Unpacking Woes

Vacations are great. They give you an opportunity to get away from the daily activities that seem to just drain the life out of you. They replace the mundane with exciting new opportunities to live life differently. No matter what you do on vacation, it is just different from the daily grind and different is always good in my book. In most cases people will take vacation away from home. That is not always the case and this year with the skyrocketing prices of gasoline some people are spending their vacations at home. Even so, your routine is disrupted as you are not getting up and going to work so hence different. In our case we were gone for nearly two weeks and arrived home yesterday afternoon.

The weather is substantially different at home than it was on vacation. We were not subjected to the 110 degree days followed by the 102 degree nights. Instead we had 90 degree days followed by 50 degree nights; that is significantly different and it is going to take a few days to reacclimatize ourselves to the Arizona summer weather. This has an impact on many things that you would not first thing about.

When we arrived home we immediately removed anything from that car that could potentially melt. This would include the common things like chocolate and other food items. It also included other things such as crayons, pens, and markers. You cannot imagine what a 115 degree car can do to a box of crayons. They seem to liquefy like molten steel at around 100 degrees. A quick run into a store can result in a swirled mess of liquid wax when you return. Once all meltables have been removed we turned our sights to getting everything out of the car. Since we had been gone and had set the thermostat up the interior of the house was not that much cooler than outside. I rushed in and changed the temperature settings to try and cool things down before we went to bed.

It is surprising how long it takes a 2200 square foot house to cool down after being warm for 2 weeks. With all the activities we had going on, the items from the car simply went from the garage to the living room where they would remain until we had the time and the energy to unpack. That has to be the worst part of going on vacation. You leave the house with a suitcase full of clean clothes and the hopes and dreams of having fun. You return home with luggage filled with dirty laundry and the memories of what you did while you were gone.

These memories are of course tempered by the fact that you now have work ahead of you just to get back to the daily routine that you so gladly left before. Not only do you have to deal with the day-to-day chores that accompany life around the house but you have to go through the mail, retrieve the newspapers, check your messages, assess the house, try and remember what it was you forgot to do before you left on vacation, find food since you emptied the refrigerator before you left, and of course deal with the laundry and the yard. At some point as you have pieces of clothing and other packing items strung throughout the house you question whether being gone was really a good idea.

At that moment though you remember the fun you just had and you long to still be gone if for no other reason than so you don’t have to deal with all of the mess you just created when you started to unpack. There really needs to be an unpacking blues song you can put on the stereo to get you through these times.