There's No Place Like Home (dustbunnies and all)

I'm baaaaaack! We had a good time and over the next few days I'll tell you about it, complete with incriminating pictures. But first.... We got bad news while we were gone. J's mom, who had been sick for a while, died early Wednesday morning, while we were at sea. His family managed to reach him Thursday when we were docked at Grand Cayman. They said we should finish our trip and they'd hold off on the funeral until we returned and we took them up on it. And believe it or not, we managed to have a nice time the last couple of days since we practiced fierce denial. But still. Sigh. Sunday morning, we got up early (5:30 am), and got off the ship as early as we were allowed to after the customs and immigration folks did their thing, and then went straight to the airport, certain we could get an earlier flight back home. We were SO very wrong. They were canceling and delaying flights right and left that day. Sheesh! Not only did we not get an earlier flight, but our original flight was one of the ones delayed. Aaarrrggghhh! As a result, we spent an hour on a bus, 10 hours in the airport, 2 hours on a plane, and another 2 hours in a car before finally arriving home around 12:30 am Monday morning. To say we were exhausted would be an understatement. The idea of sleeping in our own bed was heaven. Oh wait...what's this? Our cat, Sky, chose THIS trip, of all trips, to show his displeasure at our absence by using our bed as a frickin' litterbox!!! He's nearly nine years old and it's the first (and I hope, for his sake, LAST) time he's ever done anything like that. It's also the closest I ever came in my life to hurting an animal. Demonic possession is my theory. Take a look at this pic I took today and tell me I'm wrong. I SO couldn't deal with the bed problem at 1:00 am after the travel day from hell, so we ended up spending the night in the guest room. Pppfffttt. The next day I spent the morning paying some bills and doing some emergency laundry (the aforementioned bedding and some underwear!) and then we hopped in the car to drive 2 1/2 hours to J's hometown for his mom's wake and funeral. We won't talk about that because, really, what can you say? It's something we all have to go through and that's about the best that can be said. J is holding up about as well as you'd expect. We got home not long before dark yesterday and fell asleep early and deep, but not deep enough to prevent me from having a dream about being chased by rapidly breeding sentient dust bunnies. Did I mention that besides having MOUNTAINS of laundry to do, my house is filthy? Bleah. Ok, enough. I'll stop this depressing post and start another one about my new purse. I'd always rather laugh than cry.