A Million Words

Crash.  Whirr, creak, rattle, CRASH!  That's been the story since sometime between 3 and 5 AM and now, getting on towards 11.  When the barge pulled up along our side of the docks on Saturday, I kind of knew that it wasn't here for the scrap metal.  I half hoped it was just here for a restful visit to Galway, maybe a little pub crawl for the crew, then quietly off over the horizon of Galway Bay. But no.  It's here on business.  Loud, just outside the window business.  Shortly after the barge arrived the other day, a giant, rusty funnel was set beside it.  Now all morning trucks have been lining up underneath it and the local crane has been scooping and dumping with rattles and crashes, waking me up at every turn.   Much as I love our view of all the activity on the harbor, this is one of those times when I think that a little quiet would be nice.

It's late in the afternoon and Nova is having a nap of epic proportions, 2.5 hours and counting.  She's probably tired from our weekend's adventures in Donegal, which I plan to write about at some point, once we get the video up on youtube.   Helen did the following meme, and filling it in is about as coherent as my writing is likely to get today. What were you doing 10 years ago? In June 1998, I was moving from Lowell Street in Somerville into the dorms at EDS , and starting my dreadful summer of Clinical Pastoral Education at New England Baptist Hospital.  5 things on your to-do list for today Organize for tomorrow's sling meet (lots of steps to that one) Wash diapers Sew diapers Trim Nova's fingernails Write something.  What would you do if you were a billionaire? Buying a house would be high on the agenda, and not just any house but a historic mansion or even a castle. I would restore it and fix it up so that we could have massive house parties. Mike c

Last night, I finally finished reading  What's Going on in There ,  which I started in December or thereabouts.  Since then, long weeks have passed in which I did not read at all, or picked it up only to read one or two pages. Between January and mid-May, I don't think I read more than ten pages on any one day, and usually much less than that. When Nova went to sleep earlier than usual three nights ago I set out to read 15 pages and wound up reading nearly 40.  It felt so good to really get into a book and feel my brain stir to life again.  I nodded off with only one chapter left to read (the second-to-last, because I'd skipped around).  The following night I was too tired to pick it up at all, but last night I read those last 15 pages.  I have now read a full-length book with Nova at my side. What's Going on in There was pretty good, but like many books, it dragged in the middle. I found myself more interested again towards the end when it started talking about languag

Last Friday, June 6th, was our Cake Day.  Mike and I performed many feats of bureaucratic contortion and form-filling in our quest to get married, and June 6th was the final day set for our Irish wedding.   Here is an abbreviated version of the saga: Last fall, when Nova was still snug inside my belly, Mike and I started to talk about getting married so we could all live together in the same country, but I didn't want to rush into it, and didn't want to tie the knot while my brain was addled with pregnancy hormones.  We planned, tentatively, to get married without family or fuss at Cambridge City Hall in December. Well, Nova was supposed to come out in early November, but she was actually born on November 29th, which meant that by the time she and I had recovered from childbirth, Christmas was upon us and so was the end of Mike's 90-day visa to the US.  We planned to get married after our return from a visit to Ireland in early January.  Mike didn't get a visa to come b

This past Monday, June 9th, about twenty fishing boats lined up to blockade Galway Harbor in protest.  I was not 100% clear on what they were protesting, but one thing they wanted was for the government to stop taxing gasoline.  Here are some pictures from the day: Many of the fishermen are still here, flying banners which say: "Save Our Livelihoods" "Brussles Betray, Costal Communities Decay" "Third World starves while Ireland forced to dump dead fish" "Fishermen demand fair and effective laws" etc. Most of these signs are spray-painted onto sheets, and are accompanied by big placards from Sinn Fein urging people to vote against the Lisbon treaty.   Watching all those boats line up to blockade the harbor was a good morning's entertainment, but I find myself strangely unsympathetic to the fishermen's plight.  I don't really know the issues very well, but it seems to me that the fundamental problem is that a century of industrial

I'm fully enjoying motherhood, but one of the things that's beginning to drive me crazy is the fact that I'm having an awfully hard time reading anything longer than a short article.  Since December, I've been reading What's Going on in There , and a few weeks ago I started reading my friend Nicki's book, Crossed.   I had hoped to finish at least one of them by the end of May, but no dice.  I resolve to finish reading both  of these books in the next few weeks, or at least by the end of June.  Wish me luck.  I'll need it.

It's now been about three months since I started practicing EC with Nova most of the time.  I didn't realize until today that I hadn't blogged about it since late March.  At that point, I was washing roughly 18 diapers every day, was bleary-eyed and confused and only half settled in to our new home.   On our trip back to America in late April, I started to discover how far we'd come.  Once I got out of the urban environment of Galway and into the woods, it became much easier to respond when Nova seemed to need to pee.  We just had to be in a place where it was all right to just stop and tinkle into the bushes.  I didn't have to work so hard at finding places to pee because the whole outdoors was at our disposal.  The warm, sunny weather helped, too. Back in Galway, where the environment around us is all people and pavement, we need to make special detours to find places to pee -- pub toilets, occasional parks, and home are nearly the only options.  I started keeping