I’ve been back from my cross-country bucket-list train trip for about a week now. Hard to tell exactly, though, because my brain hasn’t fully adjusted to having a routine again.
That’s probably because I had to make three long car trips up east of the city this first week back:
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one to pick up the guinea pigs (and apparently guinea pigs do not appreciate being stuffed into a small plastic box and carted 50 miles in a car while “Weird Al” Yankovic music is blaring over the car speakers);
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one to join my daughters on a house-hunting spree (which included one house where we were counting the bullet holes in the windows and matching up the trajectories of similar holes found in the dining room wall—just like an episode of CSI, yay!);
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and one to attend a standing-room-only memorial service for the wife of my first RP pastor.
Talk about a week of ups and downs!
At home I’ve been trying to:
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catch up on freelance work;
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sort through 1,500 pictures and 20,000 words of notes from the trip;
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do laundry (apparently people like to wear clean underwear around here—how rude);
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go grocery shopping (apparently these same people appreciate eating several times per day—every day);
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and stare at the waving fields of wheat in our backyard. Well, it’s just uncut grass, because the lawn mower Wayne ordered in early April still needs to be picked up in Calcutta—Ohio, not India (though, judging from how long it’s taking him to go get it, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not in India).
No matter what, though, I’m still organizing those trip notes and am now buckling down to turn all this raw data into Train of Thought this summer. Those of you who backed me on Indiegogo (and thank you for that!) will be glad to know that I’ll be contacting you soon about mailing addresses for hard copies of the book and email addresses for the Kindle editions.
Other than all that … I think I need a nap. One in a real bed that doesn’t convert back into a cute little seat on a train once morning hits. Having said that, I do miss someone else cooking all my meals and sometimes serving them to me in my private little room. Those rare steaks were pretty good! Maybe I’ll grill a few ribeyes this weekend … if I can find the grill amid the wheat fields.