Hemlock B Bootsalotta

Back in Toronto, and my house is freezing.

In theory the digging will be finished this week, and then the main crew will be back to start pouring the basement floor. They are also going to cover the back wall as much as possible and cap off the HVAC that is currently open to the backyard and then we'll be able to turn the furnace on. Until then I bundle up as much as I can but since I'm spending my entire day sitting at a computer and not really moving around much, by mid-afternoon my hands are blocks of ice.

Montreal was just as relaxing as I had hoped. I find I have to get out of town if I really want to spend my vacation not working on something - I've set myself up with a lot of tools to keep myself organized and when I don't have those to hand I tend to go, "welp, guess this will just have to wait until I get home." I even turned off my alarm clock and caught up on my sleep.

I don't usually do touristy stuff but this time around I went to the Biodome and the Insectarium. Both were pretty cool. The insectarium is tiny, but we agreed that watching the leaf cutter ants basically dismantle a tree was worth the price of admission.

The train continues to be more comfortable than flying even if it takes longer. Masking is obviously a problem, I counted a total of seven masks other than mine and almost all of them on older people.

I have one more week of vacation I have to use up before the end of the year. I plan to take a week in November and I will spend it catching up on my to-do list. The week off was good for me, but I need to not spend any more money until the kitchen is paid for so I won't be travelling again any time soon.

I'm about a month behind on updates these days, so bear with me.

A thing that happened, back in January my sister moved to the Ticino canton of Switzerland. This is the sole Italian canton, it's located on the border with Italy and since it's also at the base of the mountains it has a very temperate climate. My sister sent me a bunch of tempting photos of clear blue lakes sparkling in the sun shine and said, You should come visit! And I said, you know what? I will!

I planned it pretty carefully. Omicron was on the ebb, but after the last two years I knew damn well that we always have a spike after a major holiday. So I picked the week before what would be March school break in Ontario, reasoning that the plague-ridden hordes wold be at their lowest number that week. As it turned out, it was damn good planning, because the province dropped masking mandates the week after I got back. I expect things will get ugly again over the next month or so.

At the last minute, when I was booking the tickets, I looked at my bank account and decided I could potentially afford to pay for a second ticket and I asked my daughter if she wanted to come. She said FUCK YEAH. (Literally, that's what she said.) So we did.

The Good: It was fantastic! We took the train all over the country! We hiked on mountains! We sat in the sun and drank wine.

The Bad: The step father was hospitalized the day I left, something I found out about while my flight was being boarded. The PSW who called me assured me that it was probably just dehydration, so after some dithering I decided to get on the plane.

I then spent the entire week trying to get the hospital to call me back with updates on his condition - and although everybody I talked to assured me everything was under control and there was no reason to cut my trip short, I couldn't get in touch with him and I couldn't get anybody from his medical team to call me back until the day before I flew home. And Axel couldn't go in and check on him because...

drumroll

Axel caught covid. Found out the day after I left. In retrospect it was good I did get on that plane because Axel would likely have come to the hospital with me otherwise. They never had any symptoms, just got notified they should test by a friend who caught it and their test was positive. Jenn & I tested ourselves several times while we were in Switzerland - the at home tests are cheap and readily available there - and we both tested negative for the entire week.

Eventually my nephew was able to go check on the Old Man and confirm that he was weak but recovering. When I got off the plane Axel was testing negative, but I spent the night at the girlfriend's place anyway, just to be on the safe side. I visited the hospital the next day before going home.

So Old Man has since been discharged from the hospital and has been transferred to a rehab facility. I just spent the day going back and forth to get the PoA paperwork and visitor paperwork with the facility and then went to his apartment to pick up a suitcase full of clothes for him.

So the holiday was good, and I had an excellent time, but the stress-reduction factor was definitely not where I wanted it to be.

Sitting on a train on my way to Montreal. I think I've taken this train once before in my life? And I remember nothing about the trip so this might as well be the first time.

Anyway it's surprisingly similar to flying, with an extended check-in and a snack cart.

I guess before I always took the bus which is way more chaotic.

I have zero set plans for while I'm away. I just really wanted to be out of my house for a week.

I am supposed to be in New Brunswick right now. Porter cancelled our flight, apparently because they had a sick pilot who called in at the last minute. However, they still issued us boarding passes, and we didn't get told the flight was cancelled until we tried to go through security. BC returned to the check-in desk to find out what was going on, and during that time they continued to issue boarding passes people who then discovered that they had no plane mid-taking their shoes off.

This is my second Porter experience and the second time they have been not so on the ball. I gotta say I'm not so impressed.

Also, you know how I said I had an anxiety dream about a week ago that featured me forgetting my passport? Guess what I forgot to pack. I didn't actually need it for a domestic flight, but still.

So instead we went out to dinner. And I'll spend my weekend writing and drinking beer instead of eating seafood and looking at lighthouses. I'm sure D is disappointed not to have the house to himself for the weekend, I fully expected him to have adopted four more cats by the time I got home.

This is a pic of our driver, a lovely man from Cork named Brian O'Gorman. If you ever want a driver in Ireland, look him up. He was awesome.

Doing a vacation with a driver is a little weird for me - on the down side, we probably stumbled on fewer things by accident. On the plus side I probably got less wet than I would have if I had been wobbling around the country on my own. Actually the weather was overall a lot nicer than I packed for. It really does rain every day, but never like it really meant it. And it was sunny for a few hours at a time on several occasions.

Friday we went to a tiny town (the name of which I honestly cannot remember) and climbed around in a graveyard looking for names. I use the world "climbed" quite intentionally there. There were city workers cleaning it up while we were there, and it had obviously been a while because some of the brambles were up to my waist in places. Many of the headstones were broken, knocked over or worn smooth. BC visited the library and apparently they had put together a list of all the graves in the area but the name she was looking for didn't show up. So that was a dead end.

From there Brian drove us to Dublin, where having a driver did not stop us from getting very lost. Once we finally made it to the hotel I called my cousin, who took us out for drinks and an evening of shit-talking. It turned out that it was a long weekend, so everything was packed and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only person in Dublin with a hangover the next day.

Saturday was more tourism. We visited Dublin Castle and one of the sites of The National Museum. Dublin is gearing up for the centenary celebrations of the The Easter Rising, so there is lot going on for somebody who is interested in the history of the country.

Sunday we got up at gawdawful o'clock dragged ourselves to the airport and I had Dreadful Flight II: Electric Fuckaroo because not only did we have to contend with the seats from hell, but we were stuck in them for an extra hour because the guy who's job it is to put the gas in the plane fucked up and didn't give us enough. The flight itself was really bad for turbulence so they couldn't even give us coffee. And then they tried to feed me this.



Seriously, what the fuck is that?

After a week of living in smoked-salmon-at-every-meal-if-I-damn-well-feel-like-it land, sticking this in front of me was just adding insult to injury.

Anyway.

I am home now and still lagged so I got up at the asscrack of dawn. This week is going to be all about the painting and then maybe I can get some of the pictures sorted out.

Yesterday was The Ring of Kerry, which is scenery, scenery and more scenery.

Today we visited to Bun Ráite Castle which is situated in a traditional thatch village, and from there drove to the Cliffs of Moher which are holy shit impressive. We are spending the night in Galway (which seems to be a real party town) and tomorrow we go to Cabhán, where BC is doing her family research. It may involve a lot of graveyards, so it occurs to me that the reason she brought me might be because bringing a goth means they are the least likely of anybody she knows to get bored.

More observations:

The crows here are like the pigeons at home, there are flocks of them everywhere. (I once pointed at two seperate flocks of crows joining a third on the top of a building and said, "Look! A mass murder!" BC didn't think it was funny.)

It rains just about as much as they tell you it does.

One of things that I remember most clearly about being here in '71 is the little winding highways with the high hedgerows on the sides. They may have built highways since then, but that doesn't mean those terrifying little roads have fallen into disuse.

A second thing I remember is that there seemed to be half-fallen stone towers everywhere, and that they are so common that the locals don't even take note of them. My cousins had one in their backyard. Since I have gotten here I can confirm that yes, my memory was accurate. So far I have seen the crumbled foundations of some kind of stone structure next to brand new housing developments, on the edge of parks and in the middle of sheep fields and people pretty much ignore them.

Irish people are nice. Even in the cities. It's a little unnerving.

I took a pic on my phone just so I could show you the kind of thing I've been doing all week.

Today we went to the Rock of Cashel, ate lunch in Cork, and took a walk around the grounds of Muckross house. Tonight we are staying in a pretty little gingerbread hotel in a town called Killeen, just outside of Killarney. I'm sitting in the bar, where the walls are entirely decorated with beer labels and golf balls.

Observations:

Parts of Ireland look a lot like parts of Ontario. In particular the area around here is full of low mountains and granite bedrock that is very similar to what you see in northern Ontario. Maybe the reason so many Irish immigrants settled there.

A lot of place names start with "kill". I finally looked up the meaning, and it turns out it's derived from "cill", meaning "church". I feel better now that we've cleared that up.

All the signs are in both English and Irish and I am more convinced than ever that Irish is a language based on incomprehensible logic. The Irish spelling of the city name Cork, for example, is Corcaigh. Just imagine what they do with the multi-syllabic names.

Ireland is the smoked salmon capital of the world.

Speaking of the food, I take back everything I have ever said about Irish cooking. I have eaten like a king since I got here. And I've even had really good coffee. More than once. England, take note. (US and Canada, don't even try, you're already hopeless.)

Tomorrow we are driving "the ring of Kerry" which is basically taking in the scenery along the coast of the Iveragh Peninsula. I will take many more pictures which I can't post here because all my cables are fux00red.

My sister signed up for a website where people trade their houses to live in while on vacation. It's a brilliant idea; save the cost of a hotel while abroad and not have your house sitting empty while your plants die and the mail piles up on your porch.

The house she stayed in turned out to be a cottage near the town of Haliburton. Axel, Jenn and I drove up for the weekend. It's early enough in the year that it's still cold and there are traces of snow around, but it was still pretty nice to be getting out of Toronto.





( a few pics below the cut )

And then on Sunday when we got back to Toronto and finished dropping everybody off, we passed this guy climbing around on the street furniture.





I gotta say, to me the most hilarious part of this picture is the guys under him going, "OMG LOOK! AN AVAILABLE PLACE TO LOCK YOUR BIKE! ON QUEEN STREET! "

The good news. No laundry to do when we get home.

The bad news. Because somebody stole it.

I didn't sleep at all on the plane, arrived around 4 am Toronto time, found Axel and then spent the afternoon rambling around the neighbourhood (and drinking wine) with my sister and her husband. They live in a small town just outside of Zurich on the lake. The picture is the view from her guestroom.

I slept something like 14 hours straight and I feel fantastic. Today we're going to go climb a mountain or something.