Back to West Hartford

There is something comforting in coming back to a New England town after being away for a year, to find that the dog bakery is still there (smelling as delicious as ever), main street is still populated by expensively-dressed women accessorized with tiny dogs drinking coffee in the afternoon, and the zinias are again blooming in the front garden bed.  West Hartford is the same as ever - oh, except that the small coffee shop has changed hands and now sells coffee as well as locally made ice-cream, so I guess improvements have been made.

Jeremy and I have spent the last week sorting a year's worth of mail, doing really boring grown-up stuff at the bank, unpacking and washing all of our stuff which we've hauled back with us from the other side of the world and generally getting ourselves back into the groove here.  Oh, and counting cars.  We have both signed up at a local temp agency to make some pocket money, and were lucky enough to get the "counting cars at the mall entrance" gig.  I don't know that I've ever been more bored.  Maybe when I had to read Jane Eyre in high school.

I seem to feel that I am often arriving in America just in time for a disaster to take place.  Last time it was the DC sniper - boy was that fun.  Now it's Hurricane Katrina.  It's very, very hard to realise that someplace else in this country a city is now a lake, with survivors looting, dying, starving and shooting at helicopters.  Especially as I'm looking out the window at a sunny West Hartford afternoon.  But it is.  And it just reminds me that even when you think you know what's going to happen, you really don't know what's going to happen.  You wouldn't think that something like this could happen in America.  But it did.  And now the news story that you watch and thank god that you don't live there is actually about where you live.  Impermanence takes on a whole new meaning.

And so I have settled into a nice pattern of reading (a lot!), exercising, studying Spanish (I have a long way to go), doodling on my guitar and slowly working my way through that list of stuff to do while we're back in the States.  Like learning how to make bread - still perfecting the second rise stage but not too bad on the taste side of things.  It sure is nice to be able to have daily patterns, something hard to keep while you're travelling.  Right now I'm reading  In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, which is particularly funny to read as an Australian, and The History of Argentina, an account of Argentinian history from colonization through to the present which is about as engaging as watching tortoises mate.  This guy has managed to take the "story" out of history and turn it into something resembling a McDonalds menu.  Ok, maybe I'm being harsh but that's because I'm only a quarter of the way through, and I know how much more of his sterile writing I need to persevere.  Give me strength.

As at this moment, J and I are planning to head to Buenos Aires sometime mid-October to explore the "Paris of South America", eat mounds of delicious steak, learn to tango and flirt in Spanish, oh and teach a little English on the side.  It looks like J might be teaching a computer class in early October in LA, and that's an earning opportunity we can't afford to turn down.  I'm so glad one of us has some earning potential.  Right now he's on a filing assignment at an office nearby, poor thing.  I know, I should have offered to do it, but...  Ok, I have no excuse.  But I am about to do my Spanish lesson, and I do have a lot more Spanish to learn than he does.

Oh, and I finally got my own computer!  She is a lovely iBook and she is my new best friend.  I never was much good at sharing anyway.