Back Home -- Sorta Kinda

[Note: This is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland.]

10/7/23

Aloha Everyone --

Our long trip (34 days give or take) came to an end on Monday around noon. Well, our bodies returned home anyway, but our luggage was still in Zurich and our brains were lost in fog somewhere.  We got our suitcases back on Thursday and the brains seem to be arriving in pieces.  Maybe another few days.......

The trip back began in Tirana, Albania, about 1 hour late.  We barely made our connection in Zurich for

our 11 1/2 hour flight to San Francisco but our luggage didn't.  As we have done often, we spent the night in SF (there aren't any flights from the west coast to Kona in the evening) then continued on the next morning.  Actually, not having the luggage was convenient because we didn't have to hassle with re-checking it and just went straight to the gate.  We always pack what we need for a day or two in our carry-on bags so we had what we really needed anyway.

Adjustment to local time has been really rough this time -- maybe yet another fun part of geezerhood.  The Balkans are 12-hours ahead of Kona, so as the day goes on here our bodies are thinking it's getting later and later at night--time to sleep!  For me the worst symptom of jet lag is the mental fog.  Every little task, no matter how small, seems irritatingly complicated.  I can feel this improving a bit each day in the morning and lasting a little longer, but the recovery seems to be taking longer than it used to. Hopefully by next week things will be more or less back to "normal."

The house seems to have fared pretty well, no major problems that I've discovered so far.  Of course, have a lot of gardening and cleaning to do.  In...between...naps.

Oh, I should mention that right before we left I wrote that Kilauea was showing signs of waking up and that it would be just our luck (or curse) if it erupted while we were gone.  Yup, sure enough -- not long after we left there was activity at the summit, complete with fountains of lava.  Then it shut off completely.  Well,  now that we are back there are again signs that something might happen in the near future.  We'll see....... 

Ok,  that's all I can muster at the moment.  Let's all hang in there, though it's beginning to look like the only intelligence around is the AI kind.