Life is a runaway train

These are the feet of people I really miss right now!

Today has been very sunny and lovely and yes, another actual day off! I hesitate to say that because this is the second day off I've had in the past two weeks and that is rare. So I slept in today and then decided to spend the day in the garden to enjoy the weather. This led to lunch in the garden and coffee in the garden and then more coffee in the garden and finally, when the sun had gone firmly behind the clouds at around 3pm, I decided to come in the house and do something else rare. As rare as sitting in my garden (and not freezing) on a Saturday...spend the next few hours doing nothing but reading. So I kept on for awhile with my recent favourite book, already mentioned here, and after awhile, I decided to add some fiction into the mix and started reading another book I've had on my shelf for ages and have been wanting to get to. xyz xyz and hours passed...

But the whole time I was feeling this twinge I kept ignoring until I finally stopped to think about it and recognised I'd been feeling this since I woke up. Homesick. It's been nearly 3 weeks now since I returned from my US trip, which means nearly 3 weeks since I've seen my family and the feet of these two lovely people pictured here above. For those that live near or even too-near their families, 3 weeks may seem just the right amount of time to not see them, or maybe not long enough yet. But for me, today is perhaps the first time I've really felt that it's just the first 3 weeks of what usually turns out to be nearly a year of away-from-family-ness. So it feels like there's a long time to go until I see them again. These first three weeks just the tip of the iceberg.

Today if I were with them I'd want to go for a long walk, then maybe play a few games. Our recently acquired favourite has been mah jong, which I've been learning to play over here, and while I was there got my family obsessed with too. Pung! Kong! and usually Dad won, but it was the fun of the game and being together and sitting round the table watching my mother's cat stare at rabbits out the window while we all tried to decide if we wanted to have a bonfire that night... I miss it!

And if they were here, they'd have been wearing even more layers than me in the English-spring weather of my garden and my sister would've probably been discussing my vegetable pots with me, or why my cats were trying to climb the trellis and whether we were going for a walk. So mainly the same stuff, but at least we'd be together, all together.