La maith agat:

Yes, that means good afternoon.  It is only Friday, I usually write after our weekend outings but I thought I might get started and recap the highlights of the week and add a bit after we enjoy the sights, fully confident that the Mariners will have a long rest after today’s victory before they move on to the ALCS.

It is killing me not being home.  I can follow the games fine, thanks to the
Internet.  But I miss going into the grocery store or into work and hearing the buzz. [Speaking of which (Mark, here), I miss mochas!  This country is only primitively caffeinated.]  And I fear I will sorely miss the victory parade.  Yell a cheer for me.

I must tell a story on my husband. [here it comes …]  You all remember the scene from Top Gun where Maverick and Goose looked at one another and exclaimed "I feel the need for speed!"  A perfectly normal vociferation for 2 hot shot Top Gun pilots.  Cut to Limerick.  Mark called me Tuesday, having gone to lunch at the faculty club with a colleague.   Our hot shot professor’s exclamation was "I feel the need for tweed!"  A bit tamer than Maverick and Goose but equally at home for his locale.  Guess we gotta do some shopping.

I miss our bookish Seattle.  There is a Limerick City Library downtown in something called the Granary.  By way of a comparison, it is a library, maybe about the size of the northeast branch of the Seattle Public Library.  Parking is often difficult to find.   But they have some interesting programs.  Tuesday evening I went to a lecture on heraldry.  Anyway, the library apparently has a branch in a small shopping center, which is more convenient to our house.  It is the Roxboro Branch of the Limerick City Library.  I had seen it a few weeks ago when I tried to go grocery shopping about 7:45 p.m.  By the way, don’t try to go grocery shopping at such a late hour.  The clerks have all gone home.  Of course the branch library was closed as well at that late hour, so yesterday after school the whole family, minus Garth who was playing at a friend’s house, went down to check it out.  I am fairly certain that this branch held fewer volumes than the Assumption School Library.  Nevertheless, Emmeline, Melinda and I each found a book we would like to borrow.  [Mark is illiterate but imagines that he would look great in a tweed jacket…. With elbow patches, I think.]  We took them up to the counter (well, table, actually) and tried to check them out.  But, it seems that the cards for the Limerick library are not accepted at its branch.  If you want to check books out from the Roxboro Branch of the Limerick City Library, you have to join that branch too.  How it can be a branch if it is not connected to the trunk, I am not sure, but these are questions to ask, oh, I don’t know, maybe a librarian.

I went for a lovely walk along the River Shannon with some IWOers (International Women’s Organizationers) this morning.  It is about 2 1/2 miles into town where we had a "cuppa" at the Hunt Museum and then headed back.  It is still enchanting for me to just be out for a walk at a common, everyday kind of place and see a beautiful swan.  We saw several swans, joined by their teenage son and daughter cygnets still bearing their dun colored plumage.  The swans are often so still they look like garden ornaments.  [They are not, of course.  They are swans.  I can tell.  I have a masters degree, … in science!]

It is now evening (wish I knew which of the trathnona maith agat words meant "evening").  I am listening to the M’s and glad I’m not an A’s fan.  I’d still be cooling my heels and waiting for a 1 a.m. local time start.  But as I sit here, I wish I had bought monkey fingers at the grocery store yesterday.  What, you may ask, are monkey fingers.  Peanuts in the shell.   Somehow "buy me some monkey fingers and cracker jacks" just doesn’t have the same rhythm.  The game’s all tied up now.  I was reading a bit on the web as I listened to the game and came across an article about how all the world series games will be night games.  I think I’m going to have to set my alarm.

8 October 2000

Hi again.  It is a beautiful Sunday, late afternoon.   Yesterday, we drove to Kilkenny, a mediaeval town about two hours to the east.  We stopped at Roscrea on the way and saw an old castle, still with a drawbridge and portcullis, features missing from many of the surviving castles.  [A side note here about the Roscrea experience:  In the castle’s courtyard, is a large and old house.  It is sort of a crummy museum now (unavoidable subjectivity creeping in there) but it had one exhibit that, if you come to Ireland, you must see.  It is mounted in a large glass case and enjoys great pride of place in the center of a room on the second floor.  It is one of the largest, most spectacular, indeed, the only specimen of Bog Butter that I have ever seen.  If you are like me and have never heard of Bog Butter before, then I will tell you that it is pretty much what it sounds like.  It’s butter ? a 62 pound wad of it in this case ? that was found in a bog.  It seems that turf cutters were out there cuttin’ the turf  some years ago and came across this chunk of stuff.  They, naturally, took it to a university professor who specializes in this field (you can always find someone who specializes in just about anything…) and asked what it might be.  It took an NSF Grant and the useful lifetimes of four grad students but they determined that this was Bog Butter.  By the way, if it had been found in KillKenney, it would be Butler Bog Butter.]

Then we went on to Kilkenny.  {If you say that just right, it sounds really bad!]  Everything pretty much closes between 12:30 and 2:00 in this country, it seems.  We arrived at Kilkenny Castle about 1 p.m. but it was closed ‘til 2 so we walked through the town to the cathedral (Church of Ireland). It, too, was closed until 2.  But we waited.  It is a beautiful cathedral.  Inside there are crypts topped by beautifully carved effigies of the Butler family, the former owners of the castle and power brokers in this part of the country for about five centuries.  Alongside the church is a spectacular round tower.  The towers are found throughout the land and were built as defensive fortifications, the first doorway being 10 or more feet above the ground and reached, in ye goode olde days, by a ladder that was pulled up when all the good guys were safe inside.  They could then climb to the top of the tower, again pulling up the ladders behind them.  Nowadays there are permanent ladders, and I counted 6, each with 17 steps, at right angles to each other going up.  It’s quite something going up and there is a commanding view of the countryside from the top.  But that trip back down.  Hang on!  Unfortunately, due to insurance regulations (the first liability insurance issues we have yet seen in weeks of climbing around crumbling ruins) children under 12 are not allowed.   Did Mark and I let that stop us?  No way!  It was awesome.  (I told the kids when they grow up, they can come back to Ireland and make their kids wait at the bottom.)
[The part I liked best about the tower was this: as Mary mentioned, there are 6 sets of steps.  After each set you reach a landing of sorts.  You dismount the ladder and walk around the landing to the next set of steps.  At each landing is a small window carved through the 3+ feet (.920 m) of rock.  As I reached the first landing and was heading for the next ladder, I looked through the window and found that 2 sets of eyes were looking back at me!  There were two baby pigeons sitting in a rather poorly constructed nest.  Actually it looked to me as though they were sitting pretty much on the stone itself but, I must admit that this is the first pigeon nest I have ever seen and for all I know this was, like a castle for a pigeon.   Anyway, on the way back down the mother - or maybe it was the father and he was there to pick up the kids to go bowling ? was there with the kids. A tender scene.  I scared the mother away by trying to take a picture.  A digital picture.  Technology… scary stuff even for pigeons]

Well after the cathedral, we went back to Kilkenny Castle.  There are lots of neat alleyways going through the town.  When we got back to the castle, we managed to snag the last tickets to the 4 o’clok tour.  Now, when you all come to Ireland, (and I’m sure with our stunning descriptions of all there is to see and do here you won’t tarry in making your reservations) go to Kilkenny Castle.  It is a thing not to be missed.  However, if, when you reach the ticket desk, they try to send you with just any old tour guide, say, "No, we’ll wait for John Burke’s tour, thank you very much."  The man is the most awesome tour guide in the entire country!  You will learn history and Irish (and gossip about the former inhabitants and their friends and lovers), all in the most entertaining of fashions.  But don’t touch the marble table in the entry hall.  It’s where they used to lay out the dearly departed, and well, if Garth doesn’t make it back from Ireland, we’ve got the curse of the Butlers to thank for that!

Hey, for all you South Park fans.  Now we know who killed Kenny.  The Butler did it!!!!

Today we went to the town of Adare.  It is a thatched cottage village with the big Adare Manor and two golf courses and more tourist dollars per capita than Disneyland.  No souvenir or antique bargains here.  It even has Disneyland’s slightly over-the-top cuteness.  We were walking down a lane to see the Dovecot used in the 1300’s by the Trinitarians to store next Sunday’s dinner, when we met one of Mark’s colleagues.  We know so few people in this country and yet we seem to run into them.  [He was wearing a tweed jacket, by the way.  Makes you think, doesn’t it.]

We have attached a picture.  Now I have seen deer, and horse, and cattle and even duck, but I have never seen one of these.  Have you?  Get ready.  It may be you or me sooner than we think.

That’s it from these parts.  I’m glad I was so accurate in my predictions about my Seattle Mariners, and look forward to another successful round of baseball.  Talk to you later.

Slan,
Mer