Midpoint

My goodness, is it Wednesday already???

Alrightey, so the week of children and recuperation progresseth. The goldfish live still, although Guildy seems to have been renamed (Robert). And somewhere within the day's action-packed schedule, there was time for a sunshiney coffee with my mom :-)

All is well.

Oh - and parcels from Amazon keep arriving, adding to the Daily Treat Count.

Yawwwwn. Well, a glass of wine awaits me, so I shan't dawdle...

Lifting the Veil

Okay, I realise from the outside looking in, I tweeted mysteriously and then disappeared. It didn't feel at all like that, more like: breakfast - pack - make pot o'coffee - pack - figure out the packing of goldfishies - drink a cup of coffee while loading up the car, then fill the High Maintenance Travel Mug with the rest of the pot and hit the road.

Whew. So no mystery there. E-curtness, maybe. Just no enigma.

Speaking of which, the NY Times has a new blog up on e-protocol, "to help you gracefully navigate the murky waters of a hyper-connected world". Now we can all be charming online :-)

And as for me, I have navigated to Dublin, where I am babysitting nephew & nieces this week while my sister tries out a radical treatment for a slipped disc called: "rest".

Intriguing. So far so good :-)

bunnies & beatles... and love

I'm in the midst of scribbling, so just a quick note. Today's lunchtime e-exploring ended in fubiz.net (always a good site to meander through).

So, for your Friday pleasure (and although strictly speaking, I think Duracell should focus on developing more rechargeable products), here's what happens when bunnies of the world unite:



And a teeny Beatles snippet, appropriately all about love, and complete with wild soaring imagination:



:-)

Have a lovely weekend, all. Particularly if you should happen to be getting married tomorrow, and dancing your weekend away. Yeah, you know who you are. Lots of love XXX

Four score years less ten

This month there has been commemoration a'plenty of Germany's invasion of Poland seventy years ago. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a small, great, on-line exhibition, with photos, eye-witness testimonies and this 10-minute film by Julien Bryan, the last neutral reporter remaining in Poland on September 1, 1939. Reporting styles have changed so much - the opening music suggests we might be about to watch a Hollywood swashbuckler, and the narrative tone seems more removed, more fluid and in control than these days. But the story utterly belies the film's glossy production.

War footage is like a trillion permutations of same emotions: grief, terror, panic, pain, devastation. The loss in the faces of the survivors: you can change from B&W to colour, and change skin tones and languages and reporting styles, but that look of loss never changes.

Wonderful exhibition.

Reward at Day's End

I've been in front of the computer all day, and just glanced up as the sky began to wash through with the colours of sunset.



Happy sigh. Very purdy.

Google the Generous

Catching up with The Onion this evening; this one is a gem:


Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

The thing about Onion's news features is that you have to watch them twice - once to enjoy the story, once to catch all the scrolling news feed articles: 'Obama to slip Universal Health Care into iTunes User Agreement' - genius :-)

Customs of the Road

Driving etiquette can vary quite dramatically from place to place. Certainly, elements of the dominant driving style here might be er... surprising, or challenging, or at times downright loopy - but you get different krazy-nesses everywhere, so this is about a positive local trait.

One of the nicest things about Cork driving is when there's a major "something" coming up that's going to impede the flow of traffic (usually some temporary roadwork lights). You turn a corner on a 100km road; ahead the traffic is stopped on red, but the last car in the queue has its hazard lights on (and at that speed, every millisecond of warning helps). And when you join the queue, the last car turns off its hazards and you turn on yours, which another car joining will in turn 'take' from you. One by one, each driver helps to keep the others safe.

It's like a Pass the Parcel road safety game. Sweet :-)

A Grail Legend

Yesterday I finally bought a travel mug. I know, I am probably the last person in the world to own one (I resisted for a long time, thinking I wouldn't use it enough to warrant it taking up space).

So, I take it out of its box, and there's a little concertina-ed set of instructions. Instructions, for a mug - I'm intrigued. And I quote:

For Best Results:
Preheat or precool mug by filling it with boiling water or ice water.
Let stand for five minutes.

Already, they've lost me. Surely their demographic is Those Who Do Not Have Time To Drink Coffee At Home. If the Drinker had five minutes, wouldn't they just sit down and enjoy their coffee?

Anyhoo, I digress. After the pre-heating/standing stage comes:

Empty bottle and immediately fill with your favourites hot or cold beverage.

Fine. The immediate is good. But then we talk about cleaning:

To clean your beverage container, wash with warm water and mild detergent. Let stand for five minutes.

Again with the five minutes? By now I'm thinking I should just stick to buying coffee as I get petrol en route. The odd paper cup here and there isn't exactly tipping the Eco-Scales of Ireland.

Pour out and rinse with warm water. Wash with mild detergent with a soft, damp cloth or sponge and rub dry.

Why yes, you have just washed the cup twice. And no air-drying for this magic vessel...

If interior becomes stained, use a mixture of baking soda and warm water. Let stand open for one hour...

If the one hour doesn't work, you're supposed to leave it overnight. Sigh. While I am totally a baking soda-for-cleaning advocate, can you imagine the house of the Travel Cup Inventor? It must be an array of things ever-shifting between states of soaking, washing, drying.

If the cup was crafted from fine Bohemian crystal, maybe I could understand. Maybe...

Have a great weekend, all :-)

Faceted day

What a treaty day!

So, it started in Clon, with the Fabulous Baking Lady (and as I type, I am tucking into an entire cake of melt-in-your-mouth shortbread). It had been months since we caught up, so we chatted over a variety of coffees in two of Clon's coffee shops (it's only polite to spread our business around).

Then on to Cork, where among my wanderings, I explored the street where my mother grew up. The site where her family grocery store stood is now a shopping centre, but a good bit of the street survives. One building was in a half-demolished state, exposing three storeys of the house's walls, with their last tattered traces of once having been a home. The area was filled with resonances as I meandered, but they were elusive, like little glimpses of fireflies that vanish as you focus on them.

And then the afternoon whirled on: lovely meal with a friend who's down from Dublin, and off to the library on the Grand Parade to meet old friends, and make new ones, and to hear the writer Petina Gappah interviewed by Ann Luttrell (both pictured below). It was part of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival. The session was a great mix: funny and poignant and engaging, and it fed conversations among our little group in its aftermath.



One of the striking moments was when Petina was asked when she writes, as in, how she structures her writing around her life and work in Geneva. "I get up at 4.30am."

I'm sorry?

"Then I write for a couple of hours, until I get my son up..." and then make breakfast, school drop-off, work (she's a lawyer, and not like a Devil's Advocate lawyer, but one that works for the good, on a global scale), school pick-up, make dinner. Then she reads in the evening.

So, I sat with my friend - also a writer - and we waited for the Big Bone-Idle Lazy Hand of Shame to appear in mid-air, and quiver slightly as it scanned the room, locking irrevocably on to us.

All in all, a day to treasure :-)

At the dimming of the day

Today was a mixture of long- and super-short-term things; felt kind of like a camera refocusing from a detailed foreground to an epic horizon shot, and back again...

But the big break was nipping out on the sea for a bit: we headed over to Sherkin, where we had a picnic (crab sandwiches & wine) then took a spin around.



We got to Hackett's Creek at low tide, and for about five minutes we just sat in the stillness, herons and seals moving around us as dusk settled.



A lovely evening :-)