Saturday, January 26, 2008

Home again

We made it in last night, about 10p.m. Chennai time and everyone was asleep by about 12:30 or 1 a.m. Today, we've made huge headway with all the suitcases, the laundry is almost done. There isn't much room on the dining table with all the bits that need to find various homes (passports to the safe, ticket stubs to scrapbooking, etc.) but aside from that unpacking is looking good. The house, though, needs a serious overhaul.

Ah, the house. It felt like it hadn't been lived in for 6 weeks. The cats practically had cobwebs hanging off them and the whole place smelled musty, catty and empty. It's a lot better now that we've burned scented candles in a number of rooms, opened doors and turned on a/c to air out, vacuumed with the roomba, dusted the pictures and counters, completely dumped the litter pan that is under the stairs (pyew!), flushed toilets and ran faucets, scrubbed a layer of mold off the pantry shelves and threw out a dozen boxes of molded cereal along with other moldy food items (cat food, macaroni noodles), cleaned up dried cat spitup puddles... the list goes on. Tomorrow I'll clean out the fridge of its leftovers. Yeah, leftovers. Ew.
The cats don't hate us, that's the good thing. Our neighbors hardly saw 2 of them during our absence but they showed up last night and today act like nothing every happened. I wasn't expecting this good a reception from the furballs.
So, we're back home. It's good to be home. It's good to sleep in my own bed (though I can't complain at all about the beds at the Marriott hotels or the Pacific Regency in KL). It's good to sit on our own couches (after vacuum and febreeze). It's good to feel like we don't need to go anywhere or do anything today or tomorrow. Not to say we aren't doing anything. This morning the girls went to their first Madras Kids rehearsal, auditions actually. The girls received the short 2 person sketch at 7:30 this morning, the one they were supposed to do by memory, and by 8:15 were off to the school running lines and practicing their songs. Apparently it went well, Rebecca did "O Lonely Peas" without issue and Katherine... well, Katherine had a little breakdown, did a different song and lost her composure. She tried. Next week they hear who gets which parts/lines/songs.
Madras Kids will take up Saturday mornings, so tennis for Rebecca will move to Sundays and piano lessons will have to figure in a different day of the week. Afterschool activities start this week as well, I think. We're not overscheduled, it's just trying to get everyone into something and with 6 people there are only so many non-work/school hours free. We'll figure it out.
A quick Kudos to our airlines, for not losing any of our luggage, nor canceling or even dealying any of our flights. We had 11 flights this trip and everything ran like clockwork. Sure, it took three sets of passports, and one of our bags was broken on the very last flight into Chennai so it won't be visiting anymore nations with us, but on the whole, that's practically perfect.

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