Never Say Never

I am the person who is never bothered by jet lag.

Yeah. Right.

I always figured that because my sleep cycle is so screwy anyway my body just says "OK. Sure. Whatever" and picks up with whatever time zone it's in. When we arrived at Mike and Char's after 28 hours of being awake, it was 11 p.m., my normal sleep time, and I slept all night. Great! I was back on California time.

I had no problem all day the first day back, as I unpacked, did laundry, and started sorting through photos. So many photos! I went to sleep again around 11 p.m. but woke up a couple of times and at 3:30 this morning I was wide awake. Hmmmm.

But I have weird sleep patterns anyway, right?

So today I dedicated myself to starting to get photos posted on Flickr, which meant moving them to my computer, from the camera, sorting through them, tweaking some of them, deciding which were good enough to post to Flickr and then posting them. I got Helsinki and Estonia posted and then sorted through the pix of The Hermitage. It takes a long time for photos to upload, so I decided I was feeling a little sleepy. I'd just go relax while the pictures were uploading.

I don't remember what time that was, but about 2 p.m.

I woke up to the sound of Walt pouring dogfood into the dog bowls and the music for Wheel of Fortune. I had slept for...hours! I was supposed to go to the store for food at some point. I was supposed to do interviews for an article I need to get done right away, and I had slept the entire afternoon.

So much for jet lag theories!

Fortunately we had tamales in the freezer that I could cook for dinner.

After dinner I went back to organizing photos. I kept them very organized on the computer on the ship but I never MOVED things from disk to computer, I merely copied them, so I'd have a backup. But that means having photos in two places and needing to organize them in a third so I can upload to a fourth.

Sometimes I think that people without cameras must lead very happy lives.

In addition to all the photos, there are all the videos. I took lots on my digital camera, and some on my flip video. the ones from my digital camera need to be converted from .mov format to .avi format...and then I have to remember which are on the flip and which need to be edited together with the ones on the digital camera.

I'll tell you, folks, it's painful to sit on a woolsack stuffed with such thorns as these.

The videos I took were, many times, just snippets of moments I wanted to remember, so today's video of the Church in the Rock in Helsinki is very brief, but the church was lovely and I liked sitting there listening to the recorded music. (I embedded a shorter version of this into my journal entry the day I wrote it, so this is kind of a duplicate, for those who watched it then)

Slowly, slowly things are falling into place. It seems that we are only missing one thing, but I'm sorry about that. We bought a CD from the men who sang at a little Pavilion at the Catherine Palace and we can't find it anywhere. I do have a recording of what they sang, since I videotaped it (though you can't see them...I mostly videotaped it to have the sound). I may use that in a slide show about the Palace, since we don't have any other record of it.

But other than that, it seems that all the little trinkets we bought have arrived home in good shape and we didn't lose anything valuable that we brought with us.

I am taking up the reins of life again tomorrow, having lunch with my friend Kathy in Sacramento and a show to review the night after that (Spamalot, which I have been looking forward to seeing)

Cappuccino goes to the SPCA thrift store tomorrow to meet someone who will go and cut his manhood off, poor baby. If he was skittish before, I can only imagine what he'll be like afterwards. Getting him in the car is going to be a neat trick, since he just barely lets me touch him now. I think this is going to be a dog carrier day.

I am slowly shaking off the aura of cruise passenger and taking up the mantle of housewife again. I have had e-mails from some of our fellow passengers today and it's nice to make contact with them after the trip. I wonder if our paths will cross on some other voyage. Char is already talking about China.

....when I was doing "this day in my history" for today, I realized that one year ago I had "the trip bug," the illness that affected everyone in our group on the France/Italy trip. Today I have what apparently is being called "The Kirov Cough," which several people on the ship had at the end of the trip.

I wonder what you get when you visit China....