Friday, June 30, 2006

Slow going… but with pictures!

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Whew! Moving to a new country has its challenges. One of the biggest ones is finding time and energy to do everything tht needs to get done while still doing what you want to do. Isn’t that life, though? We have lots of social engagements with friends (good). Lots of meeting with lawyers and accountants about business stuff (good and necessary, but at times tedious). Language lessons every day (very good). Going to friend’s houses to watch World Cup games (very fun). Standing in long qeues in government buildings to pay various fees, obtain documents, etc. (not so good). Scuttling about town with my laptop borrowing high speed connections while I slog my way with the phone company to get DSL at the house (not fun at all). Borowing cars (ok) renting a car for a few more days (ok) buying a car from someone moving back to the US (good! It’s a nice car. Not flashy, but solid, dependable with good shocks- an absolute must on these streets!) Oh and we took a day to drive up into the chapada (a kind of low mountain plateau north of town) with some friends in from the States. (sweet!) Add to that the general sense of overall exhaustion from the past year of working on the film, keeping the VTS running, preparing for and then moving… all to say it’s been a challenge to get much “work” done.

Thanks to some great help from a good friend who is fluent in both English and Portuguese we have high speed at the house now, so that will help a bunch. So we plod forward, slowly. No animating at all, though. I’m kinda taking a break after feeling a bit burnt out from the last few years. My mind is tired. My body is tired. I can’t seem to stay up past 11pm. I can’t seem to get up before 9:30am. And it seems that I like naps. I’m hoping the love for animation comes back in another week or two. I can tell that while I’m enjoying not having any pressure to make anything, I’m starting to get a bit of an itch for it again. I fired open Maya the other day for like 10 minutes and actually enjoyed myself for a bit. This weekend has a lot of business stuff being done - working on the site and the kLango online store. So animating will need to wait a litle bit. Which is OK, it just gives me more time to come back to it with some enthusiasm. In the meantime, here are those pictures I promised.

Here’s a pic of the house we’re borrowing til we get our own quasi-permanent place. It’s in a nice quiet neighborhood, walking distance to a small supermercado and some other needed shops and such.
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Here’s a street not far from our house. Obviously not all the streets are paved. 90% are, but on the outskirts of town sometimes not so much.
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Some pretty waterfalls up in the mountains.

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Me and my daughter Laura. She’s so proud of her dad. Heh. Oh, and the water was nice and warm, too!
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This framing was just asking to be photo’d.

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Even bigger waterfalls…
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Here’s a nice balcony restaurant that overlooks the plain below. On a clear day you can see a hundred miles easily.

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More views of natural beauty. I love how wonderful an artist God is.

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Just in front of that distant hill are the cities of Varzea Grande and Cuiaba, our new home. That’s about 70km away.

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And there’s beauty in even the small things.

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1 comment:

Keith Lango said...

original comments here...
http://www.keithlango.com/wordpress/?p=172#comments