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.

6 thoughts on “Catch-up”

  1. Welcome home!!! :)

    I totally know what you mean about coming back ‘home’. It’s just visiting when I go back myself now. At times, I just am aching to get back here. :) It is nice to see the family and friends and visit, but it’s always lovely to come home.

    *BIG HUGS*

  2. wandringsoul

    It’s not my fault…I was offline by the time you posted it..it’s LJ being slow…helloooooo poweres-that-be – it SUCKS lately!

    Someone change the hamster…

    *sigh*

  3. *hugs back* I know that you can relate to these posts…it’s nice to know someone who does. :)

    And ignore Phil below…he’s a bandwidth hog, he was chatting via EyeToy. SOCOM II my ass. Hahahaha…

    (ducks)

  4. People’s tastes on Kipling vary; some people love him (myself included), others hate him for his jingoism. His love for England is evident, though:

    http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/sussex.html

    No tender-hearted garden crowns,
    No bosonied woods adorn
    Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
    But gnarled and writhen thorn —
    Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
    And, through the gaps revealed,
    Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
    Blue goodness of the Weald.

    But I, for my sins, am a Shropshire lad …

    Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
    Is hung with bloom along the bough,
    And stands about the woodland ride
    Wearing white for Eastertide

  5. The best thing about art (novels, poetry, paintings) is that immediate sense you get of “Yes, that’s exactly it – that’s what I was trying to say.” :) Thank you.

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