the sun also rises
I'm back.I really ought to be saving this for later, but as it has been deathly quiet at work, it seems like a relatively appropriate time to be updating this website. It is my first day of being officially "on the floor", as they say, and I've had close to seventeen heart attacks. This sounds incredibly silly (especially coming from someone like me) but I break into a sweat every time my phone rings - and it rings often. The sequence and complexity of buttons to be pressed to connect a client to a lawyer's voicemail is simply astounding - you'd think I was programming a space shuttle, or something similar. I'm not by any means stupid, but I do feel this way whilst transferring a call.
Lesson: I am a nightmare on the telephone. Don't ring me, and don't ring my lawyer either. At least, not until this (hopefully) temporary bout of stupidity passes. (I have had many unhealthy thoughts about simply disconnecting my telephone, but that's not exactly confronting the problem in an intelligent manner, now is it?)
Yellowstone. It was beautiful. Considering that I prefer travelling to large, cosmopolitan (and European) cities, I had a brilliant time. The scenery was unparalleled and spectacular - simply breathtaking. It was much more wild, unspoiled, and uncommercialised (is that a word?) than Canada's national parks, with buffalo, elk, coyotes and bears freely roaming the grounds, a common sight when driving by. Geysers and steam vents dot the landscape, making the earth seem continuously on fire, a sight made even more surreal by moonlight. There were brilliant, clear, steaming pools coloured as if by watercolour paints, in stunning azure and sapphire blues, emerald greens, and canary yellows. Hundreds of acres of branchless, dead trees - the result of a massive and devastating forest fire in the late 1980s - form striking silhouettes against the night sky. We took an eight-hour drive through diverse and remote areas of Montana and Wyoming, where one sharp bend of the road yielded completely different landscapes. High mountain ranges and cold, snow-capped peaks. Lush and dense forests covered in a tapestry of trees and bushes. Dry, arid, eerie lunar-like hills. Vivid green valleys dotted with cows, stretching like a carpet over miles and miles. Deep gorges and canyons laced with cascading waterfalls. Sheer cliffs, terracotta-stained, piercing the sky with their brittle jaggedness. Blood-stained sunsets. The rustle of trees. The call of ravens in the dusk.
And the soft, gentle hum of the car, on endless journeys, for miles and miles, hugging the curves of the roads.
Bliss.
L'Esthete @ 18:31
