Catch-up

Let’s see if I can do a post without LJ or our faux-broadband connection eating it. :( Phil is online on the PS2, and everything is at a crawl.

I’m finally catching up on sleep. (“I’m so jetlagged, dahling.”) I confess that I fell asleep during Phil’s dodgy copy-from-a-guy-in-a-pub version of Shrek 2; it was very funny, but I was so out of it. I’ve spent today and yesterday trying to wade through formatting 700 images for Amazon – not even for our site, but for the US one!!! And so I haven’t been able to touch any of the broken code littering the site, which is still reeling from its very soft launch.

I went out to the stable to see Kip after work, who seems to be enjoying his extended pasture sabbatical due to not having any shoes (although he has a nasty bite on his shoulder and another on his neck). Finally found a farrier, who has agreed to come out on July 14th – yaay!!! I can finally ride him again! I thought he was going to turn into the most expensive pet on the planet.

It’s so nice to be home, here in England where everything is so soft and green. I realised without a shadow of a doubt that this country is well and truly, in every sense of the word, home. The land where I grew up is a harsh land, beautiful in many ways but very hard. Water is precious; grass is expensive both in terms of the water and the effort spent to maintain it. Where expense and effort have been spared, the land is dry and brown, broken only by the pines, sagebrush and buckbrush rooted deeply in the earth. Cattle and horses forage ceaselessly in brown pastures.

I don’t mean it to sound like a desert – it is not. Just normal California dryland, beautiful in places (Mount Shasta being one), but very different from this soft and welcoming environment. I was never a desert person; although the Painted Desert or the Grand Canyon can impress me to speechlessness, it doesn’t fill my heart the way that these soft, green hills do. It would never be home.

For the first time in my adult life, I feel that I have truly come home.