Home Is Where the Plants Are

Soooo happy to be home from Arizona!

I took a red-eye home on Saturday, leaving AZ at 11:45 pm and arriving in Philly at 7 am. The flight felt surreal, the quiet and the dark; I would nod off for a bit, then jerk awake. There was a period of turbulence that was a little scary and definitely kept me awake and annoyed. We had a crying baby, but he was thankfully mostly quiet during the middle of the flight. The worst part was the guy in front of me who was farting in the beginning of the flight, every 15 minutes or so.

When my Uber dropped me off at home, I came in the back door to a puzzled Rocco (he remembered me after a second) and a big pile of doggie diarrhea. But honestly, I was so freaking glad to be home, I didn’t care. I cleaned it up, took out the trash, washed my face, brushed my teeth and collapsed into bed. I was asleep within five minutes and slept til noon.

After I finally got up, Tom brought me a Wawa latte and we all sat around catching up and watching the Eagles. Later, I did a lot of cleaning (they were all sick all week, and let things slide).

I also got out to the garden so I could water it and brush more of those gray aphids off the broccoli and Brussels sprouts. The plants are huge and I spied baby broccoli!

Tom had sent me some pictures of the plants during the week, and I know it sounds crazy, but seeing them felt like a balm. Like a viscerally soothing reminder of what was real and waiting for me at home.

I picked 30+ green beans on Sunday, and more today, as well as a few more tomatoes. But I started pulling out the tomato plants, and have just one left.

The beans have a purplish cast to them (one turned fully purple) but that is normal and it goes away when they are cooked.

Yesterday we had a memorial luncheon to go to (RIP Trav 😞) and Rocco had to go to the vet after he started vomiting too. It was a long, emotional day. I worked in the morning. I was glad to be off today for a doctor’s appointment, and spent an hour in the garden in the morning cleaning up. I still feel really spent.

I submitted a claim to our pet insurance for Rocco’s $700 vet visit. Later Tom said I shouldn’t have, since it wasn’t that much above the deductible, and I realized this whole time I’ve been envisioning this as a health care plan for the dog. It’s not! It’s property insurance, like homeowner’s insurance. Rocco is property.  If we make too many claims, they’ll drop us. So… hopefully no more claims for a while.

One new fun thing on this Arizona trip was using Merlin to identify birds:

I guess I’ll leave it at that for now, and resume my regular blogging schedule this weekend. Off to finish watching “Stiller/Meara.” I got a free one-week trial of Apple TV to watch it, and promptly cancelled it.