packing in rewind

For some odd reason, I unpacked pretty soon after we got home Tuesday night. Maybe it was the thought that I was working four out of the next five days. Or that we're in final countdown mode to school starting. Or that I didn't want Dee Dee the wonder dog to rummage through our bags looking for food. Possibly it was the fear that the sight of a suitcase might make me weepy. Whatever my reason - and I'm sure it was an equitable combination of the above - when I woke up yesterday morning things were in their proper place. Or whatever it is that passes for proper around here.


There was a lot of unpacking to do, too. We had a really busy two weeks.


There was the program from the last day of the U.S. Diving Finals - the competition that helped determine the Olympic team. The kids loved it, even though Sasquatch (king of the video game) pronounced it "repetitious". Repetition was not the word on my lips watching the female divers going (headfirst, for the love of god) off of a thirty meter platform. I think that word would be nauseous. The only way you'd catch me jumping off one of those things is if someone accidentally opened a box of King Cobras between me and the ladder. They don't even have ladders, come to think of it. They have circular staircases. With lots of stairs. I get queasy going off the plain old high dive at the public pool, and only do it so my kids can't say I chickened out and hold it over my head until the next summer. But can I tell you that I really don't enjoy it?


There was the bag of Meyer lemons that I personally picked off of the tree in my folk's front yard the day before we left. When I die I want to come back as a Meyer lemon. I love them that much. I just don't like paying for them in Kansas, which is hardly the Citrus Capital of the world. I could have bought a business class ticket to Florida for what I paid for those stupid lemons last year. But now I have a grocery bag full of them to juice and freeze. And you should smell my kitchen in the meantime.


On the subject of Kansas, there was the playbill for Wicked at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. My mom had wanted so badly to take the kids to a real show in a fabulous theater while we were there, especially now that two of them are so into the whole dramatic process. She pulled it off in a big way and the show was everything we'd hoped for and more. Much, much more. I left the Pantages with a burning desire for a Defy Gravity t-shirt, which was only equaled by my questioning the wisdom of a woman in her forties walking around with that edict scrawled across her cleavage. Or is it just wishful thinking disguised as motivational jargon?


There was the flyer for the Ringling Brother's Circus (home of the $10 snowcone), the trinkets from the Aquarium we've been taking the kids to since they were practically tadpoles themselves, commemorative pairs of chopsticks from our favorite Japanese restaurant in the galaxy, t-shirts from the Griffith Park Observatory where the kids all posed in front of the Hollywood sign like tourists (and simultaneously dodged bees), and that was just the start.


There was still a whole lot of unpacking to do.