Back home for almost a day now, just waiting for the jetlag to kick in. That’s the way it always is, you know – you get home feeling like, this time, you’ve got the inflight napping, Ambien-balanced resynchronization right. You’re dog tired at bedtime – the right bedtime – and fall into deep, dreamless sleep, waking refreshed at 7:30 the next morning. Perfect, eh?

It’s only the next night that you snap awake at midnight, brain and body ready to go to work on GMT+5 hours. And the next night, and the next.

So that’s what I’m expecting tonight. To leave me bleary-eyed and fresh as a dumpster daisy when I get into work tomorrow, ready to be ambushed by everyone and everything that’s been waiting for me to get back.

This trip was really about a week too long. Bangalore… yeah, I could’ve skipped Bangalore. I suppose I did some good there, but my brain and body were aching to get back to the relative quiet of Palo Alto. Walking to/from the office each day, stepping across broken, uneven slabs of sidewalk concrete navigating the curbside avalanches of black plastic garbage bags. The air, thick with engine exhaust, and the din, the constant din everyone leaning on their horn for the length of the street. It just got to me, I guess.

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud (really – out loud. The folks I was passing must’ve thought I was a bit off) at the irony of the line that kept coming to me as I made that walk

“I am sick o’ wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’ stones…”

Kipling, tired of life in London, and wishing he were back in Burma – the “greener, cleaner land”. And there I was, not that far from Burma, lamenting that I wasn’t back in my a greener, cleaner land – California.

In any case, I’m back now, and it’s good to be back. In the past three weeks, I’ve flown quite literally around the world, crossing every line of longitude eastbound in succession. Next roadtrip, in a couple of weeks, is less ambitious: New York, to meet with our counterparts for a week of teambuilding. But there’s plenty of time to worry about that later. Now, it’s time to get to bed.

[Update, 3:35 a.m.: sigh – sometimes it sucks to be right.]