Thursday evenings are one of our semi-obligatory nights at the pub (I say semi because we aren't officially obligated, and we also enjoy it) with my in-laws. Like many elderly, they are creatures of habit, so they arrive precisely at 5pm, and leave at 8pm. This Thursday, when we got home I realized that I'd received a text message that I'd won a contest I'd entered earlier in the day for free admission to the Damo Suzuki show at Crawdaddy from the very cool and aptly named online magazine Le Cool. My stupidly leaving my phone at home nearly cost us the tickets, but we managed to get the all clear and practically ran out the door so we wouldn't miss the show.

When we walked into the place, which is the Chocolate Bar on the outskirts (Crawdaddy is through an inside door), I remarked that despite it being an open space with high ceilings, here was another bar that smelled strongly of farts. We arrived during the opening band's last song, and then Damo Suzuki's band started to set up. He has a "Damo Suzuki network", which basically seems to mean that he arranges for local musicians to be his backing band in each city he plays. So the show was made up of six backing musicians -- two keyboards, drums, bass, guitar, trumpet, and other percussion instruments like tambourine and cow bell. My camera (as regular readers will know) is total crap, so I don't know why I bothered, but here is a snap I took:

It was funny, though. As the show started, I noticed a guy standing at the very front with a camera -- he was a balding guy with very close cropped hair. He didn't seem to be paying attention to anything but how he would get his next shot. Then a couple minutes later, I noticed another guy of nearly the exact same description (balding, close cropped hair, t-shirt, fancy camera). They hovered like gigantic flies over the front of the stage. But then, a third guy of the same description appeared, only shorter and with glasses, and a much bigger camera than the other two. He was more of a swarmer, and passed back and forth from stage left to stage right. I couldn't help but get distracted by them. But more or less, I found the show to be entrancing. I used the time to daydream about my life and its possibilities, and to zone out watching Damo Suzuki do what he does and sweat a profuse amount while doing it. But it was rather stuffy up at the front. We quietly slipped out during the encore, feeling satisfied at ourselves for having a nice night out that cost us zero dollars.

One nice thing about today was going to my preferred fabric store here in Dublin. There's a couple of fancy places in the city centre, but I like my fabric stores a little gritty. My friend Emily and I are working on a costume for her. The inspiration:

As you can see, that's a lot of fabric, no matter how you cut it. (see what I did there? fabric? cut it?)

So we visited TWI fabric in Mountjoy Square. It's this store that you wouldn't even know was a store. You walk in, climb the stairs, and it's balls to the wall fabric.

Of course my heart quickened its pace and even though some of the fabrics have been there so long, they are musty and discolored, some of them are so wonderfully vintage and classic, that my mind went in about fifty different directions thinking about all the things I would like to make with them.

Now if I could just finish the project that's been on my dress form for the past six months. I have vowed not to buy any more fabric until I've used up my current stash (not that I could afford to buy fabric of any kind right now), and so I guess it's a lucky poverty.

My Mondays and Tuesdays are now going to be spent helping a very talented (and nice!) local fashion designer at her studio. The work so far has been fun (for me), and I know I am going to learn a ton. And it's gotten me back thinking about fashion, which feels really good. So going back to school isn't going to happen for the moment, but maybe I can still "make it work."

I had one vague job lead a couple of weeks ago, and thought I might actually be going to work teaching English Composition at a local college. But as it turns out, they're not hiring at the moment. So I did get my hopes up, only to get my spirits down, but now I'm sort of glad it didn't work out. While I do miss teaching sometimes, I don't want to do it full time again. Hopefully a door will open for me sometime, somewhere. Until then, I just gotta keep on keepin' on.

Yesterday we looked at the weather forecast and it seemed sort of like maaayyyybeeee it might not be a horrible day out, so we said what the hell and decided to bike from Stoneybatter to Howth, which is just over 10 miles (16km). Once you get to Fairview, it's a straight shot along the water, and quite pleasant. Arrows indicate our home and destination points.

Well, the ride in was very pleasant indeed (aside from nearly being run over by a car less than a mile into the ride). When we arrived we realized that there was a little food market, and so we eagerly locked up our bikes and strolled over. The baked goods looked divine, and there was falafel, crepes, fruit, olives to die for...but before we could decide, it started to POUR like holy hell on top of our heads. Not having an umbrella, we scrambled to put on our rain jackets, but it was coming down so hard, I felt like all my happiness was being washed away. So I said screw it and decided to throw plastic to the wind and treat us to an indoor lunch where we could dry off and wait for the rain to stop. (A nice lunch, you see, was not in the budget.) But then we couldn't find the place we wanted to go to (the place with the most amazing veggie burgers!), and then I started to really get grumpy. Everything was either too meaty or too expensive. Then, all of a sudden, the rain eased up a little. So we agreed that we weren't SO hungry after all, and we could handle the walk up Howth Head without lunch. But the lovely food items we'd encountered on our arrival were too far to go back to, and I thought of them longingly as we stopped into a Spar to buy some nuts to eat if we got hungry on our walk. Stupid rain! It took us a while to climb up the hill (there is a bus that goes right to the top, but who needs buses when you have perfectly functioning legs), but when we got there, ignoring the large groups of teenagers and families, the views were beautiful!


Realizing that we didn't take the most scenic way up, we took it on the way back down:


Just before we got back to sea level, guess what happened? It started to rain like hell again! Rain jackets back on, moping toward our bikes, dreading the ride home, somehow the place with the veggie burgers JUMPED out at us, and since they were the best veggie burgers I'd ever had in my life, we decided what the hell, you only live once, let's wait out this rain, and we stopped for a bite to eat. And we were not disappointed. It felt like fate that we didn't get all full up on burgers and fries before climbing Howth Head. That would have been gross! But after the walk, it was fantastic to have a little feast.

When we got out, it wasn't raining, and in fact the sun was shining. Then of course about ten minutes into our ride home, guess what happened? It started to pour like holy heck again! We just went with it, and biked home, suffering. But also not suffering because we had a nice day.

And I have to mention, just to prove that if God exists, he hates me, that it was fantastic to get home, shower, change into something dry, and chill out. But then it was time for our Sunday night at the pub with Mark's family, so we headed out. It was (you guessed it) raining, so we decided to walk and use our umbrella. But then, when we got outside, it seemed to magically stop! Yay! So we went back inside, and grabbed our bikes. Then, about halfway there, the sky opened up, and yep, we got absolutely soaked. My pants never did dry until I took them off to go to bed. Ah well. That's life in a wet country.

Well, after a relaxing couple of weeks in the US, full of family, food, sun, swimming, did I mention SUN? and in general being quite lackadaisical, I'm back in Dublin once again. And I won't be leaving Dublin for some time, thanks to our embarrassingly low bank account. And to make me super excited about being broke and back in Dublin, the weather has decided to rain. So that's cool. But I will hopefully be updating more often now that I'm in one place for a while!

I wanted to post another photo of our little patio in all its bloom. What a pleasant place to be!

Horses come and go through my neighborhood nearly as much as people with bicycles. But not a heck of a lot of mini ponies! I didn't want to be obvious about taking this photo, so unfortunately by the time I took it with my crap camera, it was far away. But look how tiny it is!

This is sort of a nothing post, but I forgot to post about the Street Performers World Championships. It happened a couple of weeks ago, and well, we didn't go during the formal festivities, but we did go on Friday and managed to catch a couple of performers. It was ok. But I did have some fantastic felafel! And there were these neato inflatable sculptures. Maybe we'll go properly next year.