Doings and Undoings!

The day after getting back from a trip seems to have a lot of "doings and undoings!" First we needed to stock the larder...so Woody went to the grocery store. When he got home I "un"packed the groceries and got busy making a big pot of soup...one of our favorites--Spicy Vegetable Beef. That included a lot of chopping and shredding of lots of veggies. Woody also went to the library on his grocery outing. After he got back home I mentioned a friend who is on the hospital so he went to the hospital for a visit. I got the soup to simmering and then I went back to some of the undoing that I had started when I first got up this morning...undecorating! Definitely not my most favorite thing about our Christmas decorations. But the process has gotten underway. I try to take a box or two downstairs each time that I go down and try to bring up a filled box when I come back upstairs. (The latter happens sometimes and sometimes it doesn't!) But the stack of filled boxes is growing in our upstairs hall. I have also started unpacking...another of my undoings. I am in the midst of doing "big brother" and "big sister" shirts. I've got to get those ready so the new baby's siblings will have shirts to wear to when they go to meet him/her. Kathy got the shirts ready...bought and washed...while we were gone. So now it is my job to get the designs sewn onto them. I did decide what I am going to put on them so next job is to get the designs transferred over to my sewing machine. Since it was such a nice day, I volunteered to go out and vacuum our car after its first trip. I think that this is the earliest that we have broken our usual rule when we get a new car..."no eating in the car!" Well, I don't think that we have taken such a long trip so soon after getting a new car...so that rule didn't last but a few days. Snacking is just part of our trips! I wanted the car to still look like new...so I dragged the vacuum outside and did a bit of cleaning...it really wasn't that bad...we had been pretty careful...but I felt that it couldn't hurt to do a bit of vacuuming...and Woody didn't object. After doing that, I was about worn out so I took a pretty good nap this afternoon. Woody has napped some this afternoon too. All the above is just part of us getting back into a "routine" after a trip. I am always a bit jet-lagged...perhaps it is just the adrenalin stopping flowing! Anyway, it always takes me a while to feel like I am back in the "real world." There are just so many things that need to be done that it can get a bit overwhelming...after spending four days away in sort of a suspended state of being...that doesn't really mimic normal daily life! So I will be doing a lot of "doing and undoing" (flitting from one thing to another...or perhaps floating like these fish in tonight's photo) over the next few days till daily routine/reality settles back in. Tonight's photo is one of the many fish tanks in waiting rooms at NIH.