Returning Home

I was gone for a long time on my trip.  It felt good to finally sleep in my own bed, and have a chance to cook my own food.  I didn't realize exactly how long I was away until I got back.  I returned to LA to find that my company had technically sold the department I work for to someone else.  And then once I got back home, my dad informed me that he is now engaged to be married, and is planning to sell his house and move.  My brother also moved to North Carolina while I was away, so there has been a lot of change around here.

On top of that, I got quite sick the last few days of the trip, which didn't make the flight home any more enjoyable.  I am still trying to recover from that, but it is hanging on.  That leads to the ever present question as to where the balance is between relaxing and recovering, and wasting time.  I have gotten a couple hours of productive work in ever day, but relatively little has gotten accomplished, and I am not feeling much better.  So it would appear I haven't found the proper balance yet.  It has been really hard to focus on anything useful for too long, which is the biggest issue.  Even writing this is challenging.  I wonder if this is what it is like for other people all the time.

Among other things on the to-do list, I need to start going through all of the stuff I may want from my dad's house, before he moves.  I have been working on this for the last year or two with no real rush, but that is going to change.  It is always interesting going through things from the distant past, because while I have a pretty good memory, other little details are still triggered by looking through things I use to have and use.  I am going to throw a lot of stuff away that we have probably been keeping for way too long.  But every once in a while those things do come in handy, and I am the type of guy who knows where I keep things, even after years.  Two days ago, I found my old camp staff manuals when sorting through boxes at my Dad's, and placed them in the garbage pile.  I thought more about it, and while I would never need them directly, they might be good reference material to create a new one somewhere else.  So I took them home instead, and this morning someone starting a camp unexpectedly came by the house to meet with me, and asked for them.  But outside those corner cases, most people keep all sorts of stuff that they are never going to need.

I have a fairly small house, which should help that issue, but a huge barn that does not.  Both my dad and my brother are hoping to store things there in the near future, and not small things.  The biggest thing I need to sort through and move, is my Lego collection.  I intend to give it to my children someday, and have already come to recognize that they will almost certainly destroy them.  I broke a few as a very deliberate kid, and they are old and more brittle by now, so they don't stand a chance.  But they are toys, and toys are meant to be played with, and not just sit in a back room assembled into well designed and engineered models as a permanent shrine to my ingenuity as a child.  I thought that the Lego movie was brilliant at addressing that issue, even as a guy who values order and perfection.  So I have to go through and pack them all up, which is a task that will be impossible to stay focused on, so it will take a while.