feet and go to bed or she was going to fall down and then we’d have to admit her at the ER also.
We got home (again) after being awake for 30 or so hours and found that we were in that odd phase of sleep deprivation in which you no longer feel tired as such and were all wound up from the hospital adventures. Tracie decided to sort the mail and unpack. At some point it was discovered that the Paper Jade website had crashed sometime during our absence and was completely offline. Not good. Fortunately it didn’t take too long to sort that out, even in my completely whacked state of mind.
Sometime around midnight (Boulder time) I passed into a new sleep-deprived phase and realized that I needed to go to bed Right Now. So we did, and managed to get around five hours asleep before snapping awake to the sound of a cat puking. Said cat hopped up on the bed a little while later to express his joy at our return and inquire as to why we weren’t getting up and feeding him. I told Tracie, “there’s no place like home.”
Sometime after we got up it was discovered that water had leaked from somewhere in the laundry/furnace/storage room in the basement. Some investigation revealed that the pump that pumps condensation out of the furnace had failed, so the condensate was just running across the floor rather than being pumped through a little tube into a drainpipe as usual. Remarkably enough the local hardware store had exactly the same pump on hand. I bought it after we visited Tracie’s mom in the hospital and went to the shoe-repair shop to drop off the boots that Tracie wore out in Japan.
It’s now 5:36PM local time, according to the clock. I’d believe it was just about any other time of day if you tried to tell me so; my sense of time is totally shot. Once again I have great appreciation of Gibson’s brilliant description of jetlag in Pattern Recognition.
I’ll post some more stuff about Japan within the next day or two.
