Home sweet home.

Finally, finally, home!

It's so nice to be back, under the big, beautiful blue skies of Colorado and in our nice house with all our animals and electronics and things. And oh, how I missed you, laptop! Good lord do I hate typing on touchscreens.

So now there's a TON of stuff to do, not just unpacking and getting settled in after the insane trip but also taking care of the garden and doing all the stuff that was already on the to-do list BEFORE we left for two weeks to let everything get overrun and insane. Like tanning the fox skin sitting in our freezer, or animating, or finishing a little mini comic project that has sat around getting dusty for wayyyy too long, or making the rabbit cages that need to be made.

Speaking of rabbit cages, I came to the realization this morning that there really isn't anything keeping me from getting rabbits anymore -- no big trip overseas to use as an excuse for not getting them, nothing holding me back from starting my own rabbitry. I'm both stupidly excited and unreasonably terrified by this.

In other equally terrifying and exciting news, the garden has literally exploded while we were gone.
Well, not literally, but close enough. There are overgrown plants everywhere and the tiny sunflower sprouts that were scattered around the yard when we left have shot up and grown into monstrous, bee-attracting flowering things. The hollyhocks have also flowered, along with the lamb's ear and all of the old overwintered carrots and the weeds which were left unattended over the trip. The zucchini and such have grown so much and there's an unidentified squash of some sort that in only two weeks managed to sprout out of the compost pile, sneak through a garden bed full of potatoes and volunteer catmint, and climb over the neighbor's fence into their yard.
 The other, purposefully grown plants are doing well, too, and the raspberries need some serious managing as they've finally started to grow and fruit and have managed to escape and grow around, under or over the ropes we put up to stop them from doing just that. The potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and miscellaneous other plants in the garden have also gotten a lot bigger over the two weeks we were gone, and now the yard looks like the perfect, beautiful, fruit-bearing jungle it's supposed to be.

I've really missed the chickens and the cat and the dog (who missed us even more, the poor, separation-anxiety-stricken thing) and of course the house. And I've gained a new appreciation for deserts and arid places with warm sun and big skies like Colorado. Which surprises me because I love cold, wintry, cloudy, rainy weather (or at least, I did before we spent two weeks in a place that is like that constantly).

Speaking of Ireland, and London, I should probably talk about that for a while now, huh?

Well, the trip didn't really feel like a vacation to me so much as a mission to see as many things as possible in two weeks -- there was no real relaxing, just running around seeing things (not that those things weren't completely amazing and awesome). But it was also not very vacation-like because I, at least, didn't really need a vacation. If anything, being away from home for two weeks just made me love (and, while we were gone, miss) home even more, and realize how happy I am where I am. It's just so wonderful here, and it's a nice thing to realize that I'd rather be here in good ol' Colorful Colorado than in London or a small, quaint, Irish village.

Ireland, speaking of Ireland, was beautiful, and green, and constantly rainy, which was a godsend for us, having come from a place that was literally on fire when we left it. The grass and forests were lush and it was so cool to be able to just hop in the car and drive a couple miles to a medieval castle that you could walk around in, or to the rocky, windswept beaches of Ireland (god do I love the ocean) or to a forest full of strange new plants and animals (if it weren't for the temperature, in some of the woods we walked through you'd think you were in some tropical rain forest, with all the rain and the giant, mossy trees with their novel, strange-shaped leaves).
 In fact for the first few days it wasn't even the amazing landscape and all the crazy places you could go to that were the most interesting. It was just the fact that you were in a different country, where even if they didn't really speak a different language, they had accents and drove on the other side of the road and used kilometers instead of miles and had different electric outlets and toilets and currency and all the stores were EUROPEAN STORES and they actually sold gooseberries in them because holy fridge you were in IRELAND.

Also, did I mention I loved, loved, loved, loved being near the ocean? It was so cool to look down off of the edge of a sheer cliff to see the wave-battered rocks below and think of mermaids (the real, evil type of course) and sea monsters and sharks.
 I think I must be a Selkie or something and they just hid my seal skin really well. That would explain it.

London was also great, though by the time we got there, after a week of running around Ireland like mad, I, at least, was pretty exhausted and felt like I needed a couple days of rest, not a week of traveling around the city on foot.

We got into London late on a Friday night, I believe, so as we stumbled around pulling luggage and trying to find the apartment where we were going to stay at we passed people everywhere, forming long lines to get into night clubs and hanging out smoking and laughing and bustling around (speaking of smoking, I don't think I've ever been in a place as smoky as London! Yuck. Everywhere, cigaret smoke. I think I breathed in more smoke in one week in London than I ever have in my whole life).
 I was very intimidated by the city at first, but by the third day in London I was really liking it and was unfazed by all the hustle and bustle and people. It was so cool to see all the awesome graffiti everywhere, and all the people hanging out, and to shop in the Spitalfield's Market, and I didn't mind the grungyness of the city, even where we were (which was pretty grungy).

I also loved the pigeons there. I don't really know why, and I kind of felt like an insane person for constantly freaking out about the pigeons there, but I found the pigeons really, really awesome and fascinating, and in fact they are the only other thing that I wish we had here (the first being an ocean, of course). It's just so interesting how diverse they are, looks-wise, when they aren't even domesticated. There are brown pigeons and grey pigeons and black pigeons and white-speckled pigeons and all sorts of other mixtures of those colors and us humans didn't even take and make them that way.  It's really fascinating (and makes it interesting to think about drawing or writing about them).

We went to the British Museum, the National Gallery, rode on the London Eye, saw Big Ben, saw Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard, walked across the Thames, and went on a small Sherlock Holmes-themed tour to the real 221B Baker Street, the Sherlock 221B Baker Street (actually 187* North Gower Street), Speedy's Cafe and Bart's Hospital.
 *Fun fact: 187 is the penal code for murder. 

And in the middle of it all we all got sick, so we lost a day stuck inside with some generic cold or another, watching TV (which, while you expect it to be all sorts of BBC stuff, Doctor Who, Sherlock and other British things, turned out to be Star Trek: Voyager and NCIS).

But aside from that one day of sickness everything was great, and it was just amazing to go into the British Museum or the National Gallery and just see all these amazing works of art or old artifacts just there, out in the open, for the public to view free of charge (I got to see, in person, a bog man, a Monet, a handful of ancient Greek statues and a Van Gogh, among other amazing things).

All that said, though, I was so happy when we finally got home last night, not only because it meant a chance to sleep after staying up for over 24 hours straight, but also because I really did miss Colorado,
and the gardens, and the animals, and now that we're home I'm excited to settle back into the old rhythm of things, to start drawing again (two weeks of doodling without any references takes a surprisingly huge toll on your ability to draw, I've noticed, so I've got to re-learn a few things about anatomy), to start working in the garden more, and to finish some of my old projects and start new ones, such as sorting through and editing and uploading some of the videos and pictures I took of the trip, or looking for a place to get some Champagne D'argent rabbits.

It's great to be home. It really is.