Last week we were back home in sweet New Jersey, helping some people do some things. Everyone is A-OK now; thanks for asking. I thought about posting regularly during the week while we were in the US, but I think I am discovering that I am just not going to be one of those blog people who tries to get everything from real life onto the internet. Who really wants to know all that stuff?

A lot of people asked if it was going to be weird to return to America, as if the we had gone through some kind of awkward breakup with the US and were now about to be seated next to John Negroponte, the Ambassador to the UN, at a mutual friends’ wedding.

Us: Oh. Hello, John.
US Ambassador John Negroponte: Hi. On behalf of the American people, you’re looking well. Did you lose weight?
Us: Yeah, you too. So, it’s…uh…been awhile.
USAJN: Yeah. Four months. Uh…I mean, I think four months. Or whatever. I haven’t been counting.
Us: Right. So…are you seeing anyone? I mean, did you know that your name means Black Bridge in Spain?
USAJN: It’s Italian. Don’t you pay attention to anything? Um, listen…I have to go talk to that guy over there. But great to run into you.

But it wasn’t odd at all. Maybe we had to think a little to decide what language to speak to the flight attendants in on the KLM flight from Barcelona to Amsterdam to Newark. When we’re here, we sort of try to speak Spanish even if English is possible, you know, to learn it. But when Dutch flight attendants speak English and Spanish, and we’re in, for example, Iceland’s airspace, then what? Mostly we slept, making this wholly uninteresting debate academic as well.

The time in the hospital was, thankfully, very boring after a few edgy hours in the beginning of the week. At about noon on Monday, the heart surgeon came into the hall. He used the exact same tone of voice and affect as the guys who run the service department at the Subaru dealer in Arlington to explain that he had done this and that, and that everything was fine. He was so mellow that I half expected him to say that he had replaced the spark plugs while he was at it.

This trademark surgeon’s calm has been popping up all week as numerous well-wishers have shared what they tried to make sound like their big secret about choosing a good person to cut you open and fiddle around with your innards: “That’s what you want,” they all said, in the same sideways tone of voice used to pass on stock tips. “Someone who does this 700 times a year. Someone who thinks it’s routine.” Uh, thanks. Is there a debate about this? What’s the other side of the argument – that maybe an inexperienced surgeon is better because she’ll be more excited to see what’s going on: “Ooh! Look! It really is heart-shaped! Like a big Valentine! I better buckle down.”?

One thing that did strike us about being back on our home turf, aside from how frigging cold it gets in New Jersey (but not inside houses), was how much TV there is to watch and how many magazines there are to read. We brought home one suitcase with a few clothes and a bunch of gifts and were excited to travel light coming back to Barcelona. We returned with two suitcases: one with clothes and another with books and New Yorkers. I had been promising myself that even if my Spanish never gets very good, at least I would have finished Middlemarch by the time we go home, since we had so little to read. Now, I’m not so sure of either. We are also left with one more suitcase than airlines actually allow you to check, so someone will be taking it home after their visit.

We also crammed in the entire fourth season of the Sopranos, thanks to Derek’s dedicated taping efforts and a few three-hour stints in front of the TV. Actually, we got in nearly all of them. We left ourselves only an hour to watch the season finale, but, alas, it was 75 minutes long. Tony and AJ were having a heart-to-heart in the guest house when we realized we would miss our plane if we waited any longer. Why the world can’t come up with a universal VCR is beyond me. And the same goes for electrical outlets. What point are we trying to prove? Is there something cultural tied up in the voltage and Hertz requirements for world’s electronics?

Anyhow, we fled to the airport, where five million people were trying to beat the super-blizzard. The ticket-checker for Northwest asked to see our return tickets, marking the first time anyone, aside from friends and relatives, had registered the slightest bit of interest in whether we would ever be leaving Spain, a country we are really only allowed to live in for six months. And now we’re back. Spain, for its part, was not offended that we went to see our old flame. The Europeans understand these things.

By the way, our phone works again.