My power is back on as of yesterday, and after 12 days of urban camping, life is beginning to return to something close to normal.

Even with the sweet joy of a cool home and the modern conveniences that we're accustomed to, things somehow seem different. After being displaced from our regular life for so long, facing the tasks ahead to complete the clean up and get on with life still seem monumental. Perhaps I'm suffering from Post Hurricane Traumatic Stress Syndrome--a condition which I just made up, but which seems very real to me. I'm not sure. But even though I can once again sit at my beloved Mac and get back to work, there is much that remains to be done in picking up, cleaning up, and putting things back in their normal places. One of your local newspaper columnists, Frank Cerabino, captured that displaced feeling very well in talking about how he felt when his power finally came back on:

"It felt defeating, not to be able to feel comfortable in your own home. To have to be out in the world, at restaurants, at friends' houses, at a mall — someplace other than your own little sanctuary, that dark, sticky place that had changed from a home into a huge, unwelcoming storage shed for your things.

I could think of nothing more appealing than feeling normal again. To eat at home. To fall asleep watching TV. To get up in the morning and make a pot of coffee, rather than getting in line at the Dunkin' Donuts.

To have the luxury of feeling bored by routine, even."

I'm waiting for that bored routine feeling to return for me. Maybe in a few days when the mounds of laundry are washed and put away, the extension cords that are still snaking around in the house are out of sight, and the air mattress that we've slept on for nearly two weeks is deflated and the outdoor patio returned to a place to visit and not one in which you attempt to live.