GIP!

Look! Look what barbana made me!

"Yet more fair is the living land of Lórien, and the Lady Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth!" -Gimli the dwarf upon meeting the Lady Galadriel -- "The Fellowship of the Ring", J.R.R. Tolkien

I went all crazy and picked *five* new icons, so I'll spare you all the GIPs and instead, you can look at them all in my picture page. Also, there were a few that I left (but only because I have a limit of 10 icons in my account *g*), so if you run over here to her LJ you can take one for yourself! They're so pretty!

Home

I was right in the middle of reading rhiannonhero's Constellations, when the power went out. Bummer.

So I went outside with paper and pencil (imagine that!) and wrote. No, not fanfiction, and if you read any fanfic I wrote, you'd thank me. This is all about me. As usual.

And now I'll go back to "Constellations".

~*~

It's five o'clock in the afternoon, and too damn hot. I'm amazed at how quiet it is, with no televisions or radios turned on. All I can hear are birds and crickets and cicadas. The neighbor's sprinkler and kids screaming and playing around, trying (but not really) to avoid the water. Our two dogs running around the lawn, chasing each other.

I'm swaying gently in the hammock (sans Clark, unfortunately), eating still warm chocolate cake, and it's been a while since I've felt this peaceful. My life has felt like a roller coaster ride these last four years, adapting to married life and to a different city, where everything's bigger, faster, more crowded and more demanding. And right now, I feel like the end of the ride, when the train slows down to a stop, and I'm right back to where I started. Back in the hammock, looking over the lawn where I was married almost four years ago.

Things aren't the same, of course. I've changed, as have the people around me. I never liked São Paulo, it was too loud and too dirty, and just too fast. But I adjusted, I learned to block it out and to keep up. I started eating faster, walking faster, thinking faster and speaking faster (and, incidentally, started stuttering slightly). I've been back for two weeks now, and I'm still unaccustomed to the pace of the city where I was born and lived for 19 years of my life.

People here drive slowly, walk slowly, engage in long conversations at the check-out counter. I'm still at the stage where I get slightly exasperated at their calmness, my internal pace is still set to "big city". I have to slow my body, my mind, my heart, find this pace again. Just... relax, and enjoy life, nature, family. Peace.

It's good to be home.