Back To Reality

While waiting for brain cells to reassemble and for the time to sort out and upload pictures, I thought I'd take a moment to make some random comments about what it's like to come back from an 11-day vacation.

First, in spite of living in a hooked-up world (and my meager efforts to obtain news first in Ft. Lauderdale and then on the ship), you can still miss a whole lot of what goes on. Maybe that's a good thing?? I dunno. But I'd hate to be the stupid one at the cocktail party who speaks of Robert Goulet as though he's still alive.

See, here's the thing. Our cruiseship had lots of network stations--only they came out of DENVER, so I'm all up on local Colorado news, but not so much on the rest of the nation. (Oh, and did you know Amelia Earhart is alive and well doing helicopter traffic news? Yeah, she looks pretty good for someone lost at sea decades ago). As for national stuff, well...Carnival skips right over that by giving us CNN international news. Let me just point out that there's a big old world out there, much of which I could care less about while I'm trying to figure out how close Tropical Storm Noel is to our ship (VERY close, for the record).

Don't even get me started on the SoCal fires. I'm STILL trying to figure out where they were...and weren't.

So, coming back to work is like waking up from a 10-day coma and trying to piece together what I missed. Thus far, I've gone through about 1000 personal emails and about 2000 business ones. Good thing I put some of my writing groups on "digest" or there'd be another 1000. To tell you the truth, I just deleted the jokes. At one time, I would have painstakingly opened them all--not daring to miss a gem--but these days, life's too short to read ONCE AGAIN what George Carlin supposedly said about today's America.

Do I sound cranky?

I am.

I wanna be back on the Caribbean with friends Marty and Ali...rain or no rain, I don't care.