/travel/cycling/Gone Cycling in Scotland
Back next Monday. Glasgow to John Grote's, with any luck.
New Albums from the Gallery
/travel/Short Notice Visit
I'll be in Waterloo tonight (Sunday), and leaving either tomorrow night or Tuesday morning. I'll be in Toronto Tuesday afternoon.
If you're reading this, and you'll be in either of those places for either of those times, let me know.
/Same Sex Marriage
I guess this is what you get for calling it 'same sex marriage' instead of 'gay marriage.'
/travel/cycling/Long Lost Photos
When Steve and I went cycling in BC, he took some photos. On the last day,
we sat down at a nice restaurant, all dirty and scruffy, and scrawled some
notes on a napkin. I guarded the napkin, he guarded the photos.
I lost the napkin.
He lost the digital copies of the photos.
Today, he emailed me to say that he'd found them. They're now posted for your viewing pleasure.
/travel/ireland/Bagpipes and Cereals
I can hear bagpipes outside. I keep looking out the window to see them when they sound like they're getting close, but then they get quieter again. It must be some kids at the school practicing or something.
Which leads me to my next point: Irish people swear up and down that there's no such thing as Irish Bagpipes. They're also not into four-leaf clovers (three is fine, thanks, and they're called shamrocks), leprechauns (from the irish word luprachà meaning half-bodied), emeralds, or even *gasp* lucky charms.
Which leads to my next point. Yesterday, while shopping I had to choose between Kellogg's Honey Nut Nutty ("Our nuttiest cereal ever") and Kellogg's Crunchy Nut Feast (subtitled "Honey and Nut") made primarily of "ludicrously tasty clusters". These were my choices for sweet cereal (which I generally mix with something un-sweet like Weetabix), since I'd grown tired of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut, which is "ludicrously tasty". I think the creative wonks at Kellogg's Europe need to smarten up and create a cereal that doesn't contain the word "nut".
Time to go find those bagpipes and go to work.
/travel/ireland/Kells, Castles, Bikes and the Zoo
Fear not, dear readers, I have not abandoned ye!
There's a few galleries of new photos, and some old ones captioned. But more importantly I've got a good way of posting them now, and also I replaced my charger that I lost when I was in the US, so I have my camera back. Yay!
So a while ago, Clare went off to Mallorca. She had a good time. I worked a lot, I guess. When she got back, my friend Hildur from Iceland (via Finland) came to visit us. We went to the zoo, which was interesting..it was apparently a lot better than it had been, but in the fight between animal comfort and peace vs. human interest, the latter won out too much for my tastes. We went with Clare's friend Alice's uncle Duncan, and some other of Alice's family. Duncan had been involved in some plans for the zoo that never came about, so he had an interesting perspective on it all. I haven't been to a zoo in a long time, and it didn't make me want to go back.
Then a few days later, we went to Dublin Castle. I had been warned that it wasn't very interesting, but we got a pretty good tour, and then got taken underground to the foundations, where they showed various bits of walls from different periods of construction...most amusing was the viking wall, which was all fallen apart, because apparently they didn't know how to build walls, only boats. Aah, if only there had been someone of viking decent around to tease. Oh. There was. hah.
The next weekend we went up to
Kells, a little town famous for a big
book. They seemed very bitter that their book, an incredibly ornate book of
the four gospels from c. 700, had been "stolen" by Dublin. They had a big
round tower, like the one in Glendalough, and some very tall single-stone
celtic crosses. It was a cute little town, and we managed to do the rounds
pretty quickly. Mostly we went there because I insisted on going northwest
since it's the only direction I haven't been, and it was the only reasonable
destination in that direction. The town was reputed to have lots of
medieval tunnels between the church and other places. There was a big old
stone house that apparently had tunnels to somewhere, with a sign saying
where you could get the gate key.
Yesterday I went to a music festival at a castle. That's pretty fancy. The castle also had what was reputed to be a Freemason's cave (which I readily believed) and a 700 year old tree (which I was a bit more sceptical of.) The cave was, unfortunately, recently locked up, due to partying teenagers. It was all built into a mound. There was lots of good music, mostly fairly folk-rock-ish, but some solid Irish folk, with spoken-word-plus-guitar poetry, and all that. It was raining most of the night, so we were pretty wet. And I left a water bottle open in the tent, so it got wet inside too. That sucked.
Today I went cycling with Clare to.. Enniskerry! Yes, I keep going to the same place. This time we went to the Powerscourt waterfalls, which are pretty famous around here. They're actually both bigger and nicer than I expected.
Then we cleaned the flat. And now I'm writing a blog entry.
You're officially caught up. :-)
