Time to go home

I'm torn.  

I love my holiday, despite some of the 'trials' of being alone. 

I love wandering around Animal Kingdom. 

I love walking around Epcot at night waiting for the fireworks.

I love the sun (at last there is sun, and heat!) and trips to the seaside.

However...

Exciting things are happening at home.

My baby son's new family! His wife, my lovely daughter-in-law, joined him in the UK last week.  She flew, WITH HER HORSE Izzy, from New York City. I am looking forward to meeting Izzy and Busby, the absurdly tiny pony they have bought as a companion.  

I'm going home next week!

To be serious for a moment

I like my own company.  Not all the time, but now and again.  I like the tidiness and order; I like the calm and quiet.  However, I suffer from tinnitus, and I hadn't before appreciated quite how bad it is. When you're in a house full of people, with the radio on, the sounds of life around the house, you can forget that noise in your head.  It's not that noticeable.  But here, on my vacation in solitude, there are not that many noises.  It's peaceful and quiet.  Except that it isn't quiet.  It's in fact incredibly noisy.  There are two (sometimes three) screaming noises in my head, and they are discordant. You'd think the brain could at least make some sort of harmony out of this but no.  If the radio or television made these noises, you could turn them off, complaining that modern music had gone one step too far.  If people made these noises, you'd tell them to stop making such a racket.  If animals made these noises you'd take them to the vet.  

Tinnitus is horrible.  The saddest part is that I will never hear silence again.  I can stand in the quietest spot on earth, wherever that may be, and there will always be the screaming.  But at least I can see it 😃

Can't sleep. Look at photographs instead.

My lovely brother gave me a photographic challenge for this holiday - to post one photo a day on Flickr. I've just posted photo number 11, on day 29 (which is better than my regularity with blogging). Initially I was going to photograph everyday objects in interesting settings.  Even writing that sentence is pretty boring, so that idea didn't get off the ground.  Turns out there's not much (that is remotely interesting) that you can do with a mug except drink out of it. So I made myself some hot chocolate and gave up that idea.  I looked for the photo, but I've deleted it!

Next idea was stripes.  

The rug in the sitting room

Shadows on a cold morning walk

And a zebra unimpressed by all the attention focuses on him

I like stripes.  Would it be too cruel to publish the bright white stripe across my friend's face? She fell asleep in the sun, with her sunglasses on.  Really white.  Too cruel.  Funny, but too cruel.  

The day after

Yesterday was Valentine's Day.  

And just like our wedding anniversaries, we both forgot to do anything about it.  No cards or flowers (why would my husband want flowers anyway?). No romantic gestures.  Nothing.  Anyway, we are 4500 miles apart!  But on our daily FaceTime chat, just as he was drifting off to sleep sitting in front of the computer screen (it was almost midnight for him), I remembered and said, "Happy Valentine's Day.  I suppose my flowers will arrive tomorrow."  He woke enough to laugh (slightly hysterically, I thought).  It was very romantic.

Much better than flowers, this morning I was facetimed by all three men in my life, all hale and hearty in the freezing cold, building a stable ready for the arrival of a horse and a pony at the end of the week.  

Sam looks really really cold!  Here it's going to be 25C today.  I'm not going to build anything 😃