This morning I jumped out of bed at 7 a.m., realizing we forgot to put the garbage out.

My husband took the dog for a walk as I scurried around the house, sweeping every paper receipt, toilet paper roll and stray ice cream container (hey, it’s been a hard week) into the recycling bin. The garbage was easier – tied the bag up, plastered my neon orange city-certification sticker on it and rushed it out to the curb just as the truck was pulling up.

It’s funny the things you never think about when you’re a long way from home, living out of your backpack and steadily disposing of any accumulated waste as you go (or shoving it in your journal to be either scrap-booked back home or thrown out a decade later). I probably desperately need a vacation, but that’s what I was thinking as I breathed a sigh of relief, poured a cup of tea, fired up the computer and entered my Gmail account.

Needless to say, it was nice to move from a meditation on garbage (and, believe me, I could talk a bit more about that if I had the inclination…) to the news that my blog made Travelhacker‘s list of the top hundred travel blogs.

I’m up there with such esteemed bloggers as The Lost Girls, three twenty-something New Yorkers who just, well, took off, Slow Travel, a blog by writer Ed Gillespie who took a flight-free trip around the world, writing columns for the Guardian along the way, and Nerd’s Eye View, where she’s written a great post about how to keep your travelblog alive when you’re not traveling… NOT on the list: talk about the monotonous chores that bind us to home.

Oh, well.