It's Good to be Home RBoC

• Our housesitter, who moved out three weeks ago, left the inside of the house cleaner than we did. Yea!
  
• Only two indoor plants seemed to have suffered significantly from my absence. The two expensive trees we planted last year seem to have survived, as have all of the rest of our grown trees. We lost two Rose of Sharon bushes. Too bad too, they blocked our neighbor's ugly plywood fence.
  
• Our incredibly kind next door neighbor (who does not have an unsightly fence) spent hours weeding our front flower beds and trimming overgrown bushes this week so that our house didn't look abandoned when we came back. We specifically told our housesitter not to do this, I should say. Much to do in the back yard, however.
  
• Our kids and cats seem right at home. The kids appear more at ease and comfortable than they did in our sabbatical house. Hard to say if this is really how they feel or just a projection of my own feelings.
  
• Drop-off at the "old school" (what we have been calling Dalton and Curie's old daycare) went really well. They moved from the infant/toddler room to the preschool, so it really is "new" but some of the grad interns and teachers from their toddler room came over to say hello to them.
  
• We left our sabbatical home in reasonably good shape and hopefully now free of mice. Glad we thought to let our cats patrol the basement before we left. The owner is a new assistant professor at Sabbatical U. who has yet to live in the house himself. We have told him he needs a cat.
  
• I cannot express how nice it is to have more than three knives and two mixing bowls.
  
• Driving back into town made me realize I really consider Not on a Coast home - despite my bi-coastal bias.