Moving on with life

We've been home for a week now, and life is starting to return to some sense of normalcy. (Or is it?) I'm taxi-cabbing once again. Between Lauren and band and Nathan with football, that keeps me busy driving. I don't even want to think about it once Lauren starts back to work. Heather is still pretty much of a homebody so the only thing I have to do with her is roust her away from the computer so that I can check my mail and make my blog entries. Can life be normal with three teenagers?

Work has been good. I've found that I actually missed it, and I certainly missed the people. I love the people with whom I work. They're like family to me. And they were all very excited to get the reports and see the pictures of our trip. I keep trying to remind them, however, that this wasn't a vacation. This really was a working trip, so we didn't get as many pictures as we might have if we were there on a vacation. It's kind of difficult to take pictures while you're being filmed!

We came home only to find our country in tremendous turmoil what with hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, the death of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renquist, the resignation of the director of FEMA, and gas prices soaring out the roof. It seems like things have literally been falling apart at the seams. It was difficult to stay abreast of everything while we were gone. We did catch a little of CNN International and got the terrible news concerning New Orleans but quite after-the-fact. (Every cab driver who figured out that we were Americans and who could speak English took the opportunity to express their extreme shock at this sort of thing happening in America. And, of course, every one of them said that Bush was an idiot.) All of this only served to make us want to hasten our permanent return to Vienna.

So here we are...patiently waiting as the film goes through the editing process. Our jobs are finished. Now we wait. It's due out around the end of December. I wonder how normal life will be after that?