Home!

Long Beach
Originally uploaded by Brande Jackson.

After countless flights and endless airports, roads, hotels, cars and suitcases, it's always nice to look out the airplane window and see something familiar, like palm trees and sunshine and smog. I have been out on the road for over two months straight at this point, and actually had come to miss smog…

Texas went really really well and we had a lot of fun, but we were also starting to think we were never going to be allowed out: didn’t even book a flight until about 12 hours before we left and it took forever to do since we couldn’t get an internet connection at our hotel, trouble getting to the airport and dropping off the car, the SSSS (Super Special Security Screening, as we like to call it, a given if you book tickets last minute and fly nothing but one ways like we do!) screening that took forever and then, we go to board the flight, and the person tells me and Dan our reservation has been cancelled. ‘Um, but the tickets are paid for and we are checked in and went through screening and for once were actually here really early!” I was starting to panic, imagining myself just having to move to El Paso or something as this magnetic field was preventing us from leaving the state. The American Airlines girl just shrugged, ‘computer thing or something’ and printed us new boarding passes. She still has no idea of the terror she invoked in us.

I love and at this point think it's normal to live out of a suitcase, a pickup, planes and hotels, but it's cool (well, hot, actually) to be back somewhere where it is 83 degrees out right now. Coming home after being out working this long is weird, all of the sudden you have this massive appreciation of your own bed and shower and refrigerator...like, you never realize the awesomeness of your own hair dryer and washing machine until you have pretty much been gone for six months. Or the fact that seasons and time don’t seem normal or real until you are home: I didn’t even realize it was Halloween until I was driving up my street and saw all the pumpkins.

Anyhow, a whirlwind few days lie ahead: trying to catch up, both in terms of the endless mountain of work and seeing the people that I haven't in months, two shows at the Staples Center this week that are guarantee to be highly successful, and the chaos that usually surrounds coming home for a few days...