what you learn from 15 years

Hard to believe, but the jetlag continues, and so does the secondary jetlag. Young ms. has been back in the time zone five days, but we're both still waking before 6 am, and she's still crashing at midday (with us parents trying everything to keep her awake).

Today, though, she fell asleep in the car on the way back from Tel Aviv (okay, we stopped to pick up sushi, so that didn't help) and when we got home at 8:30 she went straight to bed.

Damn, wouldn't mind THAT being permanent!

So we went to Tel Aviv to welcome the in-laws back from their month of fabulous weather in Germany. They've made it a habit to get away every August, and now end up at the same place near Munich every year, near "the baths" which they visit every other day. They've returned very relaxed, and it's good to see my father-in-law mellowed out.

Yesterday, Mr. & Ms. Squarepeg and I went to my company's annual picnic at a kibbutz pool not far from here. It's always weird parading around in one's bathing attire in front of people one spends most of one's time deliberately covered up in front of. But whatever. I'm getting incrementally less vain as time goes on, so was relatively unconcerned about the mashed-potato thighs and horrid wet-hair-just-out-of-swimming-pool look.

Oh, who am I kidding? At least my usually-glamorous boss looked just as horrid in her ugly two-piece.

The kid had fun with the water activities, and it was a nice outing, but the mr. was determined to leave right after lunch and get back to Saturday soccer matches and like a junkie was going through withdrawal after half a day away from the betting forms. All the way home he was gnashing his teeth and muttering, "I haven't had time to concentrate!"

Listen, we've just marked our 15th anniversary this week (yes, amazing, I know, thank you very much) and the upside of that is that the dark forest with all its nasty creatures looks very familiar now, and not much is worth getting riled up about anymore. (Hey, you take whatever upsides you've got -- they are, by definition, relative.) So even when there's a bad day, a really bad day, you can say, "No worries; been around this sharp turn before and I know it all works out in the end. I'll just go take a little time-out."

When others are cranky, withdrawal works wonders.