I was gone again, this time to Washington for a long weekend to see one of our nephews graduate from high school. We got back Monday night; I spent yesterday super busy at work while dragging from jet lag, and I’m very glad to be home. Not as happy as the nephew’s family dog was to have Mr. Karen pet her tummy this weekend but still glad. I’m not sad that I went, not at all, but I’m very ready to not go anywhere for a while.

Four days is not really enough time to do much on a trip to Washington. It took pretty much all day Friday to get there and all day Monday to get back, but vacation days don’t grow on trees so that’s what I had to work with. If it had been just me, I might have gotten an earlier flight on Friday, but the logistics of coordinating with the end of Mr. Karen’s weeklong kayaking trip out there and other family members’ plans made the afternoon flight the best choice. That meant I had time to spend running errands on Friday morning–stopping at my doctor’s office to get a tetanus booster that I managed to avoid when I was there earlier in the week for a physical, getting blood drawn for cholesterol and blood sugar checks (at a new to me lab that turns out to be in the same building as a homeopathic pharmacy, where I got organic chocolate from Dagoba), returning books to the library, and buying greeting cards I’d meant to pick up much earlier in the week. Then it was off to the airport, where Dale and Joan (Mr. Karen’s parents) were waiting at the gate; no, Detroit is not really on their way to Seattle but sometimes you have to fly east to go west.

After we got off the plane at SeaTac, we spent the rest of the evening waiting to be picked up (as it turned out, not by who we thought was coming to get us), stopping for dinner at a very noisy restaurant because our first choice had gone out of business since the last time we came through, and staying up too late talking to family after we finally got to our destination. Saturday I ate my own weight in bacon and bagels at the pre-graduation brunch, then ate my weight in cake and ice cream and Thai food after the ceremony before again staying up too late talking. Sunday was more eating and more talking, though Mr. Karen and I did take a break to drive to a nearby lake and walk the trail around it with the new graduate. I liked the trail a lot–plenty of dogs to admire in the busy area by the park and beautiful second growth forest in the more secluded sections. Both nights, we enjoyed the view from the deck on the back of the house:

Sunday night it was back to Seattle, where we stayed in a motel room filled with paint fumes before our Monday morning flight. We made it to the airport through rush hour traffic and one connection and a three-hour time difference later, it was 9 p.m. and we were reunited with our luggage and back at home. We were amused to find that the TSA had chosen Mr. Karen’s duffle full of stinky kayaking clothes to search–sure hope they were wearing rubber gloves (and maybe a respirator).