Habit

I've got no qualms about coming out and saying I'm a bad blogger.

How long as it been since I've last posted? How much upheaval have I gone through between then and now? Downright disgraceful on my part, truthfully. Never mind that I was running on about five hours of sleep that first official day back, still trying to reset my sleep schedule, and being bombarded with family and the fact that Christmas was only two days away. Excuses, excuses.

See what I mean?

Anyway, it's post the first of the year, so welcome to the first official post of 2011! Cue fireworks and singing of that damn song. Or, you know, you could just keep reading. That's cool too.

I thought about doing, before it hit New Year's Eve, a best of 2010 post to maybe reflect on what had happened, all the exciting - and not-so-exciting - and crazy, stupid, fearless, terrifying, etc stuff that I had done over the past year, reflecting on my three months (that feel like a dream, or that they happened to someone else and I watched) I spent in Wales, and whatever else happened that might have been newsworthy or just noted.

I didn't do one. Firstly because, like I've mentioned, I'm a bad blogger and secondly, I was just too damned tired to really focus and pull something like that together. I still have moments when it boggles me that I'm currently home and not still over on the other side of the Atlantic. Moments when I realize that I can walk down the hallway to my own bed, tripping over my own black cat, and not wander around the corner into the bathroom of some hotel in central London. Or wander to a public bathroom in an airport terminal.

So, things are adjusting. Or rather, Louise is adjusting to things.

But there are changes. If you were to sit on the back porch with me (proverbially, at the moment, as it's pretty damn cold here), with a cup of coffee, and just talk with me, you'll see changes. Little things, the way I'll go to say something and have to kind of think about whether that word means the thing I want it to or it means something different. The way my Facebook stream has a mix of both US and Welsh names in it, the way that one has subtly more or less switched itself to being sort of one top and the other a sort of background. Not that any of those people are to be considered background, but I'm hoping you're understanding what I'm having difficulty putting into words.

And that's partly why I haven't really reflected. For as good as I am with the English language, I'm struggling to put this experience into something that can be easily accessed, understood, and shared with the rest of the world. I don't know how to say what I'm feeling.

I don't know how to get what's going on in my head out onto paper or into a sequence of ones and zeroes that lets others read it, too.

Which, honestly, drives me up the wall to a point. We're used to me rambling, but this? For me to attempt to get this out would be crazier than what I normally post. Yeah. That's where I'm at.

But, hopefully - namely when I can find my camera in this post-holiday slow-down - I'll put up a couple pictures of those last couple days in the UK. Namely this post that's been in the back of my mind to do. Something about sneakers and a big, fancy word that I'm going to have to double check the definition of in a dictionary. Anyway. Hope everyone out there had a happy holiday season, a great New Year, and as for resolutions? That post (sort of) will come later.