May 8 late-published post from our Irish Mothers' Day with lots of pictures at end

July 30 -- I've picked up some work -- great! I've re-picked-up my procrastination habits too. Sigh. Which means that, hurray, I've been cleaning up the desktop and see I missed posting this. Here it is, not quite three months late. :) 

Sunday May 8

A very satisfying Mother's Day.

First, the cats woke us up at ridiculous o'clock in the morning. So then we tried to sleep some more. I moved up to the big bed in the loft with Yarrow because frankly 3 or 4 nights in the child's bunk bed has not resulted in a rested Christa. I'm getting the loft bed tonight.

We went to town in time to see the hurling practice in Whitegate (there was a proper game on yesterday, but Yarrow hadn't been with me). Then we carried on down the road toward the car boot sale, where our intention was to eliminate more stuff from our stash. We're really paring down now, since we're vehicle-less. So we caught a lift with two nice English people who have moved here. As it happened they were going to the car boot sale anyway, or at least the husband was but the wife was planning to stay in the car. She's had enough of car boot sales.

Anyway we found a nice lady, about 70 or so, who had things out to sell, and offered her the extra clothes we had decided to cull, for free, and she said yes, thank you. So that's that done. Then we had a sausage baguette, which was very nice (millions of times nicer than processed-bread-processed-hot-dog that's common in N. America), and vegetable soup with brown bread, and tea, and Coke. I've been letting Young Man drink too much Coke lately, but Ireland is not high on nutrition. I'm definitely missing Conrad's excellent vegetarian lunches at Creagh Castle. He would cook us curries and ragouts and all sorts of yummy very vegetably healthy things. 

I managed to buy a bag of salad at the car boot sale and I'll be very glad to munch on the greens here so I will (you can get lots of vegetables at this wwoofing place, as long as all you want is potatoes). Actually I'd say pretty much what you can get here for food is potatoes, with a little bit (very little bit) of extras. However, we've been spending a lot of time down at the pub, an expensive option for the week but a sanity-saving one. We've figured out how to make it slightly less expensive by sharing a steak sandwich for dinner. It's a great steak sandwich. They also have delicious pavlova. I am absolutely mad for pavlova and the Irish make delicious ones.

If you don't know what it is, it's cream on top of a meringue with fruit on top.

Hitch-hiking back again, we stopped for a while in Mount Shannon, which has this lovely park with this interesting rock work and lots of history. 

Then we met up with Desi (friendly local who offered us a hike) at the Half Barrel Pub in Whitegate and he took us for a half hour walk that took about 6 hours. He knows everybody in every house along the way, and we rambled through fields to get to the top of hills (on top of rock walls!) to see views over the River Shannon, and then we (he and I, Yarrow decided to stay on shore) went out to rescue some Germans who'd run their rental boat into a rock in the middle of the lake. Desi had been watching them not move while we had our tea break. Apparently he does that quite a bit. In fact we didn't end up doing anything but providing reassurance they weren't alone until the big strong boat from the rental company came. That and I got lovely views from the lake.

It was a very splendid, very beautiful day.

And we ended it by playing shadow puppets on the wall in the cabin where we stay at Aidan's place.