Or less grandly the return to normal after the holiday.
Overall. This has been the story of my post-holiday return week, and I realised where I was going wrong on Friday. So I stopped thinking about what could go wrong and instead started thinking about what would go right. And like magic, it worked!!! 
Dirty Stop Out Cats. We’ve now got three cats, in the space of as many months. Max the Kitten, Felicity a one-year-old cat that we’ve inherited from my mother-in-law Elaine and our existing Queen Milly, who has been with us for a good eight years now. Of the three, Milly is the only one who hasn’t been lost. Felicity is still getting used to us, and only had been here ten days before we went on holiday, got startled three days into being looked after by our fearless warrior cat sitter Tania and ended up back across the road at Elaine’s. Fortunately, Evie had the sense to go over there looking for her on day one after we had returned home. Scardy cat won’t leave our room (which is a good thing in a way). Last night Max comes on the evening dog walk and didn’t want to come home disappearing into the front garden of a house down the street. Come bedtime still not here, and his people start getting concerned. Five thirty in the morning, I hear this crunching and tearing sound from the kitchen. I investigate its our Max tucking into a packet of cat treats 😀 But really cats, less drama and disappearing, please 🙂
Post From the Shroud #3 . This was a Kickstarter for D101 Games that I opened the week before we went away, to frankly pay for the expenses of the holiday and put some dough back in the Bank of D101. You know make money, like a business does (honestly I sometimes forget this). So I did a quick Old School D&D zine, using midjourney generated art (which I had created in evenings playing) for my Swords and Sorcery game Crypts and Things. It funded, and then some, and the week away was gently doing updates and resisting the temptation to offer new stuff as stretch goals. This week has been quietly sorting out finalising production of the zines the campaign funded and tapping my fingers waiting for the funds to arrive in my bank account next week.
Go Go Go to Go Play Manchester. We are back to face-to-face gaming at fanboy3 every month, and I kinda dropped the ball in organising promoting the September meetup on the 11th since I was away on my jollies, but it’s been quickly picked up since everyone is enthusiastic about it. I’m running Fallout the RPG for the first time, as part of an initiative to play games other than my own that have been sitting on my shelf too long. Fortunately, I know the setting inside out (from practically living in Fallout 4 in my PC gaming evenings), and the system is straightforward, clear and well supported.
Become like a Grey Rock. Unfortunately, I have a close family member who is a classic Narcissist. I use the tactics outlined in this article on a regular basis, to varying degrees of success. Given who this person is it’s very draining and even if I’m in a good mood, and in high spirits and the visit goes well I usually feel like I’ve been in the ring with an 800 LB Gorilla afterwards. So Grey Rocking is one to remember and visualise when I see them next.
Bracing for School return. Evie is going to do her final year at Crompton House School, doing her GSCE’s, and is really anxious about it. Lots of emotional support from myself and Rachel, that kicked in over the holiday. Henry, well Henry isn’t going back to Crompton House, because they failed to meet his needs as an Autistic child with an Educational Health Care Plan (EHCP). Grrr! So we are waiting to hear back from the local specialist school, which has been in and out of the office over the summer holidays. So H is in my care, next week (and probably a couple of weeks into term). We’ll have fun, I’ve got science kits, boardgames, dog walks and we went swimming for the first time in years last Friday and was well worth repeating 🙂
Elaine. I’ll probably do a blog post all of its own for this one because she really was an inspirational lady, but a week or so before we went to Norfolk my mother-in-law Elaine passed on. No one is bursting into big public dramas about this, she was very ill for a long time (since 2016 – which ironically was the last time we went to Norfolk before this one), and we were prepared and had made her as comfortable as possible, but I can sense the undercurrent of sadness and occasionally I get it myself. Practical matters are first and foremost. The aforementioned Felicity cat needs to settle in. And I’ve got a whole bungalow to clean and start sorting out before we sell it.
Oh and this week was also the week where Rachel went sort of viral on Twitter by telling the secret origin story of how we got together 😀