Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Backlash of going on Vacations



Mood: Aggravated. I hate when stuff disappears
Listening to: Stairway to Heaven  - Led Zepplin

I love going on vacation. It’s usually quite a bit of work before hand packing and cleaning the house. I HATE coming home to a dirty house. I will work myself into the ground before hand just so I can come home to a clean house that doesn’t possess a mountain of laundry.

I always seem to forget how hard it is to come home. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no other feeling in the world like walking into your own house after a time away, sleeping in your own bed, and eating your own food. I’m talking about the abrupt halt to your vacation relaxing ways.

I thought I did a decent job cleaning up stuff before we left for Sri Lanka. My housekeeper left for Chennai 4 days before we left, so I was somewhat overwhelmed by more work than I was used to, but I thought I did ok. I came back to black ants raiding an almost empty cereal box (as in 3 – 4 flakes of cereal), a mountain of laundry that I forgot, and yet another mountain from our actual vacation. I came home to almost 300 RSS messages from all of the feeds I follow daily. It was a bit overwhelming. I came home to general disorder that I just didn’t have time to go around and clean up. I came home to a trash back that was neglected in our hurry to get out the door on Saturday when I had to start another trash bag because we were home a day longer than planned.

I finally plowed through all of the blogs. As much as I love reading blogs, I don’t think I’ll ever skip a full week again. Even if I do, I’m just erasing everything and starting from that point on. It took me 3 days to get through all that stuff with new stuff piling on top!

The ants I’m still battling. Once ants decide to pay you a visit, it’s damn near impossible to get rid of them, even on the 7th floor of a building. I keep finding them in different places in the house. We generally are pretty neat and I’m a big fan of solidly sealed containers (damn you Chocos that I forgot to put in the cereal container!). I’m not quite sure why they’ve wandered into the bathrooms or bedrooms – we never eat anything in those rooms. I’m still hoping that eventually they’ll decide there is nothing to eat sitting around and will go looking somewhere else. Thank goodness they are the black ones. The red ones are bitey little bastards.

The laundry mountain is currently laughing at me. We are having a water shortage in our complex right now because a pump broke or some such nonsense like that, so we had to store water the other day for a few days. I managed to store drinking water, but my housecleaner complained today that there was no water for dishes, mopping and cleaning the bathrooms. Lesson learned; next time store water for that too. Because of the shortage, running the washing machine is pretty much out of the question, so the mountain will continue to grow.

I finally got my suitcases and all of our vacation stuff put away. That part is the worst for me.  I always wish there was a vacation fairy that would put all your stuff back where it belongs.

How do you deal with the return to earth after a vacation?

Becky

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ugh, I'm a slob. I usually sort out my clothes and pile them in one corner. They are mostly all clean because, like you, I hate dealing with dirty laundry when I get back. So, everything except for what I'm wearing is clean.

Then I pile all the non-perishables in the middle of the room... and eventually... like after a weeks... I'll put it all away. I so wish I wasn't this lazy!

About the ants - they may by looking for a nesting spot. If it's the tiny black tickle ants they tend to enjoy nesting in cupboards.

Becky said...

Ugh! I sincerely hope they aren't settling into the cupboards. I think the ant spray needs to come out. They're not tiny tiny, but they're not really all that large either. Yep. That was a completely ambiguous description of the ants.