Back to reality

 I am gradually readjusting to 'real life' after two months away.  I have grudgingly taken up some cooking chores again, and done some housecleaning.  I am still pulling out literal armfuls of giant weeds from the garden - DH took a full carload to the dump today and I've still got another third of the garden to go.  I've been experiencing some aches and pains because instead of standing and walking almost all day, I am now sitting most of the day apart from a daily walk. I paid for some plants with my card today and realised that the till clerk was waiting for me to touch my card, whereas I was automatically waiting for her to rattle off the standard Japanese polite phrases about sorry for keeping you and use your card now etc. before I touched the card.  I had some friends over for a few hours and was absolutely exhausted by the end of it, after two months of largely solo travel I am just not used to speaking to other people for that long.  I have totalled up the number of photos I took over two months and it is 6,031 - even I don't feel like going through that many photos but I have started to weed out duplicates.  I've crossed a lot of boring priority stuff off my To Do list like checking insurance renewals.  I've bought a new phone (mine reached 'end of life' while I was travelling, I am sad because I really like it but without security updates it will become vulnerable) and survived the process of transferring my data over.  It took almost two hours, 90 minutes of which was repeatedly transferring the sim card back and forth between the old and new phone as I tried to convince Whatsapp to back up my chat messages on the old phone then restore them on the new. Got there in the end.

So in other words, lots of tedious real life stuff and very little 'fun' holiday stuff apart from we did have a nice dinner out.  A touch of post holiday blues I think.

I have reacquainted myself with my sewing room, although I haven't found places to put away all the new acquisitions yet.  I needed a warm up project so I made an unlined version of this free Tilda Toiletry Bag to hold some small things in my suitcase.

That was fun so I used some of my new Japanese fabric to make two more with quilted exteriors.

I blocked the little shawl that I knit while I was travelling, using the hand dyed fingering weight I bought in Iceland.  It reminds me of a grand piano with the shape.

I've also been working on a summer kimono (yukata) in quilting cotton fabric that I bought in Tokyo's Nippori fabric town, relying heavily on a video by kimono expert Billy Matsunaga.  There is a lot of hand sewing to catch down all the seam allowances neatly inside.  I also bought  a book in English and Japanese on how to wear yukata which has a step by step guide to getting dressed in one, so I will make an attempt once mine is finished.  If it doesn't work out, I can always re-purpose the fabric as quilt backing :)