Almost time to go to sea

I'm running out of fresh limes. My lime bush (I trim it to 5', as my wife is short) is down to 2-3 ripe limes, which means that it's obviously almost time to go back to sea.

 As an experiment, I bought rum this time. I drink Brazilian 'rum' which is not properly rum, the eponymous cachaca, a lovely drink used to make caiperinha, the national Brazilian cocktail and also a very effective liquid panty remover. 
 Cachaca is to rum as scotch is to whiskey, if that helps.

 Anyhow, muddled limes being the key ingredient, the lime bush is running low, as we also did some cooking that required limes- my barbecued shrimp and a few other things.

    Honestly, it's been kind of 'meh' here at home this time. I really didn't get enough free time to relax, but there was some good if stressful stuff happening.

    I got off the HQ on crew change day and took the train to Boston to have a late Christmas with family. My wife road tripped up there 10 days before, a 1500 mile drive with her mom, a blind senior citizen who speaks no English, and our kid, who's 12, and not yet ready to spell his mom at the wheel.

    So we had a few days together, saw family, and it was lovely. Really great. But the car was making an annoying noise when you stomped the gas, and for the life of me I couldn't find the issue, and I lost half a day out of my 3 days with family chasing down an exhaust leak, spent a small fortune for a single part, and it didn't help with the noise. So that soured me a bit. Her foreign car has a 200hp engine, supposedly, but you can't hardly squeeze a hand anywhere to prod at the thing, and it looks like mad scientist's masturbation fantasy under the hood anyhow.
 At any rate, along with saying 'wow, it's ugly and dark and dirty and cold here' about 20 times a day to each other, we also made racecar noises every time one of us stepped on the gas, as that's pretty much what it sounded like.
 (note: turns out, the problem was that the air filter box had become unclamped from the air intake at the engine. So... that happened. And I failed to catch it, so I should probably turn in my penis and testicles. But I won't.)

So, leaving my mother-in-law behind for a few months with my wife's brother, the nuclear B family road-tripped the 1500 miles back to Margaritaville, along with all the people over 60 from the world, who also drove down the 95 corridor from north to south. In a Jap car that sounded like a Vette when you  stomped the gas.
 Fuck it, Savannah was nice, anyhow. We stopped there to sleep, but didn't get to sightsee except for the view from a lovely hotel room.
      Once we got home, it was a matter of moving back in after a couple week's absence. My wife packed 4 giant suitcases for herself, and my kid and I pretty much had little bitty gym bags, but that equaled a lot of laundry. Pretty much most of this week has been about my wife's admin work at her church, which hasn't left much time for much beyond the odd hours here and there for us to bask in the sun (or moon) and enjoy the fact that everything is green and warm again... which sounds nice, but in reality, I actually need a lot of that to keep my head in the game. I may sound like I'm bitching about nothing, but I rely on my home life to keep me in balance against my job, and I'm probably getting spoiled there, as I no longer work 45 weeks a year like I used to.
  Ah well, couple more days, I'll sober up some, get back to work.