By PAT NEWMAN
pnewman@thecitizennews.com

Now I know how an astronaut feels when he reenters the earth's atmosphere after a spin in space.

Returning home from a week's vacation is just as shocking to the system.

A week on the beach muddles your senses, spoils your sleeping habits and generally transforms you into a tanned blob of human matter.

As I pulled into my driveway, the first thing I noticed was the crabgrass. It had shot up a foot in a week. Also accumulating about 12 inches was the pile of mail stacked on the table. My daughter even swore the dogs had grown, despite the fact that they are 18 months and 9 years old respectively.

About the only thing that failed to expand was the food in the refrigerator. The few leftovers remaining had instead burst into a bilious green bloom. The most exotically molded was the sliced pineapple which developed a beautiful white froth.

My brain was suddenly on overload. Do we unpack the car, go grocery shopping or take a nap first? A partial unloading was crucial to restocking the car with grocery sacks, so we went to work lugging sand-encrusted suitcases, leaking coolers and salty flip-flops into the house.

Still dressed in shorts and a Seagrove shirt, I roamed supermarket aisles in search of milk, bread and microwaveable food. The other customers were zipped into fur-trimmed parkas and long pants, more appropriate for the winter-type weather that swept into town Saturday. I forged ahead freezing, until I had enough eats for a couple meals.

On our second day home, I caught up on sleep lost to central time, daylight saving time and marathon Monopoly games. Back to the grocery for school lunch supplies. That's when it happened. I ran smack into my boss at the magazine counter. I couldn't avoid the fact that work was just about 16 hours away.

For a solid week, I purged my brain of anything remotely important. I skimmed magazines, watched cartoons with the kids, and rented some of the most inane movies ever made. Chasing a fluorescent orange golf ball around the wacky golf green was the most strenuous exercise I had, aside from walking to and from the surf.

Now I was faced with the depressing preparations of getting ready for school and work. It took only 16 loads of laundry to get us back on track. Add that to mopping up the flood from a leaky sink, walking two attention-starved dogs, hearing about my mother's snowy trip to New Jersey and her run in with Bruce Springsteen and you'll understand why I'm asking for another week off... soon..

Back to the Top of the PageBack to the Weekend Home Page