Vacation Recovery Schedule

If you go away overnight, your recovery time once you get home is about twenty minutes. Sort, one days mail, unpack one outfit, put clothes in hamper, not enough for a load of laundry, everything in the house is just as you left it.

Go away for the weekend— recovery time is about 30 minutes. Not much more than an overnight.

Go away for a week — recovery time is about seven hours hours. Sort the mail and deal with the recycling that inevitably comes from junk catalogs, unpack the suitcases and run a dark and a light laundry, fold and put away. Go to the grocery and restock milk, eggs, bread, fruits and veg. Make sure nothing went astray outside of the house.

Go away for a month— recovery time is about ten hours. All the things you do in a week, but more laundry, more mail, more shopping and paying the house sitter.

Go away for six weeks — recovery time is three days. Everything in a month, plus cleaning out the broken fridge, throwing away all the food that has broken down and liquified and turned to mold, then going to the store to buy a new fridge, waiting three days for it to be delivered so you can go to the store and spend twice as much time rebuying all the condiments you had to throw away. Getting over the heart break of throwing out all the tomatoes you oven dried in hopes of turning them into soup this winter.

I may be recovered by tomorrow. One can only hope.