I was not home by the end of the 26th as planned, so the vacation goes into an 8th day, and you get one more exciting day of hour by hour descriptions of my doings. On the drive home Nancy and I chatted about work. She hadnÕt been at my company for a couple years, but had lots of fun stories from her time there. I dropped her and Neil off at her house, then finally headed home, hoping that Kathy, who IÕd had checking on my birds while I was gone, had in fact remembered to leave the key for me. She had. I came in. The birds were fine, the apartment was clean as IÕd left it, and I was just about ready to immediately pass out and go to bed.
But I didnÕt. I plugged in my laptop and got back on the internet and sent out the 95 messages I had built up in my Outbox since IÕd left, and got the 487 new email messages that were waiting for me to come home. 313 of them got automatically filed off as spam. Lovely Spam. How exciting.
But I started to read and answer the mail that had come in, and I watched some TV that my TiVo had grabbed for me while I was gone. I kept going for a number of hours, also trying to stay up until around my normal bedtime so as to fix the whole jetlag thing, and then I just sort of fell asleep.
I did wake up spontaneously at around 08:00 GMT, when I had been waking up back in England. But I looked at the clock, and decided to go right back to sleep again for a few more hours.
I wanted to sleep more. I didnÕt want to get up and go to work. But I slowly dragged myself up out of bed. But then I just started answering email instead of actually getting ready for work. At least for a little while. But eventually I had to get up and go to work.
Ah yes. Work. I came in and some people were having a meeting in my office. I just let them continue while I slid in behind them, plugged in my work laptop, and started checking my work email. Over the course of the day I slowly got up to speed with what had been happening while I was gone. A few things. Not too much.
Meanwhile, of course everyone asked about my vacation. I told them it had been a great vacation, I loved Aylesbury, and to check my website for more information in a few days once I had posted pictures and the like.
But the main thing at work was that it was tie day. Every three weeks a bunch of us pick a theme out of a bowl, and three weeks later everybody has to wear a tie with that theme. This time the theme was ŅWordsÓ. So everybody had to wear ties with words on them. Then everybody votes on who has the worst representation of the theme. That person has to buy everyone else lunch. We also vote on who has the best representation of the theme, that person gets an extra vote they can use on some future tie day.
Everybody was counting on me forgetting tie day completely since it was my first day back from vacation. But before I even left I had gotten myself a tie with a Scrabble theme (and thus lots of words) and had placed it in a prominent position in my closet. So I was fine. One other guy, Nick, did completely forget his tie though, so he automatically lost and had to do the buying lunch thing. For the best tie (you are not allowed to vote for yourself), it was a three way tie (including me). Ties are broken by number of previous votes against you, and Carlos had no previous votes against me as opposed to 4 votes each for me and Rob, the other tied people. So Carlos got the extra vote.
We didnÕt have the free lunch from Nick that day though, because there was a fondue lunch organized by one of the artists on the floor, Rose. So everybody piled into a conference room and had food. Except me. As of returning home, I am on a last minute charge to attempt to win the BMI and %BF contests I was in for 2002Q1, so no food for me. But it was a fun lunch anyway. A lot of people asked me about my vacation, why I went where I did, etcÉ which led to a discussion of the whole random vacation thing. It was fun.
The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. A few meetings. Catching up on politics and gossip. Finding out what was going on with the various projects I am involved in. Etc.
Soon though, it was time to go home.
So then, finally, I got home and the last day of my vacation was finally ending. I still hadnÕt unpacked and the like. That would come later. For now, it was time to just be home, relaxÉ and start working on updating my website with all the stuff from this latest random tripÉ and after that, pick the next random trip.