“Home Leave”

We returned to Seattle for 10 days.

I had to go to the corporate offices for face time (and a lot of lunches 🙂

It is a long way to go for just 10 days. I just have planned for a longer stay. We didn’t get a chance to accomplish everything we wanted to do. Neither all the work goals, nor all of the personal goals were attained. Amazing how 10 days can slip by.

We did get to do the highlights:

The pub:

Our 2nd living room when we are in Seattle. This is the kind of place, for us, that is a real touchstone. It was our first stop, after checking in to our hotel. There are lots of ways that people that live in Seattle, “know” when they are “home”

• seeing The mountain
• seeing the needle
• seeing the sound

for us, it is seeing all the friendly faces at BPP. The beer doesn’t hurt either.

The Goat Roast:

This was a lot of fun, though I did crash for a couple hours during the middle of the party. Jet lag is a terrible thing. We got to see people in “wholesale quantities” that enabled us to at least briefly chat with people we probably would not have been able to see otherwise.

Didn’t get to spend enough time with the hosts unfortunately.

Oh, and Martin: thanks for all the “middle eastern” food. It was _sooo_ nice to see all that tabouleh and such. [bastidge]. The only reason you are still alive is that there was a big pot of pulled pork.

We had lunch and dinner at some of our favorite restaurants, ate a lot of pork, and drank a bit of good beer.

Kaddee was a shopping queen, getting all those silly little items that can’t be found here.

We visited the house and picked up a bunch of items that we had shipped there, and some items from storage.

It was great to reconnect with my cow-orkers as well. I do miss the day-to-day banter with them. They are a great group of people.

Leaving Seattle this time was harder than I imagined it would be. Last year, when we left, we were off on “an adventure”. So that was a large distraction from “the leaving”.

This time, while living in Egypt is still an adventure and a positive thing, there aren’t really any surprises.

This meant that leaving this time caused more reflection on the leaving of Seattle and less on the arriving in Cairo. There was more of a sense of loss this time. For me anyway.

Long term expats say that leaving home after home leave gets easier as time goes on.

For me, I sincerely hope they are wrong.