Sid is Alive

We headed to Heathrow early Monday (March 9) to hop an Aer Lingus flight to Shannon, passing through a bit more of London that emphasized how big the city is.

The flight was uneventful, except that the storage compartment plastic seemed to make more noise than I was used to, creaking a little with serious movement. No free beverages either. Everything was for sale. I passed.

Very little hassle when we touched down at Shannon airport, except for the usual wait for bags. I don't understand how my bags are always among the last to come off, if they come off at all.

Once we made it out of the airport we found our CIE tour bus and got our greeting from our driver/guide Tom Ryan. (He pronounced it Rhine.) His accent wasn't like an Irish accent from TV. Somehow, at first, he almost sounded German. He was a great guide, mixing in Irish custom, history, and the occasional limerick.

We set off first for lunch in a spot near the Bunratty Castle Hotel. I wound up ordering bacon and cabbage. The bacon was more like ham and they threw in cabbage and a lot of root vegetables. All in all an interesting meal.

Race Among the Ruins
After lunch we headed off on an hour and a half drive to the Cliffs of Moher at the coast of Clare. When I was in junior high we moved to a rurual community with a lot of immigrants from central Europe. Somehow driving through the small towns we visited reminded me of the first generation American kids who were in school with me. I'm not sure what exactly triggered those feelings as we made our way through narrow streets.

In the countryside we started to see the walls of old churches and other ruins all mixed in with modern neighborhoods. Most of the houses were flatter on the front than American design favors these days, and a lot were yellow - same color as Bunratty Castle Hotel.

Eventually we reached the cliffs. Winds were about 50 miles an hour. Tom warned us not to go past the protective wall. As we climbed the stone steps up to the viewing areas, we saw a lot of people who were on the grassy patches beyond the walls.

With the wind buffeting everywhere I decided to take Tom's advice and just enjoy the cliffs from a safe distance. They really are beautiful and the water crashes against the rocks below like it's the cover of a Gothic paperback.

We looked around for as long as we could take the wind then headed into the tourist rest stop for a while before the trip back to the Shannon area.

Castle Nights
For the evening, we attended a medieval-style banquet in the Great Hall of Bunratty Castle <http://www.shannonheritage.com/Bunratty_Day.htm>. I grew up feeling a romance about Ireland because there were family stories that our ancestry was there. Visiting Ireland and a castle fulfilled a lot of dreams.

It was chilly as we made our way up to the entrance, setting a crisp feel for things. A man playing bagpipes greeted us and then we were shown into a hall where a violinist named Seamus performed tunes, eventually joined by a harpist and ladies with meade. It's sweeter than I was aware, has honey mixed in. The harp is the official instrument of Ireland or one of the most favored. They put it on the money. (We'd changed some cash to Euros before leaving the states, and the exhange rate was a little more favorable than the pound's.)

The whole evening at the castle was a blast. They seated us at long tables and the ladies of the castle entertained with tunes, while a host made jokes and offered a tune or two of his own.

We got a kick out of the singing of the Lord of the Dance. Tune's the same as 'Tis a Gift to Be Simple, a tune that also serves as our corporate theme song. `Dance, dance, wherever you may be, for I am the lord of the dance,' said he.

They offered up ribs with sauce, a chicken dish, vegetables and a lot more in an array of courses. Then we headed out for the night with well wishes.

Back at the room we watched RTE, Ireland's channel. The hotel had a few more frills than the Jury's Inn in London, spacious room with a nice feel to it and the lobby, sort of homey.

Read more posts at http://my.opera.com/SidW/journal

Just spent 10 days in England and Ireland. Had a great time all around. Didn't try to access the web the whole time. The dollar to pound exchange was so steep hated to drop coins on bandwith, even though there was an Internet cafe just down the street from our first hotel in Islington.

We touched down in London March 7 after a 10 hour flight and got immediately on a tour bus for a quick trip around town -- I was pretty wiped out by the time we finally stopped. We hit the Tower of London first then St. Paul's, finally stopped about four hours later. After a little rest we wandered up and down Islington High Street and visited bookstores among other spots. Decided not to go on a Jack the Ripper tour, which had sounded good beforehand. Time change was affecting me by evening.

We had dinner in a place called Cuba Libre(actually Cuba Libre Restaurant and Havana Bar at 72 Upper Street Islington Green), great food. Getting used to British service was a little different. They have a very hands- off attitude, compared to what Christine called "the Outback" experience we're used to in America. (Or maybe the service was bad if you check some of the reviews here: <http://www.london-eating.co.uk/383.htm>

Read more posts at http://my.opera.com/SidW/journal

I have books everywhere. Stacked against walls in my office, tucked in cabinets. In my desk, in boxes, in the closet, on the coffee table. Oh yeah, I have some on book cases too. I emptied out the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet that was filled with books. They're stacked against the side of the cabinet now. That helps them to intimidate me now. Their spines couldn't urge me to read them hidden away in a drawer.

In one Signals catalog or another I've seen reference to a book, I think on Biblioholism, the compulsion to own books. Ironically, that's one book I don't own.

Fellow Travelers
I've talked or corresponded with other people who do the same thing. I used to exchange letters with a girl in England who'd advertised for pen pals in Fangoria. She told me of having cabinets and every available space in her home full of books. I also dated a girl once who had a dorm room stuffed that way. (I fall back on a quote from a Twilight Zone episode, from the eighties version--I don't remember if it was "the new" or whatever. In it Danny Kaye played a character who asked a young man: "Why would I want a library full of books I've already read?"

It all started for me with one copy of The Adventures of Robin Hood when I was a kid. It built via gifts, and my own purchases. Used books make up a large portion of my personal, disorganized library. Dime and nickle purchases are what really got me in trouble. When a used book store I'd frequented for years went out of business, I compiled a lot of books. Library culls for a dime and a quarter a copy stacked up a few more.

Futility
I've reached a point in life, as you may glean from other posts, in which I'm conscious of the passage of time. I'm almost ready to acknowledge I'll never read all of the books I have. I'll run out of time. Arteries or dementia will take me down before I've turned the last page on the last volume.

Yet, I don't see any other path, because I wouldn't exchange the pleasure of great reads. And if you're a reader, you know you never know where that's going to come from. You can't judge a book by the synopsis on the jacket flap or back cover. You have to dive in.

Sometimes it happens when you bring a book home from the store and open it on the sofa, and sometimes it comes (if you're a biblioholic) when you pull a book you've owned twenty years from a box and start turning the pages.

If you've ever done that, then you really have to wonder about people who have only three or four paperbacks that they've already read.

At 4 a.m. Saturday, Christine woke me to tell me the snow that had come only in a few brief flurries on Friday had turned to a full-fledged snowfall. Huge flakes were indeed falling. I never expected it to stick, but by 5:30 a.m. when the cats insisted we get out of bed, the yard was blanketed. I took pictures with our new digital camera and almost immediately e-mailed them to my friend, Wayne, in Chicago, where he's been enduring the winter cold for months. It's ironic we got snow in Texas. My boss went to Chicago this week and around the office we joked with him about his choice of winter getaways. I kept a Weather Channel forecast posted in the hallway with the "Feels Like" chill report.

Guess this is the second real snow we've had since living in this house. The last was on New Year's Eve, 2000. It was unexpected then. This one doesn't feel quite as magical as that one did, but it was still a nice surprise and made the back yard beautiful for a day. There's something to be said for variety as well, and I've seen a lot of snowmen. The sun's out today and the lawns are clearing, but the snowmen look as if they're going to be the last to go. I guess the compressed snow in their makeup has kept them standing.

Lunch today is chicken strips at my desk. Caved on the low-fat effort I've been trying to follow. I guess they're still better than some fast food meals. I know a doctor who's been on a weight-loss effort. He can rattle off the fat content in every kind of burger.

These are from Wendy's with their spicy mustard. Went for the fries too. Have to watch my meals over the weekend.

I'm eating them while listening to The Glenn Mitchell Show from Dallas, streamed from <http://www.kera.org>. It's a very good Public Radio station and the Mitchell Show is a really great talk show. On Fridays, the noon-hour is devoted to questions and answers. Listeners call in and relay questions then they're thrown out to the audience to see if anyone knows the answers.

If you have chicken strips and the Glenn Mitchell Show, life is good.

This afternoon I have a meeting with the guys from the web firm my company uses to discuss moving to a new server. We got backed into a tight deadline on that so the headaches are plentyful.

Of course there always seems to be a crisis. I don't get acid indigestion about it much anymore.

I'm working on getting my web page going again. I let it slide a while back because I changed ISPs and lost my free space. It's stopped showing up in Google even in cached form, a sure sign your site is dead.

I've been working on the design, which I haven't done hands-on in some time. I have it pretty much the way I want it in the "Preview in Browser" view at least, although there's one line showing up where I don't want it to, and I'm not sure why. I'd forgotten about the "bang your head against the wall" aspects of tweaking HTML.

For far too long, I've worked with a design company on my day job, doing odds and ends design and code as I need to in Dreamweaver. It's Front Page on my home computer, which I find a little like working without thumbs.

I got into web work because I liked design and the like and managed to find a job where they were more interested in my journalism past than having me do much design. Recently I started doing some e-mail newsletters that demand a little more of me, although they involve using management tools.

Management tools are always a little frustrating to me. There's always something they won't do, and I start thinking "If I could just get to the HTML..."

On my site I can get to the HTML, and there's still a blasted line!

My father passed away in October, and almost coinciding with that, my mom's health took a downturn. I've had her in the hospital or transition for months, although she's finally settled for a while, I hope, in an assisted living area of a nursing home.

She had a full-blown apartment before that and I've been cleaning out a lot of her things. She had a lot of stuff even though she and my dad had an estate sale before moving into that apartment.

In getting her old Singer sewing machine ready to donate to the Salvation Army, I found a tiny mail order package from Helen Gallager/Foster House dated 1972. That's a year after she took early retirement from her job as a home economics teacher. The package contained labels that read: Specially Hand Made and designed by Mildred.

She doesn't remember buying them now, but they must have been an impulse from her newly retired era. I don't guess she ever used them, which saddened me a bit, looking back. The time ahead must have looked fresh and exciting and full of promise in 1972. She must have planned to utilize her seamstress skills and sign her work. I never thought of what my mother did as an art until I found the package.

The years passed as years do, and in restrospect that seems like the blink of an eye. Not long before she was hospitalized, she crocheted a hand towel for our refrigerator. I guess it's the last work of that type she'll ever do. In those name tags and that refrigerator towel I have two fragments that bookend the last 30 years. Makes me realize how important the "live in the now" message is. Carpe diem and all that.

The last half hour of the afternoon is usually the slowest. Too late to start a new project and too fried to be really creative.