There and back again

Well, good middle of the night, Interweblandworld! It's 1.13 in the morning, and my alarm will go off in about four and a half hours, and I've slept all of nine of the last sixty hours... and I am wide awake. Too exhausted to sleep? Could be. Funny how jetlag seems to get reliably and noticeably stronger every time. It took me almost the entire two-week visit home to Tucson to not fall asleep at 7.3o on the couch every evening, only to then be awake for good at 3 am; and now, regardless of total, burning-eyed, achy-bodied exhaustion, my fingers are typing merrily away. Betrayers!

Some of it -- check that, all of it -- has to do with the fact that my luggage took a little vacation in Denver while I continued on to Frankfurt. At first, this was exasperating: "Great, just what I need after 20 hours of travel." But then I remembered that the two bags, densely loaded as they were with Christmas goodies for myself and others, weighed in at a hefty 50 lbs each; and that I was also about to take two trains and a taxi to get home. Which can be quite an adventure, with two anvil-like bags, two bursting-at-the-seams carryons (I could actually hear them groaning), and arms already full of wool coat and purse and pillow. (Yeah yeah, I bring a pillow on international flights. I will do this until I am eighty. After which I'll bring the bedspread, too. ;o) ) Anyway, so after being assured by the highly apologetic Lufthansa clerk that my bags would be delivered right to my front door the very next day after work, I lightly skipped aboard the respective trains and arrived home to my bright apartment, thoroughly tired but relieved, on Monday afternoon. Too bad my bags wouldn't come until the next evening; I was excited to give out the gifts I'd packed. But hey, free delivery service! That was worth a little wait.

Well, without going into further details, suffice to say they did finally arrive... but not before Tuesday night had become Wednesday morning. And because I didn't want to miss the delivery guy and face the prospect of making a trip to the Frankfurt airport, and then having to lug all the stuff home after all, I resisted the strong urge to fall asleep at 6 in the evening, though I was pretty sure I could easily have slept through to the next morning.

So here I am, at now 1.30 in the morning, still in the world of the waking. Dang second wind. Er, seventh wind. Whatever. I'll just fall asleep in front of the ninth-graders tomorrow, and they can spend an amusing class period drawing things on my sleeping face with a ballpoint pen. At least I'll get some rest!

The holidays were great, though. Really great. After the initial flightmare of finding myself heading, not from Frankfurt to Tucson as planned, but instead from Munich to Los Angeles -- where I then made a Chariots-of-Fire, 1.5-mile dead sprint, comically bulging and bouncing luggage in tow, to catch a chancy new connection via Southwest -- I collapsed gratefully onto one of mom's couches with her, Michael, and Shauna. Yay! Amy arrived the next day, and the five of us spent a lovely holiday together. Steve flew in on the 26th, and we all spent the next week running around trying to visit everyone in the entire city, run stateside errands, do more Christmas shopping for some folks here in Germany, collect some sunlight to take back to our northern latitudes, see as much of Mom as possible in her free time, and eat as much Mexican food as we could cram into our guacamole-starved bodies. Gallucci came down for a whirlwind overnight visit (after much schedule-juggling and other hitches -- thanks, Matt!), and then, for the last day and a half, mom and I actually had some time to spend just one-on-one. There is never enough of that! It was so great to be able to see everyone. But sometimes, in order to see all the people you want to see, you sacrifice spending any real quality time with any of them. Thanks for understanding, guys. I promise there's less going on over here -- come visit me on this side of the pond! :)

Speaking of visits, though, Shauna arrives in less than a week! Huzzah! That really eased the pain of leaving. We have all these grand designs of trying to get to Denmark or maybe France while she's here; but I kinda get the feeling that, once she gets here, all we're really going to want to do is while away the hours at a cafe. Though a weekend trip to the Erzgebirge would be cool. I'm trying to finagle a way to visit Conny and Nate in Berlin while she's here, too; we shall see!

All right, I'm sure there are more riveting details from these last few weeks that are just not surfacing in my dried up, sleep-deprived brain; but it's now almost two, and I really really should try to get some more sleep before another long day at school tomorrow. Happy New Year, everybody. As they say at Rosh Hashanah:

Let the new year and its blessings begin. :)