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It’s Sunday morning

It’s Sunday morning so, if you are following the relevant characters, you’ll be aware the usual Sunday morning economics debate has sprung up between our tweeting economists. I made a promise after the last time that I wouldn’t get involved.

Yesterday I had a long conversation with a friend about an apartment in Santry. Here’s why. It has an asking price of 125KE and it is a two bedroomed apartment in one of the Northwood blocks. What I have known about Northwood, hitherto, is that the prices paid for apartments in Northwood were the back end of completely irrational. Nothing against Santry, nothing against Dublin 9. Let’s face it, most of what was built in Sandyford was never worth the money paid for it either.

Anyway, assuming there was room to negotiate on price, here is a two bedroomed apartment in a reasonably okay area for around 100KE. Maybe 110KE if you’re really lucky. Current calculations suggest that the rent for two bedroomed apartments in Northwood (I’ve just checked on DAFT.ie) is around 1000E. This is above, by the way, what the DSW is willing to fund for people requiring that type of accommodation.

Currently, if you buy an apartment for 110KE with a mortgage of around 90KE, you’re looking at repayments of around 550E. When you compare that to the rent commanded, from an investment point of view (and for the first time since about 2001), this is not actually off the wall. Remember for most of the 2000s, new landlords were getting less rent in than they were paying in interest on the mortgages. This was because capital appreciation was all the rage.

I’m not interested in property for investment but I also have to look at it in the following context: provided I was happy to live there for at least 10 years, and wasn’t going to get hooked up to someone or have children or god forbid develop any more storage intensive hobbies, it would make far more sense to buy that apartment than rent it all other things remaining equal. This is not something I have seen too often in the last 10 years.

Now, I have other related issues regarding apartments. I don’t know what the parking is like; I don’t know what the build construction is like. I have one friend who reckons anything built since about 1998 can be forgotten about unless it was a self build. There may also be issues regarding kitchen space and certainly I would be making certain concessions regarding gardens and private parking. Plus there is also the grand piano issue. But if I were 10 years younger – and this is how these things should have been 10 years ago – it is not actually a bad move provided there are no issues with a) management companies b) sinkfunds and c) structural integrity  of the apartment complex itself.

We have a long way to go before I will believe that the property market in this country is even half way rational. But this is the direction we need to be heading in: that two bedroomed apartments are actually affordable to a reasonable salary. One swallow does not make a summer, and all that.

However, the net result is I am looking at the market a little less jaundicedly lately. I may buy this year. I may not. I may cash in all my chips and do a round the world trip. After all, the whole being sensible concept in this country has been tossed up and down on a sea free of tranquillity. I think what people need to learn is to recognise what makes them happy and not necessarily what society expects of them.

2012 01 22 windsandbreezes living in Ireland Comments (0) Permalink

An open to letter to Amazon.

Dear Amazon,

I have spent some time drafting notes to your customer service over the last day and to be honest, the response I have gotten suggests they don’t actually read the messages they get properly.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I do have Kindle software running on an iPad, I access Kindle via webapp from time to time and I have Kindle software running on my laptop. I have spent more money on books via the Kindle store on amazon.com in the last 6 months than I have on music via iTunes. This is saying quite a lot.

I live in the Republic of Ireland. This means you compel me to use the US Kindle store to buy Kindle ebooks. As far as English language publications go, this is not a huge big deal to me although in certain respects, I might prefer having access to amazon.co.uk as they tend to have more culturally useful special offers than amazon.com does. Additionally, I have been a book buyer from amazon.co.uk for years. So it’s not great to be forced to use the American store for ebooks.

However, I have a greater problem than that. I read French and German and would like to be able to get Kindle ebooks in these languages onto my Kindle software. The range of said books on the amazon.com Kindle store is not great to be honest, but that’s fine, because you know have amazon.de Kindle stores and especially, amazon.fr Kindle stores. So yesterday I contacted your customer support to enquire whether I could also use my Kindle software via either or both of these stores.

The response they came back with was that it was only possible to connect a Kindle to one store at a time.

They then helpfully gave me instructions on how to switch from amazon.com to amazon.co.uk Kindle store if I lived in the United Kingdom.

I say helpfully but of course, I don’t mean that. I had made it very clear in the original message that I lived in the Republic of Ireland.

So I sent them another message and asked if it were possible, as a resident of the Republic of Ireland to sign up with the amazon.fr Kindle store (bearing in mind that I could only connect to one store at a time, and identifying my greater need).

They wrote back and said if I were a resident of France, Belgium, Luxembourg or Switzerland I could sign up to amazon.fr and the prices were in euro so I wouldn’t need to even have currency conversions.

I quote:

Existing Amazon.com customers with France, Belgium, Switzerland or Luxembourg as their country of residence have the option to switch to the Amazon.fr Kindle Store for future purchases. If you’re eligible, you’ll receive a letter sent directly to your Kindle with details on how to make the switch.

All Kindle content in the Amazon.fr Kindle Store is priced in Euros (EUR) so there are no conversion charges on your credit card.

This is useful information. It makes it clear that as I live in Ireland, I can’t sign up to amazon.fr.

Additionally, of the four countries I could live in and connect to amazon.fr, one of those countries is not in the European Union, and it does not use the Euro as a currency so the blanket statement about euro prices not causing conversion charges is inaccurate for your customers who live in Switzerland.

However, this problem would go away if the full range of Kindle ebooks available through amazon.fr and amazon.de was available via the amazon.com store. Given that some of the books I already was looking for on amazon.fr yesterday are not, I know the full range of French language Kindle ebooks is not available through amazon.com.

I live in the European Union. I cannot understand why a country not in the European Union has access to a book market in the European Union that I am not able to access.

I think however made the decision of tying Kindles to a specific Kindle store rather than a specific amazon account made a serious error.

I’d be greatful if you either made the full range of Kindle ebooks available via the different Kindle stores available to ALL kindle stores, or, made it possible to buy books from the different kindle stores based on your amazon account details rather than a specific store or made it possible for people outside France, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium to get an amazon.fr account on their Kindles because as far as I can see, I’d get ALL the English language books via amazon.fr when I can’t get all the French language books I want via amazon.com.

Your in some frustration,

Treasa Lynch, Kindle customer.

2012 01 08 windsandbreezes annoying me since 1874 Comments (0) Permalink

It’s been a long journey.

picture of a handmade lace skirt

picture of a handmade lace skirt

This photograph was taken with my phone because my camera is not quite to hand.

I completed a postgraduate diploma in information technology with Dublin City University in 2005, and following that, I started some handcrafts. I have done big pieces of mosaic, some tapestry and lots and lots of crochet. Sometime shortly after that – so at least four years ago I think, in Hickeys on Henry Street in Dublin I found a Twilleys Southern Comfort pattern book and bought it, having decided I really liked the idea of this skirt.

I then had trouble tracking down the thread to make it with. It’s 2 ply thread, very, very fine and most people make doilies with it. My handbag had this piece of paper with the ball requirements in it if I ever happened across it, and one day I did, in the wool shop in Tralee. While I was there, I also bought a few crochet hooks for such fine thread because it gets uncomfortable working with a metal hook all the time. The lady who runs the wool shop there told me she was surprised to see a young woman buying that thread and those hooks because in her experience, only the nuns bought that thread and those hooks, mainly to do laced edges on altar dressings.

The skirt I was making is basically transparent. The model in the pattern is wearing a red bikini underneath it. I couldn’t think of a greater difference between what most people tended to do with that thread (in Kerry at least) and what I was planning to do with it. (make something to make me look fantastically attractive).

The pattern called for more than three hundred stitches for a cast-on row. From there, it only got more. I don’t even know how many stitches there were in a row at the end but I would say 600 is probably a low estimate for it. In addition, many of them consisted of chains. Not too long after I started it, I made some mistake which I didn’t, out of unfamiliarity, catch until I had cheerfully done about 4 hours work. Not only that, I could not find it, and so I put it down for a while. That while was about 2 years.

I eventually pulled it out again about 18 months ago, ripped back as far as I dared -this was something that happened several times – there is nothing like seeing 4 hours work disappearing in 5 minutes. The thread being so fine was prone to tangling quite easily as well. I took it on holiday with me last March, to Inchydoney Island Spa (which is my favourite hotel in the world now) and got quite a bit done, hours, and hours of work every day. Sometimes sitting in the sun, glancing out on the Atlantic.

It was a mammoth amount of work. IF you look at it dispassionately, some rows took 15-20 minutes, other rows took somewhere north of 90 depending on how intricate it was or how tired I was. I stopped working on it if I was tired because I was guaranteed to see hours of work wasted. There are about 90 rows in it, so typically, start to finish, there’s some argument to suggest you could do it in about 120-150 hours. That doesn’t sound like an awful lot but the simple truth is it is very, very hard to work on a single piece of crochet for that amount of time without a) hurting your hands or b) getting very bored. The vast majority of the stitches were the simplest of crochet stitches, chains in the air. There is no way I could have ever done this in four weeks solidly. I would have simply gone mad.

But the thread it’s made from is beautiful. And as it got longer and started to look like a skirt rather than a belt gone wrong, it got easier, and easier to do. And I suppose the experience of doing it had to be making it easier and easier to do.  The last row, which was the most intricate of the entire pattern took about 90 minutes today. Even stitching the last stitch, I cannot quite believe it’s over.

2012 01 07 windsandbreezes crochet Comments (0) Permalink

EWAC: Galette des Rois

In 1995, when I was living in Brittany, someone introduced me to a French Christmas tradition. It was the serving of a cake on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, and the cake was called Galette des Rois. Mostly it comes with a little bean or figure in it called the feve, and a bit like our saga with the ring in the Halloween Brack, there are certain traditions associated with what happens if your piece has the bean in it. I seem to remember something about making the youngest person in the house hide under the table while the cake is being cut as well. I really can’t remember the details now. But I think if you find the bean in your slice, you have to wear the crown that comes with the cake and be king for a year.

Any French supermarket is full of these things in and around Christmas but our 6 January traditions are very different here – the whole little Christmas or Woman’s Christmas is observed to a greater or lesser extent depending on where you are although the Women’s Christmas thing is spreading outwards from Cork, causing more debate. Outside Cork, it seems as though the reward was not to have to do the cleaning, in Cork, the women feck off out for a party. Cork wins, I think.

Meanwhile, twitter yesterday did feature some debate about true equality versus one day off in the year. I’ve mixed feelings about that whole discussion so didn’t contribute.

In the meantime, there’s this Galette thing that I loved, and loved and loved in 1995 and really wished I could have more of. Any time I have been in France at the material time I have not been in so much of a position to bring it back. But about 6 years ago I bought a book called Bien Cuisiner by Marie-Claude Bisset. It’s a fantastic cookbook if you speak French and I am pretty certain that three other people here in Ireland bought copies on the strength of fingering my copy. There is a new edition out here and it costs something like 25E on amazon.fr. Anyway, I figured if I were lucky there would be a recipe in it for a Galette des Rois and if it didn’t look like too much hassle, I’d give it a shot. It did. On page four hundred and something.

It turned out to be remarkably easy. It requires puff pastry which you can buy in the freezer section of any supermarket. I used Jus Rol and for future reference, it comes in squares not circles.

It requires 200g of ground almonds, 80g of icing sugar, the yolks of 2 eggs and 100g of butter.

And a serving of – well they suggested brandy but I didn’t have any so used rum instead. You mix that all together until it’s very fluffy.

Meanwhile, having defrosted the pastry, you roll layer one out, spread the almond cream out on it leaving a frame. Paint the frame with water and then place layer two on top, sticking it at the edges.

Then you paint the top with the yolk of another egg, criss cross it with a knife pattern, and bake it at 220C for about 30 minutes. Possibly less if you’ve a fan oven. After that, you shake some more icing sugar over it and put it back in the oven for 10 minutes.

Then you let it cool. It’s recommended you serve it lukewarm so you really need to let it cook.

I have no idea why for years I thought this might be a complex mess. Possibly because it hadn’t really occurred to me to fake it with the pastry and buy it ready made. This was a complete doddle to make and it came out of the oven almost perfectly. I’d say a touch overdone but it more or less matched the picture in my book; the shop bought ones are a bit more golden rather than oven baked looking.

I didn’t have any feve to put in mine on this occasion; but some American recipes recommend a whole almond in place of the ceramic figure you’ll find in French cakes of the type. That’s probably cheating.

But the cake itself is just amazing. For something so utterly simple, it has turned out wonderfully and I will certainly be doing one every year from here on out.

2012 01 07 windsandbreezes experiments with a cookbook Comments (0) Permalink

St Stephen’s Day viewing

Television today has been pretty lousy and it doesn’t look like it is going to get any better. To get around this, there are DVDs.

Today’s viewing, not shown by any television channel this side of the Shannon, included The Dish. It is an absolutely wonderful movie about Parkes Observatory in Australia, which provided most of the live pictures from the moon landings.

It is a fascinating movie on several levels. It has a wonderful humorous script featuring one of my favourite comic moments in cinema. It makes a radio telescope the star of a movie about moon landings. It has some stellar performances from amongst others, Sam Neill. And when I watch it, tears run down my face.

The Dish reminds you that while putting a man on the moon is an unequalled endeavour in humanity’s efforts, equally, there are a lot of unsung heros making small parts of that story possible.

2011 12 26 windsandbreezes Uncategorized
beautiful things Comments (0) Permalink

Things I know today that I didn’t know yesterday

Most of this year I have been discovering things about houses I don’t want to live in. Today, I decided finally, I didn’t want to live in this one either. Mainly it relates to the cupboard under the stairs which has the hoover in it. And which is a useless shape of a hole to put stuff into. Too much hassle to get things out of it.

I have also been perusing house for sale ads. And apartment ones. Mostly, today I know that I would like to slap a lot of people responsible for laying out houses in this country. They just aren’t fit for purpose.

This is really putting me off the idea of buying a house at the moment. The simple fact is there are lots of houses but the overwhelming majority of them for sale at the moment are horrible in some shape or form. This house, today it was the cupboard under the stairs, frequently it is the garden, more often than not, the kitchen. Mostly it’s the kitchen.

I looked at two bedroomed houses in Swords today; and realised that while they had several good features, none of the kitchens allowed for both a washing machine and a dishwasher. Some sad pathetic losers would probably say that if I am living on my own I wouldn’t need a dishwasher but he can get right lost because it’s not up to him to decide; it’s up to me.

I looked at apartments as well. We built bloody loads of them. Acres and acres of apartments. They are still over priced and I couldn’t see one in Dublin 9 that was designed for anyone to live in. This is the 21st Century. Having the kitchen open onto the living room is the stuff of saps and it is all too common in this city.

I am angry about this. All that can be said is that in fact, I didn’t buy a house I didn’t like and wouldn’t want to live in.

I understand why, despite the utter antipathy towards it by most planners, most people want to build their own houses, one off, designed so that they have usable rooms, usable kitchens and usable gardens. I don’t know what planet some of our planners live on but FFS, the apartments should have been shot down before they ever got built.

Yours, curmudgeonly.

2011 12 18 windsandbreezes Uncategorized Comments (2) Permalink

One vision.

One of the things that saddens me most about living in Ireland at the moment, is we don’t have any vision for the sort of society we want to live in. When Enda Kenny speaks to the nation he’s not inspiring, he’s telling us bad news.

I’m sick of bad news. I realise things are far from perfect, and that I am going to have to pay for fixing the economic things that are perfect but in the name of all that’s holy, you need to give me something to continue living for.

There’s a scene in the second Lord of the Rings movie where they’re lining up for another battle with the Orcs, and a youngster asks Aragorn if there’s any hope they’ll hold out against the Orcs. “There is always Hope”, is Aragorn’s response. Enda Kenny is no Aragorn, and frankly, he’s not instilling much hope in me.

This is utterly disheartening. I have a local FG and a local Labour TD. Neither of them give me any hope for the future. If I have any hope at all, I draw it from some of the people around me; and interestingly enough, mainly the older people. People like my parents for whom the Emergency and the rations, and the 1950s are memories, not chapters in a history book. They have a different view on how bad things are versus how bad they could be. It’s rather educational.

I’m particularly irate and stressed lately because I am surrounded by a lot of deeply cynical and negative people. I wish, for example, that people demonstrated some thoughtfulness towards others. That they did not take pleasure in other people’s disappointments because it suits them to do so. That they started being positive about their lives rather than being negative about other people’s lives. That they stopped feeling they are qualified to decide who has the right to aspire to what.

I want to live in a country where there isn’t this feeling that people are lesser beings for being less economically successful. Where people don’t feel the need to decide what other people’s priorities should be. Where working people are supported in being working people. Where people who want houses to live in are not screwed over by people who have more houses to live in than they need. Where everyone is equal before the law.

I want to live in a country where mostly, it’s not scary to walk the streets. Where people don’t need drugs to give them some illusion of pleasure against the reality of pain. Where I can count on my health service enough not to have to pay for additional private health insurance. And I spend quite a bit of my time trying to work out how to create that reality around myself.

But I can’t do it on my own and when I see my local representatives standing up and taking credit purely for pretending that they are creating jobs, for adding more flatrated transaction taxes, confiscating pension funding and not showing me the future they are building with all this, why should I buy into it? This is not visionary. It’s reactionary, it’s stupid and it’s blind. You can’t create a load of jobs by creating government paid internships. Where is the innovation? Where is the can do attitude here.

I moved back to Ireland in 1999. At that stage, it was a country with a future. Right now, it’s a country with a past.

Right now, I’m learning to make my own bread. Our politicians don’t see the practical or the metaphorical value of this.

I really don’t now how to unblind them.

2011 12 10 windsandbreezes annoying me since 1874
living in Ireland Comments (0) Permalink

The shawl.

It being winter, a new shawl is under production. It is being made of Rowan Kidsilk haze, the expensive version with interesting colour way.

It means that my knit group now assess yarn purchases in terms of whether it is as much money as Treasa would spend or somewhat less bankrupting. I have 100g of the stuff, it’s a dead simple pattern called “cast on as many stitches as you think you want and then sock stitch your way through the yarn until you’ve just enough left to cast off”. I estimate it will be finished in February some time, the way things are going. But already the colours are looking very attractive and I will find some mountain to call it after at some stage.

2011 11 27 windsandbreezes beautiful things
crochet Comments (0) Permalink

Some reasons for the radio silence.

Kevin left a note the other day pointing out I hadn’t posted here in a while. I’m sorry. All the sites have been left to their own devices. I have just been rather busy.

I did actually start MST121 with the Open University on my path to a degree in maths and statistics. So far I like it, so far I am having some issues time managing because coincidentally, work has been very busy. I am successfully getting out to my knit night on a Thursday night and I’ve had some bits and pieces in the social engagement front in the last few weeks. And I need a little more sleep. But it’s going okay and I am happy with it.

If you know me online at all, you’ll know that my twitter posting, boards.ie and propertypin.com postings have fallen off a cliff. There are a couple of reasons for this.

  1. boards.ie – not taking that many photographs so not much to offer to the photography forum. That being said, this year’s photography yearbook launched last night and I was there and it is, as usual, wonderful. It is in aid of the Santa Strike Force and without wanting to sound like a fangirl of any description, I heard Tom Murphy speak about some of the charities that the SSF from boards.ie supports and it is massively inspirational.
  2. thepropertypin.com – the population there has changed and being honest, has shifted rather too far to the right for my liking. I haven’t very much to say there; the property market is still not healthy; the economy is operating on two levels and I have too many other interests to be analysing that to death.
  3. twitter – victim to other things that I’m doing in the evening. You might occasionally see the occasional post via my phone but that’s it.

Theoretically I was supposed to post some progress on the maths front over on the treasalynch.com site. I haven’t had time and I regret that because I’m also interested in data visualisation stuff – this was a key contributor to my decision to do a maths and stats course next and the plan was to get some stuff out there.

So that’s all simmering away in the background and I’m skimping on the posting. Sorry :-)

I have some free time approaching over Christmas so with any luck there will be some changes in the silence and we’ll be back to normal.

In the meantime, here is part of the B-minor concerto by JN Hummel which is my big music discovery for the year and I love it.

2011 11 27 windsandbreezes Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Why we won’t have a heroically bad winter this year.

Last year, we had about 10 snow days.

I have friends living in the Alps who laugh in the face of 10 snow days. I have friends who laugh in the face of -10 C temperatures. But I live in Ireland and on average, the main cities get a trashing from the cold once every 30 years or so.

Last year, I was not prepared. Last year, I did not have Yaktrax. This year, I have the wherewithal to get myself from the house to the bus stop without requiring a musical sound track and a team of 9 judges checking out my triple Axels and assorted pirouettes.

As I am prepared, I am convinced that while it might freeze, the chances are my life will not grind to a halt courtesy of some white stuff.

Also, I am feeling lucky.

2011 11 27 windsandbreezes living in Ireland Comments (0) Permalink