The Long, Long Road Home Again

And so we are home.  Just in time to hear the Morning Joe wrap-up of the Trump visit to Puerto Rico, which, apparently should be grateful they didn't have a "real" catastrophe, like Katrina ... and then tossed paper towels out into the crowd.  The visual I can't get out of my mind is the woman who explained to him about the tablets you drop into dirty water, wait 10-12 hours and have clean water.  With a look of sheer disgust on his face he said "and you actually drink that?" and then with a shudder handed it gingerly to someone behind him, as if he could not believe this woman would drink dirty water.

I am running out of synonyms for "disgusting" to describe this embarrassment to our country.

But I digress.

We had a leisurely last morning in Santa Barbara, having our last visits.  Kind of a 4-hour "Hour Baur" inside the house, over scrambled eggs, leftover sushi, and English muffins.  I pretty much gave up stressing about anything this weekend and wasn't worried about how late we left.  But it was only noon when we drove away, and we were home before 8, which was pretty good time.

I realized when I was talking with Alice Nan that I had not thought of my mother at all over the weekend, and that was nice.  There was no point in calling her because even if she answered the phone, she would forget I'd called before she got the phone back in its cradle.  And I knew that the staff in the memory unit were aware I was gone and would be looking in on her frequently.  So having that emotional "vacation" was nice, though I did occasionally have twinges of guilt about it.  But very brief twinges.

The drive was uneventful and, bless him, Walt did all the driving while I napped off and on.  For the first 2 hours we were finishing the Michael Connelly book we had been listening to on the drive down and then started a Harlan Coben.  I missed some stuff in the first three chapters because of dozing off, so downloaded a free "sample" of the book on my Kindle so I could go back and see if the sample was long enough to fill in the gaps!

We stopped at our favorite comfort food diner in King City for a lunch/dinner around 3.

I wasn't really hungry, so a nice bowl of chili sounded good to me.  But the bowl was humongous and way over-salted, so I only ate half of it.

The "garlic bread" that accompanied it had no taste of garlic whatever.  A disappointing lunch for me.  Walt fared better with his salad bar and "Dagwood-sized" BLT.

We ran into some pockets of heavy traffic, but overall they didn't last long.

The dogs were very happy to see us and both of them wanted to be in both of our laps right away.  It was nice to have been missed.

So today it's back to normal and I will be visiting Atria sometime after lunch.  But it sure was sweet while it lasted.