Greetings,

Surprised to see another letter so soon?  Last weekend may have been a bit low-key, but the Roddys are back to tearing up this country in a buzz of activity!   And I know you all are just dying to hear the latest, so I'll oblige.

Friday, the IWO had a Christmas crafts party for the kids.  A wonderful woman, Mary, opened her home to at least a dozen mom's and 19 children for cookie baking and candle decorating and star making.  I was particularly delighted because I was far too practical when I packed up in Seattle, bringing no Christmas items whatsoever.  Our stockings are buried so far into the back of our attic that I'm not sure when they will see the light of a Christmas bulb.  But until this party, I'm afraid our house here was looking a bit bare.  However, we are well on our way to a holiday celebration now.  In addition to the craft activities (all planned by her) she made a wonderful lunch of soup and sandwiches and cakes.  Apparently she thought she was only volunteering a venue for the party, not the plan for the entire day, but she hosted us all with such wonderful grace.  I will miss her when we leave.  She is just one of those kind of people who makes everyone feel welcome.

{Don't you want know about _my_ Friday?  I walked to school in the rain and spent the morning shivering in my office and constructing a tip sheet for the MS Front Page.  This is a program that allows the user to create pages for the World Wide Web.  The tip sheet is a set of directions written in a fairly conversational tone guiding the first-time user through the basics of the process.  I have written many of these tip sheets for various programs.  What I usually do is open up the program being described and use it for some set of routine tasks, recording the basic steps, things to look out for, etc. in a word processing document.  So for this one I had Front Page open and was working through the creation of a routine Web page on the uses and Edwardian origins of Bog Butter.  I had just finished describing the set up of interactive bog butter buttons (This requires some special extensions on the server but they are fairly standard in Ireland.) when a colleague came in and asked if I had time to go for a cup of tea.  I looked at my watch and realized with horror that I was 4 minutes late for my 1:00 tutorial!!!!  It's not really my lecture,  I am taking it as a favor for a professor here but still I am obliged to be there.  Fortunately the tutorial room is less than a minute away if you are running as fast as you can, so I was only about 5 minutes late.  Still it was horrible.  It was just like one of those crummy dreams where you are late for an appointment that you didn't know you had, except that I was fully clothed.

The rest of the day was less horrible.  The bright spot came was the walk home.  It was a two-glass night!  This means that I found two pint glasses abandoned in the weeds alongside the sidewalk.  It's not unusual to find glassware from the many pubs when you are out and about here in Limerick.   Found glassware now accounts for more than half of the glasses in our kitchen.  It's partly weird but hey, once they are thoroughly washed, a glass is a glass, right?  I have wondered about it, though.  Sometimes I see a glass left perched on a wall or in the grass near the sidewalk and I pass it by.  How many of these things do you need anyway?  (I am to the point now where if they do not have a special design or unusual shape, I leave them there.)  But in many cases I have passed the same glass day after day.  Nobody wants them?  Nobody returns them to the pubs, whence they came?  How does this work?  I have thought about this a great deal as I walk.  Friday ended with the University's Christmas party, ably described by Mary below.}
 

Friday night was the University of Limerick staff Christmas party.   We found a wonderful baby-sitter, who Emmeline managed to immediately wrap around her little finger.  Although Mark had read to the kids for a half hour before we left, Emm got Alexander to read another chapter of Harry Potter, during which, she demonstrated her skill at reciting the text verbatim, by continually correcting him when he missed a word.  (At least that was the report we got from Garth).

The party was nice, especially so because we ran into one of my fellow parent boarders and her husband who is a professor in languages.  Mark saw only two colleagues he knew, and I saw no one else I knew, so I'm afraid it would have been a bit boring had we not met up with Edel and Liam.  Liam has a wonderful sense of humor and a classic Belfast accent.  With the accent, I think I would have been entertained had he read the phone book.  The food was good and they had a band which played mostly American rock-and-roll.   There was actually a band when we arrived that was playing traditional Irish music, but they did not stay long, unfortunately.

Speaking of the arrival time, and Irish time in general, we are still struggling with the time factor here.  We can find tables to convert our recipe ingredients and cooking temperatures from ounces and Fahrenheit to grams and Celsius.  We can find a web site to convert our American dollars into Irish punts.  But we have yet to find a method to convert an 8:00 party invitation to that time when people will actually be there!

We drove to County Cork on Saturday.  Our first stop was the Blarney Woolen Mills, looking for tweed for the dear professor.  Again, I'm afraid we were unsuccessful.  Much as one would imagine wool jackets would be sold in that season when one would actually want to wear one, apparently we are out of tourist season and the stock consists mainly of 38 shorts and 58 longs.  Looks like we're going to have to resort to mail order.

Just down the road from the woolen mill is a place you may have heard of, Blarney Castle.  I had no idea what to expect, other than a major tourist attraction, but it is beautiful.  The first place you part with your money, the reception desk, is about a 5-minute walk from the castle.  You walk along the river and glimpse the castle through the trees.  {By the way, my camera began to to develop amnesia round about the time we pulled up at Blarney castle so.... there are only a couple of those glimpses.}  It is no longer a working castle and has suffered some serious damage, but is nonetheless a beautiful building.  Inside, stone staircases lead every which way to rooms of various shapes and sizes, all built, apparently, with little in the way of an overall architectural plan.  As it stands now, you can see its function as a major tourist destination (hey, maybe that's the number one attraction ahead of Bunratty Folk Park!) by the signs which direct you up this stairway, this way along this passage, down this stairway, up this stairway, MOO! all leading, of course, to the famous Blarney Stone.

As we have been touring this country, we have learned a great deal about castle architecture, particularly as regards the defensive features.  Often at the top of the castle, in the battlements, are something called machicolations, which are a sort of chute down which can be poured hot liquids, like boiling water, fat, McDonalds decaf, or whatever is handy, to defend against those potential usurpers below.  These machicolations jut out from the top of the castle much like a 3-sided stone box, with no top or bottom.  (The 4th side of the box is the exterior wall of the castle.)  The open bottom of this structure is set about 18" below the surrounding wall.

Well, it is at the bottom of one of these machicolations that the legendary Blarney Stone is located.  In order to kiss it, you sit down facing toward the interior of the castle, lean back into the machicolation, grasp two grab bars, and lower your head (and your kisser) down the chute to the stone.  Smack (that's you), click (that's the official Blarney stone photographer - you can order your souvenir photo as you exit the park, along with an official certificate, suitable for framing) and up you go, fully imbued with the gift of the gab, or the privilege of telling lies for the next seven years.  I am happy to say, after only a bit of hemming and hawing, all the Roddys partook of the practice.   And as a certified public accountant, it is my considered opinion that the dear professor can deduct his portion of our admission price as a professional expense!

The grounds of Blarney Castle are perhaps not quite so renowned as the stone itself, but definitely deserve time in your sightseeing tour.  There are all sorts of interesting man-made and natural features of note - the witch's kitchen, the druid's cave, the wishing steps (and if Jiminy Cricket was right, I'll be back to this lovely isle some day).  My one tip would be, buy the guidebook at the visitor's center as you enter.  We had little idea of what we were looking at, and given the unusual names, there must be some equally fascinating stories.

We left Blarney Castle with plans to see some of the sights in Cork city.  However as we approached the city center we ran into a huge bottleneck of holiday shoppers.   December 8th is the feast of the Immaculate Conception, also known in Ireland as a holy day of shopping obligation.  Given the religious nature of the people, it appears they continue their celebration on subsequent days.

On to Plan B.  South of Cork City (oddly enough described as West Cork in the guidebooks) is Fort Charles, a 400 year-old star-shaped fort.  It is located at the mouth of Kinsale Harbor in a beautiful, but isolated spot.  The fort is something of a ruin today, having been burned when the British pulled out after the treaty was signed in the 1920s.  It is operated by Duchas, the national heritage service.  Duchas has done a wonderful service, preserving and educating the public about nearly 100 sites around the country, providing tours and interpretive centers.

Garth has found a series of books here called Horrible Histories, encompassing such titles as "The Vicious Vikings", "The Terrible Tudors", "The Angry Aztecs" and "Them Gol Derned Bloodsuckin Thievin Greek Stinkers."  They are every 11 year-old boy's dream text, focusing on all the blood and guts of history.  Well, Mark described the tour we had at the fort as the Horrible History tour of Fort Charles.  We heard all about the monotonous diet, the flogging, and best of all, the suicides at the fort.  One story centered on the story of the White Lady, a ghost who haunts the fort.

The story goes that a British officer married the daughter of the commander of the fort.  As the happy couple celebrated with their wedding guests, the bride and groom stole off for a quiet walk.  She saw some beautiful pink flowers down the hill and her dear husband said "You go back in and attend to our guests, I'll get them for you."  She went inside and a sentry on duty offered to go get the flowers, but he left his gun with the officer and asked him to watch his post while he was gone.  It was quite a walk for the sentry to check out at the gate, walk down the hill, get the flowers and return.  The groom, of course, had been lifting his glass at the reception, and fell asleep in the sentry station.  {I am willing to bet that he took the pint glass with him and left it somewhere in the grass just outside the fort.} Meanwhile, the commander decided to take some of his guests for a walk to show them the fort.  As he approached the sentry post, he got no call to halt.  He got closer.  Still no call.  He found the sleeping sentry,  took out his pistol and shot him dead.  He was fully entitled to do that, asleep-on-duty being one of some 24 crimes punishable by death.  He then called for a detail of soldiers to bring the body up to the party to show all present what happens when soldiers commit such indefensible acts.  It was not until the soldiers laid out the body that he realized who he had killed.  His daughter, seeing her husband of hours dead on the ground at her father's hand, leapt from the battlements to her death on the rocks below.  And the commander, himself, was never the same again, committing suicide a year later.  The ghost of the bride in her wedding finery is still occasionally seen on the ramparts.  There is even an inn in Kinsale known as The White Lady.

We drove through Kinsale on the way home.  It is a picturesque port town, known for all its restaurants as the gastronomic capital of Ireland.  It is filled not only with restaurants but inns and precious boutiques, as well.  I can imagine in the summertime it must be mobbed with tourists.  I reminds me a great deal of Sausalito, California.

Earlier in the day, on our way from Cork to Kinsale, we faced an unexpected delay.  While we were slowed in Cork by thousands of shoppers hot on the scent of a bargain, near the town of Riverstick we were slowed by some 20 hounds and a like number of horses and riders, naking their way along the road, hot on the scent of a fox.  Well, I'm afraid by the time we saw them, the trail was a bit cold, but it was still fun to see them in their finery - black helmets, red jackets, white breeches and black boots.  {It should be noted here that in fact only a few riders were decked out in the usual garb.  Most of them were wearing an interesting mixture of black helmets and jeans, red jackets and tennis shoes, gauntlets and shaggy Irish sweaters.  In England, I think this would be shocking.  Here, it's Irish and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.  Not so sure about the fox....}

Last night we went to dinner at Liam and Edel's who were also entertaining a professor from England and his wife from Spain.  He is starting a job, also in languages, at UL next month.  It was quite the international evening.

Today we went to the movies.  There are 2 theatres in Limerick which, at noon on Saturdays and Sundays, offer a choice of 2 kids films, where the kids pay £1 and the adults are free.  We saw Stuart Little.  On the way home, we stopped at a Christmas tree lot.  I have been looking all over Limerick for a Christmas tree stand.  I found one super-deluxe stand, with a correspondingly super-deluxe price tag.   For me, this is a single-use item and should have a disposable price point.  However, somebody suggested that I might find a tree stand where I bought my tree.  So we pull into this lot and immediately 3 urchins approach the car and stick their heads in the window.  "Wanna buy a tree?  Wanna buy some holly off me?  What happened to your radio?"  (We had the faceplate off it.)  "Did somebody steal it?  Where are you from in America?  Are there lots of robbers there?  You can just leave your radio in the car here.  Nobody'll take it."  (These boys obviously don't read the Limerick Post, a weekly newspaper here filled with umpteen accounts of purse stealings and vandalism and other assorted mayhem.)  So I finally get to ask if they had stands for the trees.  "What?  No.  That's OK.  Just get some books to prop it up."  The bright one of the bunch suggested we get a bucket and some sand.  "So are ye gonna buy a tree from me?" I said I can't get a tree til I get a stand, but I would be back later.  So they said, "Buy it here.  See that guy down the road?  Don't buy it from him.  He'll charge you 30, 40 quid an' his trees leave sheds all over.  Lookit those trees.  Sheds all over underneath 'em."  When they finally extracted their heads from the car, I was able to continue my relentless search for a stand.  Or a bucket.   Or maybe some books.

Tonight we went to a Christmas carol sing, in the pouring rain in Annacotty, the next little community down the road past Monaleen.  The warm crowd did not let a little rain deter them from turning out in full force, however.  And lots of presents were placed under the tree for disadvantaged children.  It was heartwarming.  (I just needed an Irish coffee for a bit of hand warming.)  Father  Christmas showed up in his full Father Christmas outfit.  It was fun to see a different looking Santa.

That's it for the weekend.  I hope your holiday preparations are not stressing you out too much.  Talk to you soon.

Slan,

Mary and Mark