10 Questions About…

Friday night Patrick and I went to see Krapp’s Last Tape at the James Joyce Center. The Center is of O’Connell Street in an area we rarely visit at night – so that was fun.

Krapp’s Last Tape is a play by Samuel Beckett, who is kind of a favorite of mine. He does short, theatre of the absurd type shows. In this show, an older guy is listening to tapes he has made 30 years earlier talking about his life and loves gone by. During the show the actor uses an old tape player – forward, rewinding to get to the bits he wants to hear.

The actor was excellent. He looked the part, his timing was perfect, and his facial expressions were great. And then coup of coups for anyone who has seen this show – the tape machine broke. It was kind of like Godot jumping on stage and saying “I’m here! You can quit waiting.” I think Beckett would have loved it and the actor handled it in character.

The theater was very small – a room actually. So the audience all had to leave the room so that they could fix the technical difficulties and then we returned for the end of the show. The show was sold out – and everyone returned after the snafu.

Patrick got a picture of the stage and me at the James Joyce Center.

Earlier this week we brought Aine to the hospital – to St Columcille’s Hospital. She is fine – in fact her big head injury doesn’t seem to bug her at all. Despite the fact that the glue holding her head togehter is glumpy and stiff.

Sadly, her hospital made the news today:

Dr Kieran Geraghty has called for urgent intervention at St Columcille’s Hospital, Loughlinstown, following the death of 16 people with hospital-acquired infections at the south Dublin hospital over a seven-month period in 2007. (Read the whole article.)

So we’re keeping an extra eye on her and holding off on all other ailments and injuries until we go home!

Yesterday we had two girls home with the flu. But it wasn’t either of them that got to have the unscheduled tour of the Emergency room. It was Aine. (Shocker!) She was standing on the kitchen chair when apparently it flipped backwards and she smacked her head off the floor.

She cried for a few minutes and bled all over the $25 shirt I bought her in Kilkenny when she threw up on us – but she rebounded pretty well. I wasn’t afraid of a concussion but I did worry that she needed stitches. So, we took the bus to the hospital. They looked at her head. And I have to say that once they really looked at it I could see that she really had cracked her head open. It was very gross in a cool sort of way. In the gross theme I will say that I could have poked my finger into her head and touched her brain – if I had wanted.

Luckily they were able to glue her head together, which again was kind of gross/cool. She didn’t cry or fuss at the hospital, which was pretty impressive. We stopped for an ice cream on the way home – luckily the bus stop is near a convenience store.

I asked Aine to talk about her adventure on the video below – but as you’ll see she preferred to talk about her life here in Cork. (Not sure where that came from.)

Gulliver’s Travels is the book selected for the One City One Book program in Dublin this year. So this weekend we have been celebrating Gulliver’s Travels.

One Friday night Patrick and I went to see Eamon Morrissey do a performance on Gulliver’s Travels and Jonathan Swift. It was great. I forgot how very funny Gulliver’s Travels is.

I described just one scene from the show to the girls the next day and they are both looking forward to reading the book now. Here’s the quickest, cleanest take I can give. Gulliver travels to lots of lands. He starts with Lilliput, the land of the little people. He is a giant, they capture him, but eventually release him on his own recognizance. So he tries to help around town by doing many tall people deeds.

Well, he was out one night and there was a fire in the castle. He was sad to see that the castle might be destroyed. So he decided to step in. Unfortunately it was a big fire. Water saw too far away to fetch and the fire was too big for him to just spit it out. Fortunately he had been drinking and had a very full stomach. SO I won’t finish it but I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out how he put out the fire. I will add that I was not surprised to hear that although the castle was indeed saved, the queen did not want to move back into it after the incident.

(Another terrifically gross work by Swift – A Modest Proposal. I made Patrick read it to the girls – they thought it was very gross.)

After the performance Patrick and I went to a tapas bar for yummy appetizers. Eventually I dragged us to Bruxelles – the pub with the best music (not live) in the city and we stayed there too long but had fun.

On Saturday we were back to our travels for Gulliver’s Travels. We went into George’s Dock to see the giant sand sculptures of Gulliver. They were great. You can see them in the pictures below.

After the Gulliver exhibit, we walked down the docks to the port, a walk I had never done before. Along the way we took a few pictures or statues (famine memorial and eternal flame), I took a picture of everyone across the Liffey from where U2 will be building a huge hotel. I think that will be a fun picture after they have renovated this area, which is already starting. I also took a picture of U2’s recording studio while we were on the U2 trail.

The girls were great walkers! (Well except for Aine who was in the stroller.) We ended up popping into the Pearse Street Library, where they had another Gulliver exhibit.

They also have Nelson’s head. There used to be a controversial, large, granite pillar topped by a statue of Horatio, Lord Nelson, located in the centre of O’Connell Street in Dublin. It was destroyed by a bomb in 1966. (You can learn all about it on Wikipeida.)

Nelson’s Pillar was replaced by the Spire in 2003.

Sunday we took advantage of the car and climbed up Killiney Hill in Dalkey. Killiney Hill is not very big but it overlooks the sea and Wicklow, which are both beautiful. The Dalkey area is also beautiful. We stopped for lunch at a place called Nosh.

After lunch we headed to Bray and climbed a little bit up Bray Head. It was beautiful but super windy.

Last night we met up with two old friends Mary and Paul. Patrick went to school with Paul. They live in North Leitrim with their 3 kids who are round about the same ages as ours. It was fun to meet up with them. Unfortunately it was a late night. We met up at 10:30 and left the bar at 12:30. So it wasn’t too wild – but as I said, late.

It felt even later when we got up this morning at 6:00 to meet Anita and Darla at the airport. The arrived safe and sound. Anita did an excellent job driving from the airport to the house.

Aine stuck gum in my hair today. She didn’t stick it in ends of my hair – no way. She chunked it right on my part.

Thankfully Kate, who spends more time on hair than any other 8 year old I know was able to get it out with peanut butter.

The good news is that we don’t have to buy Aine a prom dress as she is now grounded for the next 20 years! (Unless I can get her married off by age 16.)

Patrick’s advisor Tony Roche has us over for the nice dinner again. The guests were Katy Hates (Tony’s wife and an author in her own right), Tom Redshaw from St Thomas, Andrew Carpenter from UCD, and Lucy Collins of UCD.

I wore my new skirt, which I had only worn once before. As luck would have it, the other time I wore the skirt I met Lucy and Andrew. I’m sure that has been the source of much gossip around UCD and will probably cause them to grade Patrick’s PhD lower.:-)

We had a very nice time – with some fun heated discussions at the dinner table. And I think it was nice for Patrick’s future to see what a connection he could be between UCD and St Thomas.

As you might imagine, St Patrick’s Day is a big deal here. I was surprised how much bigger a deal it was than the last time I was here 15 years ago.

We started our day by using the free fun fair ride tickets we got at the scavenger hunt. Then we headed in to the parade. It was packed!

Somehow we mentioned to get a place where, if the girls balanced on the edge of a store window and me, they could see the parade. I was pretty impressed. There are marching bands – but there were also a number of cool float type things. I took a load of pictures. Most of the pictures do not include us – just the parade. Also a little luck went into the pictures since I had to hold the camera way over my head to get any shots.

We stayed at the parade for about 90 minutes. We left a little before it ended. We were with Patrick’s Michael and some of his colleagues from Canberra. We snock down a few back alleys and found ourselves out near Christ Church – still on a parade route but not so much in the thick of it. We were starving and our timing was perfect as we got a table at a pub on the parade route. We couldn’t believe it.

We had a nice (not too healthy) lunch at the pub. Then we headed to the Guinness Storehouse. Rumor had it that there was a big festival there too.

Well we got a little worried when we walked into the Storehouse (by walked I mean paid to visit). We got a tour of the Guinness factory, which was cool but not super fun for all ages – though pretty cool. After the tour the 2 Guinness drinkers got their samples and we decided to head for the 7th floor.

The 7th floor is all windows and looks out over the City. It is amazing – and worth slogging through the Guinness stuff. Also once we got to the upper floors we found the festival stuff. Kate and I chowed on the free smoked salmon.

We saw band or two, hung out for a while and eventually went home. I could see that if you didn’t have kids you could spend the rest of your night here.