Back from hibernation

I've been quiet lately. I still write blog posts in my head during the day, I just haven't written any of them down. I was sick for a week with a cold. When I got well I could feel the 'well-ness' as a new reality, as concrete a feeling as the sickness had been. I had a lot of catching up to do. Especially at work. Now, I'm caught up more or less.

There have been small shifts in my mental state and I guess I've needed time and space to incorporate the change. Nothing large. I've been down here 4 months now. Seems so much more mature than being newly arrived 3 months ago. I'm sorting and repacking my huge piles of stuff that I have here and wondering how the heck I'll get a lot of it back to the States. I sent a 'Gorilla Box' (brand name) foot locker of stuff back a couple of weeks ago and just got an email from my Mom that it arrived. I'll take inventory of the condition of it's contents, and start sending more stuff back. I am getting rid of some things. I've found most of the things that I thought hadn't made it down here. It's just a matter of time till I do have something not show up at the other end. A friend ordered a new Blackberry phone, and the package came in as 'damaged' and when he opened it there was no phone in the box. The place he ordered it from is sending a replacement. We'll see if it gets here. Luckily, most of my stuff isn't anything that would sell on the thieves market.

I've had a few 'what the heck is this middle-aged hippie geek from Nashville doing down here in Honduras' moments. Sitting in a conference room waiting for a meeting to start and listening to the local Honduran admins chatting in Spanish that is still gibberish to me, I had one of the moments. I think that going back to the States I will feel it as a concrete PLACE in a way that I wouldn't have been able to before. I'm headed back to visit Mom in a few weeks. I'll only be there for 4 days. I'm a bit afraid that if I was to stay longer I wouldn't come back down here. It's not that I'm unhappy, it's just so different. I've told friends that I want to go back and drive my Jeep wherever I want, take a walk down a town street at night, alone, go to the casinos, and, oh, yeah, see my Mom. That is pretty much the truth.