A Million Words

Noreen left this afternoon after a 5-week stay that turned into 5 months. I’ll miss her, and so will Nova and Mike, I think. She was possibly the easiest-to-live-with housemate I’ve ever had, and entertaining, too. She did introduce Nova to smoked salmon, which is getting expensive, but since it’s practically the only meat Nova will eat, it’s probably for the best. She also brought us nice cheese and good bread and bottles of wine all the time. Now we get to live on our own as a family, at least for a short while, and it’s a bit of a novelty. I suppose it will be more peaceful, but it’ll also be a bit dull. Who will help us keep Nova entertained now? We’ll have to get a dog. We made a cake for Noreen this afternoon before she got on the bus. Or rather, I mixed up some cake batter, baked it, and tried to roll it up into a nice roulade with some whipped cream, but I skipped a step and it fell apart into a cracked, disordered pile. Mike got out the writing icing and wrote “Go Away ...

Breaking news from Galway Harbor:  the oil tanks have been leveled.  Here are a couple of pictures from yesterday and today:   Now we can see the little fringe of green at the back of the parking lot, the area which is supposed to house the race village for the big Volvo Ocean Race hooha which is coming to town in a few weeks.  Looks like there's still a lot of rubble to clear.

Yesterday afternoon I attended my first ever poetry slam.  I've been wondering about slam poetry for a few years now, but between one thing and another I'd never actually been to a slam until yesterday.  I had heard that they were loud and full of hecklers, but that was in America. Here in Galway, poetry audiences are quiet and respectful, even at slams.   The slam took place at the Roisin Dubh, a pub which people frequently use as a landmark when giving directions in Galway.  I'd never been in there before, and found it much like any other bar, except very crowded for 3:00 in the afternoon.   About a dozen poets participated in the slam. First up was a young woman in a short, hot pink dress who did a piece about long-post-Woodstock wannabe psychedelia. I thought it was pretty good, but I couldn't follow the narrative thread of it at times, and her performance was a bit too nervous.  She was the best of the first few in my mind.  The next one I thought was good was a ma...

The Cuirt festival is on this week in Galway, and I'm thrilled that this year I'll be here and able to attend at least a few events.  I started off this morning with a workshop, which was a lot of fun but left me wondering: Am I getting old?  I am terribly ageist when it comes to writing workshops.  I can take each writer as an individual, but generally there are two groups in any class; those who aspire to careers as professional writers, and those who write primarily for their own amusement.  The career-oriented writers are generally younger, in their 20s and 30s, while most of the hobbyists have long since gone grey and retired from their day jobs.  I know that some of the older people will go on to write actual books while the younger ones lose heart in their creative endeavors, but I still felt more than a little discouraged when I looked around the table today.   The trouble was that the instructor, Nuala Ni Chonchuir (and yes, I'm too lazy to figure out how to put t...

I've read another book already!   The Princess Bride is a good bit shorter and lighter than the last two books I read, and it's good... but not as great as I thought it was at the beginning.  In the final third of the original story I became impatient with the narrator, and in the hundred page added-on section at the end, Buttercup's Baby  I just wanted to be done with it.   That said, I'm thrilled  that I've managed to read a whole book in less than a week, and it was highly entertaining a good 3/4 of the way through. I also enjoyed all the commentary on life as a rich and famous wrier, even if the narrator was a jerk.

Well, it's been a long time since I wrote about what's happening outside our windows.  Oil ships and scrap-metal barges have come and gone on their regular rounds, a few yachts have wandered in and out, and we keep hearing rumors that the Volvo Ocean Race is coming to town, and that it will be a major event.  Many things are supposed to have been happening in preparation for this race stopover, but until today I didn't actually believe that they were going to move the oil tanks to make room for the race village.  The tanks were supposed to have been removed in December or January, but on they stayed in all their galvanized splendor:   Throughout the morning I heard the occasional thunder of crashing metal, without realizing what was going on.  I looked out and saw that our scrap metal heap, the usual source of such noises, was nowhere to be seen.  The sound was coming from the old, empty oil tanks.  Perhaps they are coming down at last. 

A few months ago I reported on Nova's early words in the post Nova is Walking! For months after I wrote that post, her vocabulary remained stagnant, and even shrunk a bit.  I don't think she used the word "baba" once between September and March, then all of a sudden, about three weeks ago, it was back.  More words followed.  Last night I attempted to compile a list of Nova's current words, including those that I'm not 100% sure of (followed by a ? in the list bellow) Baba (baby) Ball ballaballap (balloon) bubum (butter) bye-bye (also used to mean, "let's go already!" when I'm taking too long to get out of the house) book? blue? buttbutt (button, including especially bellybutton)  dada down dat (that)  dog (Nova's favorite word) dark (not very precisely pronounced) duck (a very popular word these days, second only to "dog."  It includes all birds.) eye hat/head/hair (not sure if she's distinguishing between these yet) hi/hiy...

I have never been an especially fast reader, but I used to be able to get through a book in a week or so, most of the time.  So, when I made my new year's resolution to read one good novel a month, I thought I should be able to manage it.  Three and a half months into the year, I'm starting to slip. Well, my book for March wasn't a novel, and I didn't get properly started on it until well into the month.  I finished reading White Mughals around midnight last night, and I must say it was worth the effort and more. I picked it up as research for the historical romance that I'm supposedly working on. I wanted to learn a bit more about the East India Company around the beginning of the 19th century, as background for the male lead in my story.  It gave me what I was looking for and greatly broadened my perspective on that period in history.  In addition, it had a compelling plot and was excellently written.   I had checked the book out of the library, but made such slo...

I expected that we would go up to my mother-in-law's for Easter dinner, but as it turned out she was going away for the weekend so I wound up doing dinner here.  I made deviled eggs (no recipe, though I looked at a few), asparagus (sauteed in butter), pot barley, and a half shoulder of lamb with this marinade .  I also threw in a few baked potatoes, because it's not a real dinner in Ireland if you don't have potatoes. I cooked them according to the directions on How to Bake a Potato.com . Amazing, the things that have their own websites. I found the results excellent. The lamb also came out well despite the fact that I didn't start marinating it until an hour before baking, and didn't have a food processor so the ingredients weren't as mashed up as they're supposed to be.   When my mother was here for a visit, we went out to more fancy restaurants than usual, including Sheridan's, which is just on the corner. There, my mother ordered something that in...