(no subject)

Ireland was nice, although slightly chilly. I'm very glad the coat I brought with me is windproof, because that came in handy at least two or three times. (Blowing snow in Dublin? Who ordered THAT? The Dubliners certainly didn't.) Further Ireland stuff later.

I got back to Boston in the middle of last Friday afternoon and spent the rest of Friday letting Lily in particular figure out that it was, in fact, me. Eventually both Hairy Beasts decided it was, and then decided that since it was, they could eat again. I know that they don't eat all the food I leave for them if I go away for a weekend, and now I know they eat about half of what's given to them if I go away for longer and have somebody else feed them every day. On Saturday they ate about twice as much as they usually do in a day. Things seem to have evened out again now, though.

In Galway last Wednesday I came down with a cold, and brought it back to the US with me. I've got the cough that sounds like what Mom had over Christmas, but this one seems to want to be a shorter cold than that one was. (Thank goodness.) On Saturday I went to the drugstore, the bank and Trader Joe's, and those three errands knocked me on my ass so much that I had almost no energy for the rest of the day. Discretion being the better part of valor, I put off the rest of the errands I wanted to get done yesterday, and did nothing more energetic than laundry. Today I feel almost human, but we'll see how much energy I've got after being at work all day.

I got myself dug out from under my emails by lunchtime, but today seems to be "ask a random question" day. I have no idea why anybody thinks I would know where to get HMS academic regalia, or why I would know what the difference in pay scale is between a postdoc and an Instructor at one of our affiliated institutions. (And yes, both of those questions came directly to me.) Ah well, onward and upward, I guess. Literally upward, because I started at the oldest email and proceeded up the list from there.

It appears we're in for another mess of sneaux tomorrow. I can't say I wish it were April, because we've been known to get sneaux in April, but I wish winter would decide it's got an urgent appointment Elsewhere for about six or seven months, already. At least the clocks have changed so I won't always be coming home in the dark, regardless of what the rest of the weather is doing.

(no subject)

So, Ireland.

Things I learned in Ireland:

- NOTHING is open at 7 AM except McDonald's.
- Half the tourists in Dublin seemed to be French, and it all made sense when I found out about the rugby match on Saturday night.
- Nobody in Ireland can pronounce my last name either. I had a couple of hotel people apologize for calling me by my first name because they couldn't pronounce the other one.
- There's Starbucks in Dublin, but not in Galway.
- The Walk/Don't Walk buttons do mostly work, but mostly you wait for about two minutes after you push the button.
- If a pub is called Murphy's/Flanagan's/Doyle's/etc. and it's in Ireland, it's not automatically trying too hard; they've all got names like that (with some exceptions).
- Dublin's got egg statues like Boston had cow statues a few years ago. I thought the eggs were confined to St. Stephen's Green, but I found one at Trinity College and a couple elsewhere too.
- Galway is medieval in its street design and layout and commercial in everything else. I don't think anybody lives in Galway City; they just come there to sell things and catch buses.
- The scenery in Connemara is worth seeing. I really don't want to know how much work went into getting stone walls to go up the sides of some of those hills.
- Apparently you can contain sheep with less-than-four-foot walls. Or you don't care when they go over them, although I never saw any sheep try to go over any walls.
- All of the bilingual Irish/English signs and announcements put the Irish first.
- Next time I go to Ireland I should wait until April and see if it gets any warmer.