Happy Happy Joy Joy

My luggage has been found! I was about to post a whole diatribe about how I was starting to get a bit worried when my cell phone rang. It died immediately because the battery was low but I went online and my luggage has appeared. Yay! Now I have to go get it. I think I'll flexcar it. :)

Book 4

I'm on book 4 of the Twilight Series. I ended up finishing book 1 and 2 while in Ireland. I originally wasn't going to, but I ran out of things to read. While in Philly, I downloaded book 3 and 4. I originally only downloaded book 3 but then I realized I wanted to know how the whole series ended so I got book 4 too. I read the last chapter or so first. Just so you know. :)

Book 1 - Started out very slow. I really do not like the character of Bella and I can't fathom why anyone likes her. I could be clouded in judgement by both my dislike of the actress I saw in the previews of the movies and what I think about the author. I still do not think the author is a good writer. Without the movies I would have no mental image of any of the characters (and in reality, I only have a mental image of Bella and Edward because they were so heavily featured in the previews). I forget when it finally got decent, but I still wouldn't go so far as to call it good.

Book 2 - I liked parts of book 2. I'll admit that. :) I like the character of Jacob. I still don't like Bella and kind of hope she dies. Obviously she doesn't or else there wouldn't be a book 3 or 4. :) I have a huge issue with this love story though and what it teaches girls. Perhaps it is because I'm not especially romantic but in reality I wouldn't want someone to "love" me the way Edward and Bella "love" each other. Edward's also a bit of a drama queen.

Book 3 - I liked book 3. Still hate Bella, mostly dislike Edward but I did enjoy Jacob and the rest of that storyline. I also liked the struggle and how things were resolved.

Book 4 - I'm part way through (33%, thanks Kindle for letting me know that) and still hate Bella, think Edward is a fool.

All in all, the writing gets vaguely better as she goes along. I'm not a fiction writer, should I really judge? Sure, why not. I don't think she's anywhere near as good as JK Rowling, though. While there are definitely times where Harry is kind of a whiney baby, he's nowhere near annoying as Bella. Are they worth reading? Probably. If you're not me. :)

I have a whopping 10 min left. :)

So today we were in Northern Ireland which is its own separate country. (Well it is part of the UK or something I don't really get it and honestly at this moment I don't care enough to look up exactly how the relationship works but they do use pounds just like England does). We crossed over yesterday on the train and when we got off the train we couldn't find anyone to stamp our passports (did I already talk about this? I feel like I might have). I asked the guy at the ticket window and he said we didn't need to. I double checked and said I was from the US but nope didn't need to. Weird that.

Today we took another tour. Unlike Matty's and my fateful tour a way back when, this tour was not populated entirely with old people with a vendetta. Today we went up to the Giant's Causeway and the Carrick a Rede Rope bridge. The wind was blowing too much for us to go on to the bridge. I have a photo. I'll post it when I get back. It will illustrate the level of the wind. Otherwise the Carrick a Rede area was pretty. The Giant's Causeway, though, AMAZING. Seriously. Honestly. I have photos. I'll post them. :) But really, do yourself a favor if you ever come up here, visit the Giant's Causeway. It took me a day to figure out why Northern Irelander's accents are so different than Ireland accents... Scottish. There is definitely a Scottish bit to the accent. Also they use wee a lot which Ireland does not do. However if you watched the amazingly quality filum (films are always 2 syllables and pronounced fil-um) Charlies Angels #2 which had the hot Irish guy who was trying to kill Drew Barrymore... he had a Northern accent. Whilst in the Aran Islands we discovered the movie Leap Year is being filumed there sometime in the semi-near future. I'll have to check that out when it comes out.

We had crappy dinner tonight of hotel food because after climbing up hill and down dale we were wiped out. Tomorrow we head back to Dublin where we will shop a wee bit and then fly home on Sunday. Something fun to cause a bit of trouble on Sunday... daylight savings time. They start it Sat night/ Sunday am. I wouldn't have known if the tour driver today hadn't mentioned it. Glad he did... would've sucked to get to the airport an hour late.

4 min 33 seconds to post...

We're in Belfast today and until Saturday when we return to Dublin and fly out Sunday morning. It was weird travelling into Belfast, they didn't stamp our passport when entering. Apparently they don't need to. I'm not sure what'll happen when we leave to go back to Ireland. They only stamped our passport until 3/25 (whoops we were there until 3/26) because I told him we'd be travelling into Northern Ireland and then returning on the 28th. He said we'd get it stamped coming back. I dunno. There didn't seem to be a customs place in the train station. Maybe they do it on the train.



While I'm having a great time, I'm kind of getting ready to come home. I'm sick of spending money (and oh how I have spent!). I'm tired of living in a suit case and travelling every couple of days. I want to sleep in MY Bed on MY sheets and by myself. :) Two weeks is a LONG vacation. I'm not sure I could do it again.



(Also if I paid 2£ for this internet connection, I should be able to see the screen full screen instead of mostly covered in ads.)

I have 5 min and 22 seconds...

So here's my latest addiction... logging into my work email. I'm on vacay. Why do I keep doing it? why can't I stop it?

We're heading to the Aran Island of Insh Mor (I'm fairly certain I've misspelled that) today. Should be a fun all day adventure. We're going by ferry, which my coworker says can flip upside down! Eek! Oh crap it is 8:30. gotta run anyway.

I have less than 4 minutes to post this

Today we're in Galway. It is really pretty here. We went on another tour around the Burren, Cliffs of Moher and into Aillwee caves. Very cool all of it. I'll be sad to leave. Tomorrow we're heading to the Aran Islands via ferry. Whee! Hard to believe only about 4 more days here. :( I have filled up 2 gigs worth of card on my camear. That's a lot of photos. I should probably weed out the unfocused ones before I even try to upload to my home computer.

Phew... finished with 2 min 23 seconds left on my 2 euro computer use. :)

today I'm in Kilkenny

We were in Dublin for a few days. We're moving on to Cork tomorrow and then galway a day later. We'll be there for 2ish days and then on to belfast. Whee! So far it has been a pretty fun trip. I got lost once on a tour. We're not going on a tour here in Kilkenny, just walking around. In cork we will just walk around and in Galway we will take a tour. I've taken like a billion pictures and fallen in love with the accent. Hopefully in galway I'll meet a nice Irish lad and be swept off my feet. The odds are good there 3:1. Hopefully it won't replicate the Alaskan odds, which means the goods are odd.

It's a great adventure!

I know what y'all are thinking... Yeah yeah you're going on vacation whatever it is a great adventure. But, aha, that's not what I'm thinking is the great adventure. Apparently my getting to Philadelphia is the great adventure. What's in Philly? Is there gold in the streets? Are all the raindrops lemondrops and gumdrops? Should I stand outside with my mouth open wide going ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah?

My sister both called and emailed me today about my flight out of Seattle to Philly. It is not only full but over full by 2 people. I have to hope beyond hope two people don't show up and between now and 8:45 tomorrow 10 more people don't decide to go to Philly. Otherwise there are a few other flights that take me through Las Vegas or Phoenix and to Philly. Worst comes to worst she'll buy me a ticket on Delta. Hopefully we don't have to go that route. Think lazy thoughts tomorrow between 7:00 - 8:45 AM. :)

Otherwise I'm off! Don't miss me too much. Also hopefully I'll have awesome pictures when I get back! :)

I'm on fiyah!

So I've been experimenting with cooking Thai curry you know? I bought a new type of Thai curry paste tonight. I followed the instructions which required 3.5 tablespoons of the Thai curry. The other recipe on the other kind of paste requires .5 to 1 tablespoon. That one is always too bland. Even when I add more of the paste (although I don't know that I've ever added 3.5 tablespoons) it is bland. This time... too spicy. However it is really pretty good. I also am pleased that I managed to make a one pot meal out of this dish by adding more water and the rice directly into the curry. I am quite pleased with the results. :) I also like the fact that the left overs give me lunch for the rest of the week.

I'm having a bit of a hard time believing that in less than a week I'll be on vacay. I still have some planning to finish up. I want to figure out transportation to and around Ireland and have some options in mind already. Since I'm leaving my laptop at home I won't be able to access the bus/train schedules online. (We are travelling by both. :) ) It just seems so surreal.

(Totally unrelated to anything but I'm watching this commercial where a monster truck drives up a ramp and over a bunch of maytag washers and dryers with the "Do not attempt" label across the bottom. Who in the hell would buy that many of the fancy new maytag washers and dryers and try to drive a monster truck over them? Really? This is a concern?!)

Bo-Ring

So while I love the new Kindle I've run into something that isn't working out for me. I can't skip to the last chapter. Or at least I haven't yet figured out how to do it. Usually if I am having trouble getting into a book I skip to either the last chapter or some place in the middle to see if it is getting better. If it isn't, I stop reading. There are too many books for me to read out there to waste my time on something that is crap.

Do you know what is crap? Twilight. According to Kindle, I'm 24% of the way through the book. I am so bored by this book. I don't like Bella at all. I don't like the writing. And after reading the story that explains the wolves vs vampire thing, I pretty much lost all interest in the whole thing. I downloaded a new book while heading to pick up take out.

Good news & bad news

The good news is that my storage unit in my building has been cleaned out and I got rid of a bunch of stuff that I didn't need to be storing anymore. The bad news is two fold. One the reason I did that was because apparently the ceiling above my storage unit has a leak and water has been dripping into my storage unit for who knows how long. I discovered it today when I went to put some GS cookies into my unit until Sunday's site sale. I heard something dripping and I reached up for my sleeping bag and it was wet. As I was moving everything out I discovered this had been going on for awhile since my cast iron dutch oven had rust and there were many boxes ruined by water damage. Now for the most part, that was no big deal. As I am a pack rat, a lot of those boxes were acutally empty, or if they weren't, the contents weren't damaged. However there was one box that was mostly unsalvagable and unfortunately that's the box with the most sentimental attachment to me. It was a box of all the letters I've received over the past 27 years or so. There were letters back to when I was a little girl and I went to NY for a summer and my best friend, Junna, wrote to me. There were letters sent from friends while I was in college. Obviously if they were this valuable I should have done something else with them. All my photo albums are here in the apartment, but I am a little sad at the loss of those letters. Even the few love notes I've received in my day were in there. Maybe it is better, though, break with the past. But, on the bright side, there's a lot of freed up storage space. That's what I'll concentrate on. The fact that I can stack more crap in there now.

Whoooooooooo Spoooky!

Sometimes I think my apartment is haunted. Earlier there was a knocking on the door, but it wasn't a knocking on the door. Just a knocking in that area. And then just now I shut down the computer because I was going to restart but instead the command said "Install updates and shut down" so I did that. And then went into the kitchen to heat up food. I heard, what I thought was the computer starting up but thought, no it shut down. Then I came back into the living room and lo and behold.... computer had booted up. I didn't do it. I'm sure it was a ghost.

I've booked most of our hotel rooms for vacation. I have one more to book. Or wait, two more. I need one for one night in Dublin after Belfast but it is just the night before we fly back so it will be close to the airport. Even though I'm booking all this stuff, it still doesn't really seem real.

On Friday I'm going to my first ever acupuncture appointment. I don't know that I believe in it, but can't make things any worse, right? :) My sister, Michelle and Stephen all swear by it. (Actually my sister does acupressure because she doesn't like needles. When she came to visit I saw these little beads on her ear. Since I'm surrounded by people who do all sorts of body modification, I presumed that they were piercings. Nope, acupressure thingies.) I'm hoping to sort out some of my tendonitis issues and some back pain issues. We'll see if it works.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh

(Unrelated to this post, the commercials with babies that talk in grown up voices creep me out a lot)

So today was a completely unintentionally hilarious day. First, Lyday and I went to REI to get rain jackets for the big vacation. As we're getting ready to turn into the parking garage we notice that the car ahead of us is having rouble. It seems the driver forgot that his bicycle was on top of the car and the handlebars got tangled up in the 7' limit sign. Other people had to help him get his bicycle detatched. He seemed to not be able to figure out the best thing to do. First he unhooked the first wheel from the bike rack but he didn't unhook the back wheel. He was just trying to lift the front wheel to unhook it. Unfortunately the U shape of the handlebar had actually hooked itself around the sign. Really it was just funny.

Then we went to dinner. Now this is more of the you have to laugh or else be furious. We went to Applebees. Eh. Our waiter was TERRIBLE. Like I think the only worse waitstaff I've had was when Michelle, and I think our friend Janel and maybe one other person and I went to a Mexican place in Fairbanks and the waitress kept apologizing for her incompetence by saying that the restaurant was just so slammed. It wasn't. Including us, there were 3 tables. So our waiter tonight, Steve, was not just incompetent but also one of those who blames everyone else for his issues. Firstly, he was a mumbler. Half the time I couldn't understand what he was saying. We ordered an appetizer and a meal. We waited and waited and waited and waited and the meal came but no appetizer. At least once he came by and made a joke about our waiting. I'm like, dude, that's not good. If you know the food is taking forever you should be apologizing and doing what you can to make it right. Lyday's "cheeseburger" was a hamburger with a slice of cheese slapped on it, not melted like it should be. When I asked the waiter about it he blamed the kitchen and said they made him look bad but he's just the messenger you know? So at the same time I asked about our appetizer and he seemed shocked we hadn't received it yet. Although he also seemed to totally forget we ordered one which made me think he forgot to put it in altogether. And we eat. And Lyday finishes her meal. And I finish my meal, still no app has appeared. And he comes by and asks if we wanted it to go and I say no we'll eat it here. And we wait. And we wait and it finally appears. And I have pulled out my card to pay and we start eating them. And we wait. And we wait. And finally he reappears and we just give our cards without even waiting for the ticket because I figured if I have to wait for the ticket and wait for him to return we would never get out of the restaurant. So, and this is impressive because I'm not this person, when the manager walks by I caught his eye and told him how ridiculous the whole thing was - including that Steve blamed the kitchen for the food issues which made the manager's eyes widen. He gave us some gift cards. It was so bad. I think Steve's problem, quite possibly, was he was a fan of the pot.

However, as bad as it was for us, it was worse for the table next to us. There were 4 adults, it appeared to be 3 generations of men actually. So one guy ordered a bacon cheese burger. He received sliders. And then about 10 minutes later he got a side of cooked bacon. And then eventually he got a real bacon cheeseburger. The oldest man had ribs and fries. But something was wrong with them and so he sent them back. It took a minimum 30 more minutes to get his new ribs. All in all it was a bad night at the Applebees. The oldest man was quite feisty and said to his family that he would not be returning to Applebees. I mentioned to the manager when I was talking to him that their experience seemed to be terrible too.

But I did get a jacket that is light and was on clearance. It is orange and gray and a men's jacket. I found the women's "enhanced sizes" section, but sometimes I feel like my shoulders are too broad for women's sizes. When I would cross my arms in front of me it felt tight across my shoulders and back. I also bought 2 new pairs of shoes (another pair of bites and a pair of merrill hiking shoes). I am almost ready for this trip... now all I have to do is book the hotels, and figure out the buses/ trains we will be using to get around and book the tours and and and. :)