A splendid Galway birthday

So, on my birthday this year, I turned 42. They say that 42 is the ANSWER to life, the universe, and everything, so we will see!

We were kind of stuck way away in the country and didn't know how to get out, as our cats aren't meant to go on the bus in Ireland, we learned (by a horrible horrible bus driver from Limerick yelling at me for 6 minutes on the bus). The first birthday present was a man who offered us a lift to Galway. A very very generous offer, so it was, and we accepted.

And we had a wonderful, wonderful day in Galway, with board games, and donuts, and a haircut, and music in pubs, and a bus tour.

And I didn't write about it or put photos! There are some on facebook.

Intention: to find a good steady place where we can be comfortable and have lots of internet!

A grand day out in Dublin with an Editing Colleague (in which there are plenty of geeky editorish thoughts)

This post should have a variety of interesting photos, and is only half written. But it's hard to do this well in noisy pubs and I'm discovering that a lot of wwoof hosts don't keep much internet in Ireland. So... here's what I got done this morning before anyone came down. (then the host came down and we had a nice chat, and then I took Yarrow sightseeing in the new old car)

A grand day out in Dublin with an Editing Colleague (in which there are plenty of  geeky editorish thoughts)

We had the grandest day ever out with Eamon Mag Uidhir in Dublin yesterday (just to solve the mystery for others who wonder, his last name is pronounced roughly like the anglicised version of it, Maguire). While I'm at it, the E in Eamon is mostly silent (say Amon with a long A). "E"s do tend to be silent in a lot of words in Ireland, but in front or the middle of things (e.g. teach is "tak") whereas in English it's usually trailing "e"s that are silent. And "h"s usually mean that whatever letters come before (perhaps a g) are silent (like in our light and night). I have asked a few people for a pronunciation guide for Irish but there doesn't seem to be one. Yarrow and I have some fun trying to guess how to pronounce the words on the road and other signs.

Eamon gave me a children's book produced in the 20s (on newsprint with the cover glued on) with all the writing in a lovely gothic script, and mostly it had dots above the silent letters instead of "h"s after. That was easier to understand. Eamon explained how the printers decided to go to the regular English alphabet fonts, which has changed somewhat how Irish is written. He had trouble reading his kids' schoolbooks as they were written differently to the ones when he was in school. There are a lot of tricky rules to Irish and I wonder if the modern generations will simplify it, but Eamon said no, plenty of languages have tricky rules. I can't really argue with that! Irish would be something we'd enjoy learning more of, we think.

First good thing to know: if you're driving into Dublin, don't. (I learned this twice on my previous two trips, once when I was driving and once when my host's brother was driving -- traffic in Dublin is horrendous. Slow and not fun.)

What to do instead: park at a park-and-ride facility and take the tram in. It's a half hour or so journey and was a bit crowded so we had to stand the whole way, but it's vastly shorter and more pleasant than driving that distance would be (as I said, I've already proved this to myself twice). In the tram (the same kind of unit as Calgary's C-trains), the stops are listed on the wall in Gaelic, which sometimes resembles the English and sometimes not at all. Luckily, they also announce the stops in English!

(Perhaps worth mentioning that we also got lost on the way to the motorway at 7:30 in the morning coming from Tullow, the country town we're currently staying near. We also got lost on the way home. Signage in Ireland is mostly based on the idea that you already know where you're going... if you don't, it's not terribly helpful, and when you realize you've unexpectedly gone off track, the iPhone with its Google map and 3.ie free internet is a great thing to have!) In Italy we blamed the roads on the Visigoths. Here in Ireland, Yarrow says the road system is the Vikings' revenge on anyone who didn't want to get around by sea/river.  We've been working on a post about driving in Ireland... but I digress. Back to Dublin and our wonderful day with Eamon.

Eamon very chivalrously met us at the Jervis tram stop and I surrendered most of my geographical thinking for the rest of the day and just followed and looked and listened and enjoyed.  On the walk from the train station to an amazing breakfast at the Kilkenny shop near Trinity College (remember that one, mark it down, you WANT to try the restaurant in the Kilkenny shop, definitely the best Irish breakfast we've had ever), Eamon told us about the architecture and the development of the various neighbourhoods. For example, Temple Bar had come about because the bus company had bought up all the derelict buildings down there, hoping to make a bus station, but by the time they accumulated all the real estate, downtown bus stations were out of fashion, so a group was formed who had the task of finding cool and artistic tenants. So there's a rock music centre and a few artisans here and there, but, with some disgust, Eamon said it's mainly turned into bars and cafés and people come over from around Ireland and England and drink themselves silly for three days on hen parties and whatwhat and whatnot. Yarrow and I weren't sure that was so terrible, it looked like a reasonable place and it is certainly getting famous.

We also saw a very grand red market building and some other buildings and Eamon explained the history of how originally, the wealthy folks in Dublin built nice neighbourhoods for themselves and everyone else lived in slums, but then, in the 1720s, there was some centralized money to make improvements and large buildings and they made a huge beautiful red brick market and some other huge beautiful buildings.

(You know, every time I type neighbourhood, I think how lovely it is to spell in Canadian, just Canadian, and even Britishise it a little and not have to take the "u"s out to maybe Americanize it... (or I would have normally spelled that Britishize with a z in Canada, but Canadians can also choose the -ise ending and now I am doing that more to mesh better with European English whereas before I spelled it -ize to mesh better with American English.) It's really interesting how little thought processes like this change when you move around).

In all the day I did manage to ask one question Eamon didn't know the answer to, which is where the red earth for the bricks came from. But he knew a myriad of other tiny and large details and history and everything.

We went to Trinity and looked at the line up to see the Book of Kells (and decided, oh well, some other day!). And then we looked around Trinity. Eamon explained how Queen Elizabeth (of 16th century) is thanked in the grace of every meal in the dining hall in Latin. She's the one who put the money up to found the incredible large buildings there. And he told us about taking first year English classes in the Chemistry hall, and also about climbing over the (slate!) roofs of one of the buildings one night (likely inebriated) to get into the Trinity Ball after he'd graduated, since only students can go to the Trinity Ball. Then he put on his bow tie, all James Bond like, and joined the party.

We did the museums, too. We got to the Science Centre, which had some awesome discoveries -- mushrooms and cloned-cell hamburgers, for starters, the Natural History Museum, saw the Celtic gold at the National Museum, and saw the Da Vinci sketches at the National Gallery. All of those are free to get into ! Isn't that great?

There were many more splendid things to tell, but I must get off the pub internet, I think. Noisy pubs aren't a great place when you want to write.

Recipe for potatoes that seems to be popular

This recipe was much liked by the wwoofing guy who only wanted to feed us potatoes.

They like it at the place we are now too (or, perhaps where we are now, they just have such lovely manners that they always say the food is nice when someone else cooks it). The boss here said it's kind of like a colcannon (potatoes and cabbage and things).

To me, this is good, but isn't necessarily something really special, but anyway it  seems to please the masses, so maybe you'll like it.

METHOD:
Put a lot of potatoes in a pot and boil them. Steam up some broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. Mash them all together with delicious cubed Irish cheddar (the pungent white delicious kind). (yes, I said delicious twice... the mature Irish cheddar IS twice as delicious!).

If you're in a more luxurious house, you might add in green onions, arugula, sweet potato, or anything else you like. Maybe we'll try it with cabbage one of these days.

An even MORE luxurious house would throw some bacon in, though we find a lot of vegetarian meals around here in our three wwoofing places so far.

From glorious to not so good and back to even more glorious

We are at our third wwoofing farm now. I did write a post about the previous one, but I didn't post it. I guess it was one of those situations that you want to get through before you admit out loud that it wasn't so great!

Nonetheless we had plenty of fun and beauty out of it, the only problem was that the boss was a miser, which was sort of unpleasant. The lucky thing was, he was also stingy with the work. He didn't want to feed us (except for potatoes mostly) or let us use electricity to get hot water, but he also didn't give us much work, so we walked alot and saw the towns around. At least we were exercising! And there are a lot of very skinny Irish men around, attesting to the idea that eating potatoes all the time might be a good weight loss method? Anyway, we ended up splurging on steak sandwiches at the pub. It seemed like the right thing to do. We didn't mind sharing a steak sandwich between us. Yarrow loves mashed turnips and carrots! And potatoes, of course.

I had a lovely Mother's Day there too, going out on the River Shannon in a boat with a local lad who took us for a "one mile" walk that lasted about 6 hours. He knew the names of everyone and what their kids were doing and who built this and what the story was behind that. Here's an example: ruin beside the road: that's an old lime kiln. One time two bulls fell down in it and we had to get a tractor and ... (adventure story)... so now he's built the walls higher around it, see there?

The reason we went out on the boat was because while we were having our tea and biscuits at the dock, Dessie noticed a rental boat was stuck on the rocks, so we went out to make sure they weren't sinking. They weren't, as it happened. Three big fat German guys on a big rented-for-the-week boat. They said they did have some beer on board, but they didn't share it. Harumph. However, the views were lovely from there.

The WWOOFing place we are at now is glorious, with the atmosphere of a yoga retreat, nearly. It's owned by a dad (the mom lives in town now) with a flock of homeschooling kids, through three are grown and only the 15-year-old is here during the week, and the two littlest are in town during the week but they'll be back on the weekend.

One of the sons is going to sell the van for me, which is a huge relief off my shoulders. And the food is gorgeous (as Eddie, the boss, would say -- he uses "gorgeous" and "brilliant" a lot and is a lovely person to be around). The first night we were here, Yarrow and I sort of stared at the table and thought, that's more food than we've seen in a week! (or 10 days in fact!)

For work, we are weeding, weed-whacking (that's Yarrow) (actually it's called "strimming" here). Yarrow's enjoying the power tool, me, I prefer the quietness of weeding, as does my gimpy right hand, which is not keen on power tools, nope, not at all she is not. But I am feeling much less achey since being here. It's sort of a magical place, it really is.

It has quite a sound track. When the wind is right you can hear the church bells nearby, and there are cows and sheep in adjacent fields, and there are three funny chickens who make sweet little cooing sounds (except today Yarrow cleaned out the chicken coop a bit and the big chicken went inside and screamed her head off, so he went in to see if she was okay, and she laid an egg right then! So Yarrow saw a chicken lay an egg).  Is laying eggs always such a screamy business?

There are also a ton of birds who sing. I haven't been anywhere this noisy with wildlife since Costa Rica, I think!

I have taken plenty of photos, but they're just so much easier to post on Facebook, than here.

Irish bathrooms

Last year I had some very fun days with a young lad named Matt. We walked up mountains and jumped in glacier-fed lakes (and later, made a thing of at least dunking our head in).

I was washing my hands in a washroom of Cork a couple of weeks ago and realized -- washing in Ireland is frequently very similar to jumping in glacier-fed lake!

Sitting on toilet also similar to winter outhouse as washrooms often seem to be unheated (both the water and the air, like).

We actually came to be very fond of staying in the dairy at the last place even though it was cold. The exercise is probably improving my metabolism. Feels more right, anyway, except for the carpal tunnel pain that has come to my right hand these days. Rats. Working hard feels great, hand kind of lets me down.  But have some stretches and will work on maintenance.

Current WWOOF "host" (he's not very host-y) is so miserly that he actually said he prefers we not heat up water for a whole bath. (!!!! he really seriously did) He sees no need for waste like that. A sinkful is plenty.

SIGH. Planning night in B and B for birthday on Friday, maybe. Found out that we can't take cats on bus (legally), so getting out of the back-of-beyond place where we are is a little trickier than getting here was. Ah well.

We're walking lots. Putting in more than 10 km some days.

Lime is better than concrete

If you make your stone house with lime mortar and plaster, they say it will "breathe," but what they really must mean is that the lime absorbs the water when you breathe overnight, then releases it later in the day, like when the fire is on or so.

But when you sleep in a little concrete house, the windows will get all fogged up. 

We now know this for an experienced fact! The dairy was limed, and our little cottage now is concrete.

It's kind of fun, as Yarrow was just doing the part in the book about hydrated compounds in chemistry yesterday. Funny how that works out, isn't it? It's too bad that I don't have any copper sulfate to show him the reactions properly.

More to write, but too busy to do it just now.

I know this post could be a million times better with photos. Sorry for the lack. I'd better get back to stack firewood. (I admit, I've been frittering away my time in the pub here chatting when I came to pay my IOU).