Crashing back to reality

Ah, the joys of being a homeowner. After a blissful week on the East Coast, I returned to Toronto feeling fairly calm, albeit a little bit motion sick from a turbulent flight home.

While I was very, very sad to leave my friends and family (and a wee bit reluctant to return to work), part of me was also happy to be returning to my house, complete with two freshly painted rooms. I was excited about getting back into the painting and decorating projects (hello secondhand shops!), after taking an evening to relax and get back into that Toronto state of mind.

Instead, what greeted me was a slightly overgrown lawn (sadly, my wish that the heat would finally kill the grass was not granted), coated in a week's worth of tossed litter, a stuffed mailbox, two dying (likely to soon be one dead, one maimed) houseplants and a nosy older couple (total strangers, by the way) who stopped by to say that they didn't like the look of our yard because our grass was too long. Not to mention a bunny to be collected, a few surfaces to be dusted, laundry to be washed and luggage to be unpacked. Plus a couple hundred emails, over a thousand blog posts to be caught up on, and a handful of voicemail messages.

But, despite wondering whether I couldn't just go back on an extended vacation (the answer was sadly no), we hunkered down and chipped away at our to-do list. So I'm back, and once we catch up, we'll be back to home improvement projects, rather than just maintaining/cleaning it. 

Responsibility is a drag.