I spent the last five days sitting on a porch, drinking beer, fishing and enjoying the now-annual rite of getting to know my family.

We see each other about once a year these days, so my trips down to South Carolina carry with them an odd urgency, but also a strange sense of detachment. The journeys are part house party, part family reunion and part anthropology experiment. It’s as if by seeing everyone as rarely as we do, when we are together you get a clearer glimpse of the ways we’re built the same.

By the end of the five days, I was ready to come back. The trip could not have been more perfectly timed, to be honest. It was wedged in between the end of my old employment and the beginning of the projects I’ve put in front of me, and so it created a natural scene change of sorts. For five days I didn’t see a cloud in the sky, and most of my thoughts were on the next meal or the next beer.

But by the end of it, I was ready to be back home. I’ve been away from South Carolina for so long, and return so infrequently now, that I carry with me very little of my daily life when I go back. It’s difficult to meld the two places and parts of me, and so they end up fighting for space and time.

Having returned, now back in D.C., it’s time to focus on the Mount Pleasant Project. It’s time to start doing the work I left work to do.

I actually began work a week ago, on the Friday before I left for South Carolina. Only a fool would get disheartened on the first day of a long project, but I have to admit that I started to feel signs of frustration just a few hours into the work.

Mentally, I have the idyllic picture in my head of my neighborhood