A Million Words

May has been a good month for reading. I read Mort , by Terry Pratchett, , which was good fun, and I finally knocked another item off of my to-do list: Read Strunk & White. Many years ago, I read that every writer should read The Elements of Style , by Wm. Strunk and E. B. White , study it, and re-read it every year. This struck me as such fine advice that I went out, bought the book, and read the first ten pages. With less then 90 pages to go, it shouldn't have taken me another six years to get to the end, but somehow it did. I got caught up on the mysteries of colons and semicolons, two punctuation marks that I have never fully understood. The book slipped back onto my bookshelf and has stayed there ever since, near the front of the pile but rarely opened. I am now happy to report that I have finally read the whole thing. I felt its influence on my writing immediately, as if I could tighten sentences better than ever before. I felt my critical eye sharpen as I read. I did

I realized the other day that Nova has looked uncharacteristically sad in all my recently-posted photos of her. Here's one where she looks more like her usual self:

I looked at the official festival brochure yesterday, and sure enough, these windmills are supposed to power the whole race village. That's what the brochure says, anyway. It's a "green" event... sponsored by an automobile manufacturer. I'd bet they get at least some of their power off the grid, if not most of it. I'm not as cynical as my husband, though, who thinks that the windmills are purely for show. As I was taking these pictures, there was a guy walking past who looked like he might know something. I said: "These sure look pretty permanent for something that just went up two days ago." "They won't be there long, don't worry," he replied. Too bad. I kinda like them.

Well, the tanks are gone, the docks have been scrubbed clean, and with three days to go until the boats start arriving, this is what the docks look like. First, there's the main race village: On the wall in front of the dome, there, you can see a sort of mural has been painted. I would have hoped for something I liked better, and expected a closer copy of the Green Dragon logo. I imagine that in an ad agency somewhere, a graphic designer is weeping. As you can see here, "non-food retail" tents have taken over a lane of the road in front of our apartment, obstructing the flow of traffic. A matched pair of windmills appeared earlier this week, on either side of the lock. Perhaps they will power something.

If you don't live on the Galway docks and aren't obsessed with round-the-world sail races, you may not know that there's much happening this weekend. If I didn't live right in front of the stage, I would hardly have noticed until a few days ago, but this week on Shop Street you can't turn around without hitting a Volvo Ocean Race banner. Now, I'm not particularly all this corporate-sponsored racing, but I am curious about it. Most people in Galway are only dimly aware of this race stopover event, despite a huge publicity machine and a full program of music and miscellaneous other shows. The organizers, however, are expecting this to be the biggest thing since Jesus... or at least since the Pope came to Galway in 1979. There's a bit of a disconnect between the hype inside the organization and practically everyone else I've spoken to. A business woman I talked to said that they're charging €6000 to set up a tent, and thought that was an awful lot to

When Mike was working full-time at a miserable, hazardous job, I thought it would be a good idea to celebrate every Friday by buying or making a cake.  So far, I've made chocolate cakes, carrot cakes, and miscellaneous cakes.  By the time we went into unemployment a few months ago, I had become quite attached to the idea of the Friday Cake. Last week, I decided that it would be fun to try to make a Battenburg Cake.  I'd spotted one at a friend's house, and thought it was interesting. After all, we don't have Battenburg cakes in America.  A week later, and on Saturday, I've finally gotten around to it.  The process was messy.  I used this recipe except that I bought the marzipan rather than make it from scratch.  The batter was gloppy and had to be thinned with lots of milk, and I didn't get it quite even in the pan. The cake came out all lumped up in the middle and didn't look like it would make two neat checkerboard cakes in a million years.   Well, a ful

The Volvo Ocean Race stopover advertises itself as a major event for Galway, but you never would have known it was happening until a two weeks ago when the oil tanks finally came down. I mean, they'd said that was supposed to happen in December.  Now, the ground where the tanks stood has been more-or-less cleaned up and they're starting to set up the race village, and temporary floating docks are being dropped into the water where the racing boats will park: The race people are also setting up a fence around the perimeter of the docks to keep hapless festival-goers from tumbling into the cleaner-than-usual water.  From my angle, the best thing about these fences is that they're a sign that we won't see the scrap-metal barges for a good few weeks. So, although I'm sure there'll be plenty of race-related noise at least it will be replacing, rather than adding to, the usual things that wake me up at 5 AM.   I doubt, however, that these will prevent any determined s

Late Thursday night I came down with a bout of mastitis, aches and pains all over, chills and general malliase.  I had a pretty good idea what was happening, so I went in to see the doctor right away. That kept me from writing on Friday, I was still pretty tired on Saturday, and by the time Sunday rolled around Nova had a fever, too.  We took her to the doctor yesterday afternoon. Now she and I are both on antibiotics and I haven't done any actual writing in days.   According to the doctor, Nova has an ear and throat infection resulting from her recent runny nose and cough. Also, her two top eye teeth are on the verge of breaking through the gum.  The result of all this is that she's nursing almost non-stop, more than she has since she was a newborn, I think.   Now, this is the first time in Nova's 17 months that she's had to take antibiotics, and it isn't pretty.  Toddler antibiotics come in a sticky yellow liquid form, and are supposed to be dosed out by the teasp

For four weeks, from February to March, I stuffed all of my grocery shopping receipts into an envelope behind the i-pod on the bookshelf.  At the end of the four weeks, I tallied them up in a spreadsheet to find out how much I'd been spending and where I'd been spending it.  I wrote about the experiment here . My analysis led me into a lot of mumsy internet forum discussions about budgeting, meal planning, comparison shopping, etc. I moved into phase two of the experiment: creating a menu plan and organizing my pantry.  I started off by making a list of all the things I like to keep in stock in the cupboards, refrigerator, etc.  Well. I ended up with a list of about 150 items, including actual staples, baking supplies, spices and sauces for a variety of cuisines, cleaning products, medicines, etc. I could make a shorter list, but it wouldn't come close to including all the things we get from the grocery store.  Having made the list, I never look at it, but the process of ma

Lately I've been thinking about starting a serious blog, with regular, reasonably frequent posts and content that other people might actually want to read.  To that end, I've whiled away most of the past week learning about blogs, websites, etc.  I have fallen behind the times.  Sure, I knew about twitter and indexing and submitting to search engines, but the intricacies of feeds, wordpress, etc. are all new to me.  I didn't even know how to set up a counter on this blog. I'm still looking for one.  I am making progress, though. Two days ago, I signed up for a website hosting account at Fat Cow, and this morning I figured out how to sign up for Google Analytics .  I was surprised to discover that it was free.  Why didn't I know that before?  I'm hoping to get all this sorted in the next few months, and to launch my new blog/website sometime this summer.  I'll probably even announce it here, just in case anyone stops by.