Category Archives: spring

My stance on mythical creatures

2 Replies

It’s Easter Morning and no bunny came to our house. The kids are fine with that. They haven’t really noticed. To be honest, I didn’t really notice. I thought for a good 30 seconds after I woke up to figure out what day of the week it was, and was happy when I decided it was a Sunday. I did not leap out of bed and get busy with baskets and fake grass and eggs of any description.

Not to say that we don’t do Easter things. We went to an egg hunt yesterday. There was a big guy in a bunny suit there, but he wasn’t handing out candy so my kids weren’t really interested in him.

Egg haul

Mabel’s eggs

When I first discovered – and Dash was about five when this happened so you’d think I’d have noticed before – that the Easter Bunny in America was like Santa Claus, an imaginary being who delivered things in the night, I was a bit horrified. Another one? Do we never get to give our kids anything ourselves? And since Easter always comes somewhere between B’s birthday and Dash’s, usually closer to the latter, we really don’t need an extra occasion for overconsumption.

Am I depriving them of a quintessential childhood memory? Will they complain to their therapists that the deep-seated trauma of never getting an Easter basket is at the root of their neuroses? Do I care?

I made a nice dinner for the grown ups last night, with a nice dessert to boot. Rhubarb, first of the season, grants a wish . The children didn’t eat anything, due to ill-timed large bready snacks in the late afternoon. Mabel is going through a phase (let’s charitably say) and the day ended with my carting all the soft toys and all her dolls down to the basement in a huff, because she wouldn’t even try to clean up. She’s been happily playing with Lego all morning.

Dash had a fever on Friday and is now in that “is that a rash?” in-betweeny stage. He might have strep, he might have fifth disease; he might just have a sore throat. We might go on an outing today; we might stay at home. We don’t need any more bunnies.

April Fools (Me Every Time)

6 Replies

I got a pedicure on Saturday. I sorted out the kids’ summer clothes and found out what still fits and what can go to some lucky slightly smaller people. I swapped the winter duvets on all our beds for the summer ones.

So of course, temperatures are going to drop into the 20s tonight. (That’s below freezing.) I would bring back the duvets, but B enthusiastically put them into vacuum bags and sucked all the air out and was delighted with himself, so I think it’ll be extra blankets all round.

You would think I would know by now, not to go casting clouts until April, at least, is out. But no, I am a rash and impetuous creature, governed by whims and flights of fancy and susceptible to the warm spring breezes. Aren’t we all, after that long, long winter? I should just be happy that all we got today was a lot of rain, not like the s-n-o-w they had further north.

Baseball-ready, 2014

Baseball-ready, 2014

Baseball season has started again, so Dash is happy. He ran the nursery school’s fundraiser 1k fun run on Saturday and won it for the second year in a row. Next year he’s going to have to just run the 5k and leave the 1 for the younger children or it’ll start to look like he’s hogging it.

Rounding the last bend, well ahead of the competition

Rounding the last bend, well ahead of the competition

It’s spring break and so far we’ve had a playdate, done the grocery shopping, and gone to the thrift store, where they had the amazing find of a green lightsaber. “I’ve missed having a green lightsaber,” said Dash, for whom two blue ones and a red double-blade are not enough, apparently.

His birthday is coming up – AGAIN – and he wants a Star Wars party – AGAIN – for he is a creature of habit. And I’m trying to think how we can disguise a Star Wars party as something subtly different so his friends don’t all die of boredom and think they’re stuck in a time warp. So I’ll be in the corner with my notebook chewing the end of my pen and writing lists, which is how I think best, for a while.

As always, you can find me waxing hilarious (be charitable) and/or sensible over on Parent.ie if you’re missing the more regular updates here.

Ode to suburbia

3 Replies

This is the time of year when I really love where I live. The streets are lined with trees drooping heavy with pink and white blossoms, like big fat balls of cotton wool, raining their petals down at the bump of a branch. The weather is my absolute favourite type: jeans-and-sandals temperature. Not too hot, but definitely warm. The sky is blazing blue, I can hear a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, and we’re digging out the shorts and wondering if last summer’s Keens might possibly still fit.

This neighbourhood is an oasis of small-town life in deepest suburbia. Once you venture beyond its bounds, you’re on the big anonymous roads with ugly strip malls and chain stores – Target, Safeway, Giant, Payless Shoes… nothing fancy, just the basics. They’re pretty soulless and indistinguishable from any other Targets, Giants, Safeways, Paylesses. But inside the bounds, it’s a village. We have a selection of one-of-a-kind establishments: a (really) greasy spoon, a takeout pizza joint, a barber’s, a shop that sells Keno tickets and hats, a Lebanese cafe that’s a live music venue too – and a co-op supermarket that’s not part of a chain. The first time I stepped inside it, I was transported back to supermarkets in the west of Ireland, the sort you went to when you were on your summer holidays, where they sold things with funny-looking labels and there was a distinctive smell and if you were lucky they had soft-serve ice cream.

Our local Co-op doesn’t have soft serve (at least, I don’t think it does) but it has that same distinctive smell, and exactly the same ladies at the cash registers – except instead of soft Galway accents they have Maryland ones. I don’t get that same spine-tingling thrill of nostalgia every time I walk through the doors any more, because I’m there at least twice a week; but I do still appreciate how special it is to be in a supermarket that’s not a chain, that’s different from everywhere else, that has wine and beer (not the norm in this state), and where I’ll usually see someone to say hi to around at least one turn of an aisle.

My mother stopped shopping at her local supermarket because she didn’t want to meet people she knew. Not that she’s anti-social; I think more because she’d stand there chatting for half an hour and the whole morning would be gone. I think I’ve already heard my children announce, in a deprecating tone that sounds oddly familiar, “…and then Mom met someone.”

But that’s what I love about it. I love that on any weekday morning I’ll drive the girl to school and pass at least two cars whose drivers I can wave hi to. I love that I’ll bump into a mom I know in the supermarket (to whom I can chat at length, or just say hi). I love that I know the fruit guy in Safeway and that the meat-counter lady asks where my baby is – followed by a laughing acknowledgment that she’s not a baby any more.

Much as I miss where I used to belong, I love that we belong here, because that makes it a home.

Blossoms

Spring in the suburbs

Naturalist

3 Replies

American robins are ginormous.

Or, for the other half of my audience, Irish robins are teensy.

The problem with moving away from where you grew up is that you become a total ignoramus – not just when strangers try to ask you directions, but also when your children innocently ask you what sort of bird that is. And you have no idea. Not only that, but you’re not sure what sort of tree this is or – what the heck is that creature at the bottom of the garden? (Hint: It’s a groundhog. They’re big.)

I’m actually not too bad at nature, so long as I don’t have to spend extended periods of time in it. I mean, my mother knows the names of trees and flowers and birds, and every now and then I look at something growing and a word pops into my head. Sometimes it’s “purple” or “spiky” but other times it’s more useful, like when I noticed a flower in our yard recently that made the word “hellebore” trip lightly across my mind. Followed closely by “belladonna,” “Socrates,” and “poisonous.” And “Oh, that’s nice, the kids are making pretend dinner in the frying pan I gave Dash because he watched Tangled again recently and wants to have his very own frying pan to fight bad guys with.”

I digress.

But wherefore the red-berried Cotoneaster of my youth? The fluffy Leylandii and shiny Griselinia hedges, the pink-belled Fuchsia of the Irish garden? (See, I know all the fancy names. But I had to look up the spellings.) The shy robin red-breast, blue tit (no jokes, please), and ubiquitous blackbird? The birch and beech, sycamore and horse-chestnut? I recognize all those. This country – this part of this country – has other stuff.

So the most common bird around here seems to be a sturdy mid-sized brown bird with an orangey front. I knew it wasn’t a cardinal – the bright red, very exotic-looking and smaller bird that makes me wonder just what sort of colour-blind predator ensured its evolution – but it was only this year that my friend-who-knows-about-birds told me what I saw was an American robin.

 
American Robin (image from Wikipedia )

Apart from the reddish breast, it’s nothing like an Irish (or British) robin, which is a tiny, delicate bird. I presume the poor pilgrims were so homesick that they decided this was the closest thing this land could manage when they named it. Or that everything in America was bigger.

European Robin (image from Wikipedia )

The other day the children were playing at the front of the house. I saw Mabel climbing in the smallish rhodedendron bush and decided nothing bad would happen if I went indoors. Two minutes later she ran in after me -

“Mummy, look what I found!”

 - and handed me a beautiful, tiny, greeny-blue, warm, egg. Intact. Before I had time to formulate an answer, Dash was behind her showing me a second egg. Apparently none of our parent-child discussions had yet covered what to do if you find a nest in a tree you happen to be climbing.

I took the two eggs very gently and told the children as unfreakingoutly as I could that they had to go back in the nest straight away, so that the mother bird wouldn’t miss them. To be honest, I thought that she’d smell us on them and abandon the nest forever, but we had to try. Dash said there were other eggs in the nest too, so I thought at least there might be hope for them.

The poor stupid bird had built her nest at just about seven-year-old head-height, right in front of a big gap in our half-dead, surprises-me-with-blooms-every-year, crappy rhodedendron bush. I’m amazed Mabel managed to climb in there at all without immediately stepping on it. But we put the eggs back and hoped for the best. Mabel got very angry with me for saying that the baby birds might not hatch, so I knew she was feeling bad about it and I tried my best not to sound as if I was blaming her. She honestly didn’t know the right thing to do.

So we talked about leaving nests alone and never touching eggs in future, and some helpful friends on Facebook told me that probably the mother bird would not actually fly away and leave her eggs to their unsatupon fate, and lo the next day I looked out the window and saw her happily back there, sitting on her stupidly low and exposed nest. She’s still there, intermittently, and I have great hopes that in a few days? weeks? how long do eggs take? we might even see baby birds from the comfort of our own front room, where we have a great view and won’t disturb anyone.

I don’t know if you can make it out, but that’s Mrs Robin in there

And I’ve given Mabel the task of making sure the neighbourhood cats stay away, any time she sees them outside. She’s taking it very seriously.

Getting to first base

1 Reply

At some point a long time ago, in my teenagehood, I suppose, I met the terms “first base,” “second base,” and so on – in a romantic sense, let’s say. In a book or a film or something. I had a vague idea of what they referred to, but I wasn’t so hot on the specifics. A lot of questions remained unanswered for many years: Which way did the sequence go – was “first” the very beginning or the final target? (First is the winning place, after all.) But then if first was the start, how many bases were there – was this an open-ended thing? Could you define your own bases, perhaps, to infinitely frustrate the boys?

The problem was that while I read American books and watched American films, I had no knowledge of American sports. Sure, I’ve seen Bull Durham and Field of Dreams , I can say something came out of left field or talk about home runs, but I’d never actually been to a baseball game. And those phrases, it turns out, about the bases – they’re talking about baseball. Well, except when they’re not, obviously.

And then. Dash took up baseball this season. He’s playing “machine pitch,” which is what they do for the seven- and eight-year-olds. It’s slightly harder than T-ball (where the ball is propped up on a stand to be struck) but easier than expecting the kids to pitch a hittable ball as well as hit it – a machine sends the balls at them in what’s supposed to be a steady stream of nicely centered, not-too-fast pitches.

Looking good

But after a couple of practices, B. pointed out to me that the poor boy has no notion what he’s meant to be doing, beyond the hitting and the catching (which are not as easy as they look). He’s never even watched a game on the TV, never mind in real life. So we decided we should take in a game.

I’ve never been one for sports, really, and I’m lucky enough to be married to a man who is also not very interested in watching the game, whatever game it might be. I’m pretty sure that the only time I’ve ever been to a professional sporting event before, it was (ironically enough) an exhibition game of American football in Dublin that we got free tickets to, and it was incredibly boring and totally incomprehensible.

Maybe I had lumped baseball with football and decided that it too would be incredibly boring. Maybe I felt that not going to a game was the last bastion of not being American that I wished to hold out on. Maybe I just had no reason and no interest. But however it came about, after ten years in the country, yesterday I finally went to a real actual proper ballgame.

Looks authentic, no?

Not the big leagues, of course. We started small, with a minor league game close to home – but still professional baseball. The weather was just right – warm enough but not too hot or sunny. The game was well-attended but not too crowded. Dash wore his shorts in case they needed an extra player at the last minute.

Dash demonstrates his swing
The genius of the people who plan these things, though, is that they understand that baseball is sometimes not the most thrilling of spectator sports. So it’s not like you’re watching Federer serve at Wimbledon, being shushed by the umpire if you sneeze. The place had lots of families, babies, dogs (is that a thing, or was it a special bring-your-pooch-to-the-game day yesterday?), and the players just did their thing regardless of whether my children were running up and down or clambering over the seats or wailing because their giant ice-cream cone was dripping all over their hands. 
“Need some help with that?”
And when they got too bored to keep watching, and we’d done the pizza and the ice-cream and refused the cotton candy, there was a carousel and a bouncy castle and pitching and hitting games right there to help parents donate even more dollars to the nice baseball people, and then hot dogs and popcorn. Not to mention the between-innings competitions and adorably bad pre-game show and requisite toe-curling rendition of the national anthem. And I think I’d even have quite enjoyed watching the baseball players if I’d had more than five minutes to pay attention to what they were doing.
We stayed for about an hour and a half before calling it quits just as a sprinkle of rain was beginning. I think we’ll probably do it again, it was that good.
What’s more, I would probably be able to reliably go back in time and let my teenage self know what was what with the bases. Just in case she ever needed to know.

And/or

Leave a reply

What a relief! Summer went away and it’s nice and cool and rainy today. I’m sure there are people out there complaining about it – and I’m sure I’ll be one of them this afternoon when the children are all cabin-fevery and/or then I have to take Dash to baseball practice in the rain/mud – but right now my brain has switched back on and I can inhale deeply and I’m wearing my jeans and socks and it’s good. All that sunshine was giving me a headache.

And I let Mabel’s feet get sunburnt yesterday because I slathered her up nicely with sunscreen on arms and legs and face and neck but forgot that she would inevitably ditch her new purple sandals after ten minutes on the playground and leave her lily-white hoofers in the direct glare of the midday sun. Bad mother. (It’s okay, they’re not lobstered. Just a little extra pink.)

The pink and purple blossoms look positively luminous in the rain, too. It’s very April-showery.

A little bloggy PSA and self-publicizing now. As you might recall, I’m going to the BlogHer conference this summer, which is very exciting/terrifying, and because I’m paying more attention to my e-mails from BlogHer I noticed that they are now accepting submissions for Voices of the Year, which is a way they recognise some of the best blog posts from the past year. Even though I always assumed the people who won these things were the “big bloggers,” I thought what the heck, and submitted two of my favourite posts, because why not, and who else is going to ever notice your best work if you don’t tell them where to look?

The main awards are decided on by a panel of readers, which is fair and means that the blogs with the big readerships don’t scoop everything just because they have more people to vote for them; but there’s also a reader’s choice prize, and if you happen to be also a member of BlogHer, I’d be really delighted if you’d like to take a moment to go and vote for either or both of my nominations, if you like them. (You can still vote for everyone else as well if you feel that would be fairer.)

The page to vote for the first one is here , and the second is here . You can click through to the posts themselves from each of those pages.

And if you have a blog and are a BlogHer member, go and nominate your own favourite posts too and then tell me about it. (You can join BlogHer just to do it.) Share the love.

Boom! Spring

3 Replies

And then, with barely a day’s grace, it was not so much spring as a full-blown dress rehearsal for summer.

At least, I hope it’s just a dress rehearsal, because I’m not ready for leg-baring and constant sunscreen just yet. I demand that we have some days in the 60s and lower 70s, because taking us straight from 50s to 80s is not helpful.

Now all my Irish readers are putting their best sarcastic faces on and saying “Pity about ya” because their best chance of seeing 83 degrees all year is inside a mug of tea; but it has its drawbacks, this weather.

And now in best Irish tradition, I will proceed to find things to complain about:

1. I’ve had to start hanging the washing on the line again, because my tiny shred of environmental consciousness won’t let me use the dryer in this weather. Though I did cheat by putting the socks and underwear in the dryer because hanging up 265 individual socks with clothes pegs drains my will to live and uses up all my good Facebooking time.

1b. You know what’s a little annoying? When you spend all that time hanging out the washing and taking in the washing and find that out of a huge big load there are no more than five items that actually belong to you. And three of those are socks.

2. It’s too hot. I’m getting sweaty. I haven’t been sweaty since October, and I like it that way. Ugh. Armpits. Yuck.

3. Sunshine. It’s giving me a headache.

3b. Sunscreen. Children. Sigh.

4. Birds. Damn birds, singing chirpily all over the gaff. I don’t mind, mostly, except that I left Mabel’s window open last night because it was so mild/stuffy, and she woke up at 1am, 2am, and 5am, and I’m blaming at least one of those on the deafening dawn chorus.

5. Water. I have to start bringing water everywhere for the children, or – preferably – making them carry their own. But they can’t reach the filter jug in the fridge, so I’m still the one constantly refilling it and pouring the water and washing the water bottles with their annoying multiple straw parts and why can’t they just be dehydrated and like it, like we did? (Do Irish mothers tote water everywhere for their children in the summer nowadays? I think not.)

The ritual imbibing of the water

 6. My feet. Aaaghhhh the state of my feet. I’ve put on the ritual first coat of toenail polish, but they’re still crying out for a pedicure. Or just your basic amputation, that might make them look better.

6b. Sandals. I have sandals, actually. I bought the same pair that I loved last year when I found them on sale in February. How’s that for forward planning? Of course, I’m still wearing the old ones because I want to keep the new ones nice and new-looking. Maybe I need more sandals.

7. The annual putting on of clothes I haven’t worn for six months and discovering that, well, they pretty much still fit. But not as well as when I bought them. On the other hand, now that I’m not brewing a pot of tea every five minutes to keep me warm, maybe my muffin consumption will slow down. Just as soon as I get this loaf of banana bread and chocolate bunny out of the way.

New nails, old sandals. (Stupid toes.)

But I suppose we’ll just soldier on and make the best of it, until proper spring comes back and we can complain about something else for a while.

Promise

3 Replies

The trees are holding next week’s blossoms tightly furled and fuzzy in the palms of their many hands, each one ready to burst forth given just a little more sunshine, a little more warmth, a little more time. They are a beautiful dark red, waiting to explode into pink.

The sky is grey, briefly blue, streaked with white, then grey again. A flurry of snowflakes, a handful of gravelly graupel, some rain that starts and stops and starts again. It’s a particularly hard March, and that’s just on this side of the Atlantic. At least here I can be pretty sure that eventually spring warmth will come – and after that (with luck, not too soon after) the hot and humid days of summer. In Ireland, though the flowers will bloom and the trees will sway green and lush in the breeze, warmth is what you yearn for and heat will probably only be found somewhere further afield. It will come, the warmth, but not as much or for as long as everyone might like.

 
It’s the grey first day of spring break and already the children have dropped their bikes and invaded the neighbour’s house, where the toys are better and the snacks more plentiful. I just had a phone call from across the road to ask if they could eat a piece of leftover birthday cake. I was a little surprised that I was being asked such a no-brainer.

Purveyor of Cake: “Dash suggested I call and make sure it was okay to give you some.”
Me: “Ah, isn’t that sweet of him? What a good child.”
P of C: “Mabel suggested she’d have some even if you said no.”

That there pretty much sums up the children’s personalities at the moment. Up and down; a little give, a lot of take; potential everywhere: just like spring.

Cycles

4 Replies

Yesterday, Mabel gave me a tiny crumb of hope for the human race. Or at least for the portion of human race that we’re raising in this house. She was spontaneously thoughtful.

But first, I’ll tell you about the walk home from school.

When Dash started at the elementary school, Mabel was almost three. His dad brings him to school most mornings, but Mabel and I walk up to collect him at 3:20 every day, unless the weather’s horrible. This meant that Mabel would be in the stroller, post-nap, and I would be pushing. Sometimes she’d hop out and run, and on the way home Dash would perch himself on the front till I yelled at him, and thus not so beatifically, we’d finally get all the way home again. I think I blogged about my frustrations .

When he went back to school this year, with Mabel now the proud owner of two bicycles and a scooter, I started encouraging her to bike to school sometimes. It worked pretty well, though we didn’t abandon the stroller entirely. When she biked I’d end up breaking my back to push her halfway home up the slight incline you wouldn’t even notice without a bike. Some days she was unhelpfully naked at 3:00 and it was as much as I could do to stuff her into her wheeled throne, put a blanket over her, and throw some clothes in the basket for the point when she was ready to emerge into the public gaze.

Since Christmas, though, she’s been biking pretty consistently and the stroller has stayed at home. We took things up a notch last week, when both children suddenly looked too big for their bicycles at the same time – and with Dash’s birthday coming up, we decided it was time to buy him a new one and let Mabel inherit his old one. Since the old one is purple, she was happy. Dash got a shiny new big bike and is looking terribly large and moving awfully fast all of a sudden.

And he’s started riding his bike to school. Mabel doesn’t need a push any more, and is learning to use the brakes – rather than her feet – going downhill too. So now, my view of the daily commute looks increasingly like this (below this paragraph that keeps getting longer), and I’m going to have to unearth – and inflate the tyres on – my own bike if I don’t want to have to run home every day. (Which would be good for me, but my stupid foot is still a little sore* and I’m not dressed for running at that time of day.)

And now the nice bit. On the way to school yesterday Mabel was stuck cycling slowly behind a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. She didn’t pass the woman out, and soon stopped to wait for me. I told her I liked that she’d not barged past, and said she could use her bell or say excuse me if she wanted to get by.

“I didn’t want to ring my bell in case it scared the baby,” she said to me.

The clouds parted and angels sang. My little tyrant, thinking of someone else? Maybe, just maybe, the extreme self-centredness is just a phase. (I’ve always been fairly sure it was, but I’m an optimist and there’s always the chance that you’re the one raising Genghis Khan.)

The way we’re doing it, the Chinese-water-torture drip, drip, drip, keep-telling-them-about-how-to-behave-nicely, observe-and-praise-the-good-behaviour: it does eventually penetrate, and just when you’re starting to think you should maybe have been spanking them soundly on a daily basis and twice on Sundays, they surprise you. Maybe, in time, she’ll turn out to be a decent member of civilization. Butterfly, chrysalis, yada yada; springtime metaphors abound. Sigh.

*Sore but improving. Apparently what I should have done to fix it was not bring it to the doctor but simply blog about it. I might escape the nun shoes for a while yet.

Compare and contrast

Leave a reply

It’s a very Irish-looking day here in America, with the rain, no rain, torrential rain, less rain, no rain until you go out in it, and some rain going on all morning. Looking out the window I’m hard pressed to say what makes it America at all.

I see tall trees, taller than my house in suburban Dublin would have around it, but no taller than some in other parts of Ireland might be. They’re still winter-spindly with no sign of spring, but some of the others I noticed this morning have a tiny amount of pink fuzz, just enough to make you gasp in relief, finally heralding a change. The air is softer today too; mild, we’d call it, which is an oft-used word in Ireland for any day when it’s not bitter. Those are pretty much our extremes, I think.

The grass is wrong, I know. The grass in my back yard is dead yellow, with tufts of new-growth green in between. That doesn’t happen to Irish grass: it stays lush and dark all year. You never understand why the tourists all exclaim over the greenth of the country until you’ve had a winter somewhere else, or a summer somewhere else for that matter.

There are still dead leaves wet at the bottom of the garden, in the corners and crevices. We’re probably supposed to scoop them up, but more likely they’ll stay there and turn to mush, to loam eventually, perhaps. We can keep hoping they’ll blow away instead. Ivy climbs up the treetrunks, looking just like Irish ivy, dark green on craggy wood against a grey sky. My garden shed does not look like a garden shed. It seems here you can have two types of shed: the sort that looks like a miniature house, or the sort that looks like a barn. Mine looks like a barn, because it’s an Amish shed, I’m told. Irish sheds are not Amish. They look like sheds. (If you need further explanation, you’re not Irish. I’m not going to try.)

We have a deck, which is unIrish, and a rotary clothesline exactly like the one that still adorns my parents’ back garden. I have wooden clothes pegs and plastic ones, but my parents only have wooden ones that are blackened  and thin with exposure and use – becuase in Ireland if you miss the start of the rain, you may as well just leave the clothes out there until the wind starts blowing them again. Here, I am lazy and use the clothes dryer in the winter. I blame it on my Reynaud’s, which makes my hands painfully numb doing things like that in cold weather, but the truth is that we have the luxury of large American appliances, and I bask in that luxury and exploit it.

It’s lashing again. Torrential. Floods, cats and dogs, Datsun cogs as the old joke goes; pissing, we’d uncouthly say in Dublin. Good for spring, I suppose. A couple more weeks and we’ll be surrounded by the beautiful blossoms of the pear trees that line our streets here in the neighbourhood, and the days will be sunny and more than mild and the sky will be blue, and America will look nothing like Ireland once again. Except for my clothesline, the constant.