Home, but Not Home Yet; To Be Continued?

As of about 3:30 p.m. yesterday, I've been back in the States. As I hinted at earlier, it's a bittersweet return, mainly because London became such a home in the last eight weeks.

I'm not home yet, though; despite a Welcome Back dinner at Applebee's with maternal relatives on the Eastside of Indy, I haven't made it back to the house yet. Instead, the family and I are in Michigan, right off the lake, taking a small vacation. It's small because my brother and I have to go home on Tuesday to work on Wednesday. (Dang responsibilities!) We'll be hanging out with my sister, a cousin, and an uncle up here, doing some fishing and playing the family card game: hand and foot. (If you don't know it, let me teach you some time. It's a long game, but as such it's highly social.)

As I ease back into regular life, I begin to think of keeping a regular blog. I mean regular in two senses: the one from the first clause of the sentence, meaning ordinary/not from London, Paris, or Dublin; and the one from a calendar, meaning a post per week or every four days or something. This travel blog is the first consistent record of my life's doings that I've kept, and given the success of this I might do more.

I've told one person that I'd like to keep a diary that's almost as thorough as hers ("almost" because I can't ever hope to be that complete!), but that comment refers more to a private journal than a public Web log. There is also the concern that, let's face it, my life isn't that interesting and it would be hard to keep up a blog where the usual entry would be:

Wednesday 15 July: Did some orthopedic research today. I chatted it up with the statisticians and talked about the current project over the phone with the head doctor. In my spare time, I checked Facebook a few times and visited icanhascheezburger.com once. Drove home in 90-degree heat and a faulty air conditioner.

I can expand on these everyday things, of course, by finding meaning or reasons or motivation or something, even if it's just for mental exercise. I wonder, however, if all of that will only be enjoyable for me. I don't think there's a wide audience for my daily activities or private thoughts. (If I'm wrong, by all means let me know! Then I can judge if you're a stalker or not. :D )

...God, I wish I could go back to London. I'm with my family right now, and I just finished an epic game of hand and foot (my sister and I were beasts!), so I should be firmly back home mentally. But no. I was walking in Lake Michigan earlier today, and all I could think about was London: what I had done, what I hadn't done, who I had met, who I wanted to get to know better, how my laptop is still on British Summer Time, everything. I love it back home, but... sigh. That's the only concise response I have. Sigh.

I might have more responses later: photos I skipped uploading, memories that somehow missed the blog, final observations of the city, lyrics ripped from a Billy Joel song. I'll be processing this trip for a while, so I don't know how many appendices I'll add to this Web log. Some processing, inevitably, will make it into the next blog (hey, I made my decision already!), but it won't be quick. Like I said earlier, there will be a Before London and an anno Brittanica to my life now.

So, besides the coming appendices, I now formally close the blog. As A.B began at 9 a.m. BST on 4 July 2009 (time is approximated, just to make future calculations easier), and as it's now 6:45 p.m. EDT on 5 July 2009, right now it is day 1 and 15:45 hours of the rest of my life. Here it goes.