A Very Bad Blogger

It's true: over a month since my last post...I'm afraid that makes me a Very Bad Blogger. My sincere apologies to anyone who has been wasting their time checking for something new (and possibily even interesting). The good news is that I have a valid excuse, at least for the last few weeks: I have been traveling! Quick catch up: the last weeks of July were spent working 40+ hours a week and enjoying the TV that Celia and I purchased. It sounds pretty pathetic, especially since we don't get a single channel and can only watch movies, but after so long without TV and since I was working so much...well, it was actually pretty enjoyable. I also believe that I was conserving energy for what I knew was arriving at the beginning of August...my sister! For those of you who who haven't met her, Jessica is two years my junior and about a hundred times more energetic and driven than I am. So resting up for her visit was wise. Really. The basic outline of our trip went like this: she arrived August 3, and we spent a couple of days checking out Dublin and some of its surroundings (namely Howth, a cute little port town with seals in the harbour). On August 5, after months of cordiation with her friend Ashley, Jess managed to surprise two other friends, Tyler and Nikki by meeting them in Dublin. Actually, it was a pretty funny event. Jess and Ash had arranged to meet on the Ha'penny Bridge (a well known tourist attraction in Dublin, named for its one-time half-penny toll, pronounced "hay-penny"). Jess and I got that shortly before the appointed time, and were hanging out on the middle of the bridge when there was a big commotion down the river; someone had jumped off the bridge, bringing about 6 fire trucks, 4 ambulences and 9 police cars (yes, I just made those numbers up, but it was something like that). This was entertaining for a while, until the drunk homeless guy standing next to us decided that jumping in was a great idea and climbed over the railing! Jess and I opted to ignore him, figuring that he was just looking for attention, but we were the only ones wise to that and soon a fair crowd had gathered. We were a bit torn about what to do--we didn't want to get caught up in the chaos, but we also didn't want to miss Ash and co. and ruin the surprise. Fortunately we saw them, right after the police turned up to coax drunk guy back onto the safe side of the railing. Jess pointed them out to me like this; "that's Ash with the video camera, Tyler scratching his ear and Nikki in the striped shirt." Well, she was right about the camera and striped shirt, by Tyler wasn't actually scratching his ear: after seeing that Ash appeared to be videotaping the jumper, he was trying to pretend that he wasn't with her! He claims that it was this embarassment and confusion that put a damper on his reaction to seeing my sister (he seemed a bit underwhelmed), while Nikki bounced around excitedly and tried to get Ash, who was filming their reaction, to turn and look at Jess, not realizing that Jess' appearance was anything more than a coincidence. We spent the next day with them in Dublin, and on Monday, August 7, headed out on a bus tour with a company called the Shamrocker. It was a 3 day tour of Western Ireland that took us took a whiskey distillery, Clonmacnoise (a monastic sight), the Cliffs of Moher, Dooling, the Dingle Peninsula, Killarney, and the Barney castle and stone, among other places. It was fantastic! We had a small, and apparently very quiet group, but we really enjoyed ourselves and made a few friends. The others on our bus were all Canadians and Australians, plus one New Zealander, and we got on very well. We returned on August 9 to Dublin, spent the 10th getting organized and seeing Ash, Tyler and Nikki off. First thing on the morning of August 11 we flew to Brussels. I'm about out of time for now, so I'll continue this tomorrow. Just to give you something to look forward to, we went from Brussels to Zurich to Interlaken to Cinque Terra (via Milan) to Venice (via Florence) to Munich to Salzburg to Paris and then back to Dublin!