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Back to piles of marking, internet glitches, portals f*cked, phone calls to IT people and booking.com (site down and multiple charges made to debit card for duplicate bookings); what a mess normal life is. Administrators have all been sacked to save money, and recorded voices offer options you don't want, IT professionals gaslight you with impunity, then have to actually apologise (horrors!) when the whole site collapses, and things that should have take half a day will now take the whole weekend.
I'm so glad I went away.
I am looking forward to hearing the recordings.
I met my friend Laura, whose whole family have been friends with my family for three generations and who I haven't seen since she was twelve and I was fourteen; we went to YWCA camp together and managed to survive the experience. We wandered around Boston and then went back to her lovely house in the New Hampshire countryside to talk, eat and catch up.
I went to visit Jane and her baby Emile and ate leek and potato soup in their apartment in Brooklyn, and I met up with Jenn Pelly, who has just completed the book on the Raincoats, for a coffee and a long chat.
Add to that the meandering (seven miles one day, eight miles another), the quirky museums (more to come on that after the marking mountain has been conquered), the park, the YMCA (a unique experience) and a seamless journey back after a struggle through the muggy rush hour Subway with a  suitcase that defied my 'poorly arm', and it has been bliss to be on a completely different planet for a few days.
No jetlag on the way back- how peculiar. Offsprog One reckons that maybe my body clock simply didn't adjust, which makes sense. And now also for the fifth attempt at re-writing the academic article that bounces back as regularly as a rubber ball. This time, though, I'm doing it for the sistaz and will publish myself if they don't do it!