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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

On days like this….

Today has been a good day.

Today I got two pieces of work done that had been wrecking my head for the last week (I have this to do list) and really I still don’t care all that much about not going to New York for the ASP.

After I got those done, I went to the beach. It was a glorious, windy day. There must have been thirty kites on the water. I took some photographs – where some means 150 – and then wrestled inside as to what to do. All my friends had more or less arrived at this stage and were heading out so I could have stayed to take another 150 photographs. But….there were waves.

As far as waves in Ireland are concerned Dublin sucks. I mean, really sucks. If there are waves, they are messy and horrible, and possibly about 6 inches in scale if you’re really lucky. In the 5 years that I have been going down there I have seen one beautiful wave, at very low tide off the Norfolk cargo ship. Today was one of the nicest I have seen. And I own a body board. That I have never used.

I bought it back in March at the start of my holiday in West Cork on the grounds that I’d use it. I then promptly fell victim to that stupid badminton injury that ruins my life and the bodyboard sat forlorn in the back of the car, pink, but unused. I was not impressed. In the meantime, I didn’t get to Clare as often as planned; the one day I was in Kerry it looked nasty and murky and I didn’t get to Achill either for which I really am sorry. So today then. They weren’t huge but they were about 1 foot to 18 inches. And they weren’t too messy. They were generally short lived but so what the hell. I went home, dumped the camera and got the body board.

Things I have learned today: my aquapac is missing. Actually scratch that. All three of my aquapacs are missing. This is a nuisance from a key point of view. Other things I have learned today but then I already knew them. The men who like breasts on women do not generally design wetsuits. Ouch, tight, restricted movement. Argghh.

but then…the waves. They were pretty. They were fun. I was alone in a sea full of kitesurfers, brandishing a pink body board in the little ickle waves. They must have thought I was nuts not to be kitesurfing but to be honest, it wasn’t really my kitesurfing type of wind anyway so.

I wish it was like this more often. Admittedly it was helped by a steady stream of traffic in and out of Dublin Port (god it was like rush hour there today) and the tide was out…but you know, I’d get a lot better at body boarding a lot faster if I could go out once a week instead once a year. Imagine what it might have been like all summer if I could go out a few mornings before work.

2011 09 10 windsandbreezes being a crazy bodyboarding girl Comments (1) Permalink

More beautiful and cool stuff.

As a result of the maths course, I have recently been in the market for a scientific calculator. Being not fully au fait with these things I hadn’t a clue what to look for but someone recommended I look in Reads for one.

Reads did indeed have scientific calculators, including mainly ones acceptable to assorted exam authorities. I bought a Casio one because they were deemed to be “good” in all the reviews I read. What made this one attractive though was that it was pink.

I’d have killed for a pink scientific calculator when I was in school. Instead I had to make do with brushed steel from the local coop shop.

Things are so much better now than they were in the 1980s. At least we have pink calculators.

2011 08 28 windsandbreezes beautiful things Comments (0) Permalink

Beautiful and cool stuff.

One of my friends was looking for edible glitter yesterday so we spent some time in Stock and Kitchen Complements not too far from Saint Stephen’s Green SC yesterday. I have spent much money in both shops when I did the skydiving altimeter cake a few months ago so I knew more or less where to take her to enable her spending of money and so boosting the consumer economy. We need more people to have cash intensive hobbies I think, but more about that later.

While she was perusing the glitter, I was perusing a very dangerous section of the shop, namely, the cookie cutter section. I don’t often bake because I really don’t often have the time.  But I like pretty things, and pretty things involve, for example, pink two heart cookie cutters, aeroplane cookie cutters and assorted related. I got those ones in the fantastic kitchen shop on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork. Somehow, I’d never quite managed to uhem, check out Kitchen Complements’ collection of cookie cutters. This was rectified yesterday. All for the sake of glitter. I now have a few stars (pretty), and a palm tree. I pondered assorted leaf selections but talked myself out of them in favour of the under water collection. The next time I make cookies, I am cutting them in the shape of little lobsters. I think there’s a lot to be said for lobster shaped biscuits myself.

In addition, I bought a few new stackable mixing bowls, to fit into the three I already have and love. This means I had to go into the corner cupboard to see how I was going to arrange stuff. [insert rant about kitchen again but you know that already].

All told, Kitchen Complements did nicely out of me. I successfully did not buy a Bodum red handmixer but that’s only because it cost nearly 80E – like what the hell – and anyway I have a servicable white Kenwood one which cost about half the price if not less. I will probably get the red one at some stage because I love beautiful things. But not today.

2011 08 28 windsandbreezes beautiful things Comments (0) Permalink

on the state of the nation.

Our economists are falling over themselves to show their relevance in the new scary today in Ireland. I wish they’d all shut up.

The overwhelming majority of them completely failed to foresee the economic disaster which befell the country. Their absolute inability to read their own crystal ball ill behoves them to be wheeled out to voice any opinion on what to do next because if they knew what they were doing and had any balls, the vast majority of them would not have been talking about soft landings and how there was no bubble. When push came to shove, only Morgan Kelly managed to forecast the likely property value falls and even now I suspect he’s not close to fully right, and only David McWilliams who in my opinion is not an economists but a commentator, managed to voice the opinion that putting so much of our economic eggs in one basket was maybe not a good idea.

The simple fact is this. If people have to borrow more and more and more money to be able to afford less and less and less house, there is something wrong. You do not need a PhD in any university in the world to work this out. But if you have people with said PhDs and calling themselves economists swearing it’ll all be okay and no one is going to get burned, it’s hard to blame normal people who want houses to live in the question how qualified they are compared to the economists who are supposed to know more about this.

So I’d have to say most of the economists who get any media time in this country are not fit for purpose. Unfortunately, now that the disaster – which was foreseeable from 2001 and was screamingly obvious from 2003 – has befallen the country, they are getting even more media time to review newspapers, comment on the radio, and get quoted in internet fora all over the shop. As a result, the quality of discourse has fallen again.

2011 08 28 windsandbreezes annoying me since 1874 Comments (0) Permalink

And so to a project abandonment.

Some time ago I acquired a hairpin loom to do hairpin lace and got stuck into doing a top which you’ll find here – just a little way down the page. I was planning to do the dress too. I wanted to do the top first and I had some Sirdar silky look green stuff which I thought would look great and I went about doing all the work. You have to work three lines of loops and then start joining them up.

So I worked the lines, and there they were finished, two or three weeks ago, Go me, interesting looking pile of silky loops. All I had to do was join them together.

The joining has not gone without problems. Two of the lines hooked up nicely; the third has been problematic so often that I have decided to abandon the project, rip it out and ditch it, as far as that yarn is concerned, all together. I have to say the decision had an air of inevitability about it bearing in mind that there had been one major rip out and three minor rips. The thread was also a balls to work with – so much so that I’ve no real wish to recycle the yarn into anything else, I’m done with it. No more silky look. I haven’t seen it for sale for a while so I assume it’s been discontinued.

It’s very disappointing because to be honest, as bits of it were coming together, it looked like it could be great. Unfortunately, I signally failed to get it together in any wearable form. I’m not prepared to abandon the plans for the dress – I have different yarn set aside for that (at last I think I do; it’s supposed to be in a yarn box I haven’t inspected in some time. It was an olive green and it’s a bit more substantial than the silky stuff) – but nor am I going to have time to complete that any time soon. The hairpin loom will have to be set aside – so far I’ve not managed to complete any project off it – the Kristin Omdahl scarf has been a disaster and is also waiting rip out. If anyone is interested in a pile of some sort of Noro, currently in hairpin loops, they’re welcome to it. I have decided I really don’t like it.

In the meantime I’m in the middle of making a new Doris Chan tank top from Amazing Crochet Lace, and it’s flying along. Depending on how much yarn it swallows up I may do a couple of them in different colours.

In other more useful news I am pointing you to this beauty of a website. I’ve met some of those little cats and the squirrel too. They are GORGEOUS. Full of cute.

2011 08 28 windsandbreezes crochet Comments (2) Permalink

Lifelong learning and other stories.

Firstly, I have to apologise for the recent silence. I have been busy and unmotivated on the website side. All of my sites are suffering which is bad and frankly I find the internet somewhat boring of late. I think it’s called information and choice overload.

Anyway, over the last few years – yes, years – I have been looking at options to study maths. There are various reasons for this, the key one being (of course), that I quite like playing with numbers. In the grand scheme of things, it might have been sensible to send me towards applied maths when I was 17, and someone had a go at it. I saw value in modern languages at the time. Anyway, over the past few years, I have been looking at further study options here with a view to trying to make it maths related (hard) or something interesting related. In the end I gave up. DIT used to have a part time maths course but it looked a bit frilly for my liking, and UCD’s were all full time and the postgraduate options didn’t look very WnB friendly. So I bit the bullet and signed up for MST121 of the Open University. My objective is to complete a degree in mathematics and statistics within the next five or six years. How successful I will be on that front is open to debate but I intend to at least do this first module and make a decision on the basis of that whether to go on or not.

One of the things I think we do very badly here is lifelong learning. When I told people I was doing this, they said “Fantastic. You can earn a FORTUNE working for stock exchanges”. I can’t say that’s why I want to do it. The short version of why I want to do it is because I like messing around with numbers and it’d be nice to say I could do it (officially). Also, I’ve forgotten lots now.

There seems to be some idea that all our learning should be done with some economic return in mind. I am not sure I agree. I’m not sure everyone agrees either, world wide. Stanford University is running three public online courses in artificial intelligence, database design (this last one will be handy for work now, as it happens) and something else, can’t remember what although I signed up for it.

I’m intrigued. I think the Open University is amazing; I am sorry that it seems to be more or less one of a kind. I think, however, what Stanford is doing is fascinating and may have major repercussions for the future of higher education. 100,000 people (plus) have signed up for the artificial intelligence course which tells you something simple. It’s that people are interested in stuff and making it easier for them to learn about it is better than making it hard.

I’m going to give those three courses a shot just to see how they are doing it. I am not sure I can manage them while also doing the first part of my maths degree.

2011 08 19 windsandbreezes learning space Comments (0) Permalink

The Piano Tuner

I came very close to look at a piano in Waltons yesterday. The opportunity has fortuitously passed as I really don’t need to be adding to my furniture moving requirements and so too, to some extent has the urge.

The main reason for that is that I reread “The Piano Shop on the Left Bank” which really is a truly amazing book and you must read it.

In my piano hunting treks, however, I happened across The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason and read it too while I was flying too and from France. I finished it with some difficulty last night.

It’s not that it’s a bad book because in many many ways, it’s a fantastic book. It’s an unusual and delicately handled plot. Elements of the writing are light and playful and – may god forgive me for this – the turn of phrase is entertaining in lots of cases. But the language is very, very, very descriptive and this is where I get caught. It’s descriptive and yet somehow leaves me on the outside, unable to come into the world it describes. I don’t know how it happens – it may be something in me and I believe the book is up to be filmed which may make an interesting difference because there is so much more of descriptions of place rather than plot in the book. It may work much more as a film than a book for some people.

In the grand scheme of things it is a book I’d consider returning to but not immediately.

2011 08 01 windsandbreezes yes I read too... Comments (0) Permalink

La Compagnie Anglaise des Thés

When you get the RER from Charles de Gaulle Airport into the centre of Paris, one of the city centre stations you can get off at is Chatelet and by miles of tunnels, when you get out there, you can find yourself in Forum-Les Halles, a large and very confusing shopping centre. No trip to Paris is complete for me without spending some time in there,

The shopping centre itself is not universally loved and yet it is generally very busy. It has a massive range of stores from huge chains to small independent shops. Some of the chains are quirky. In Ireland we have nothing at all like Natures et Decouvertes, for example, which is a bit like an Innovations catalogue gone nuts. And to know what that means, I suppose you have to be of an age.

One of the shops where I always, always do damage is La Compagnie Anglaise des Thés. For a nation of tea drinkers we in Ireland are pretty useless at it. The choice is Barrys or Lyons and of those two, the better tasting is unquestionably Barrys. The supermarkets sell a range of other teas but few of them have any significant market share.

Dublin has at least one specialist tea shop – Le Palais des Thés on Wicklow Street which tellingly is a French chain. They are terrific. There used to be one in the Powerscourt Centre called Matchabar – they had really nice things as well, and I have also bought tea at a stall in Dun Laoghaire which I’m pretty sure is connected to Kingfisher Teas.

The whole idea of a small tea shop in most reasonable sized towns doesn’t exist here however; for all that we are generally placed 1 or 2 in the teadrinking stakes.

Back in Paris, they have lots of these little tea shops and my favourite is the above mentoned Compagnie Anglaise des Thés. It’s not just because of the smell wafting out the door as you pass it (this is how I usually find it in the maze that is Forum). It’s not the huge range of teas. It’s the fact that if you go in to buy one thing, one lousy hundred grams of Turon black tea which should cost about 6E at the most, somehow you come out having spent a lot more than 6 euro. This time I bought two new cups, lusted over 7 teapots, bought a few new strainers. And they weren’t done with me. They give you samples. Sometimes they don’t even tell you this. Or they have suggestions you might not have known about and suddenly you need 100g of Fuego as well, and that nice one with all the peach and caramel stuff.

It’s probably in my interest that they don’t do online sales or have a branch in Dublin. I have rather a lot of tea to go through now.

2011 08 01 windsandbreezes beautiful things Comments (0) Permalink

Can we please have an appealing presidential candidate?

There are none. And because of David Norris’s campaign problems (for serious want of a better description) we aren’t getting much in the way of a debate about how we want Mother Ireland to grow. No vision. No future. Nothing.

I’m very disappointed. I realise that the role of President of Ireland is largely ceremonial and PR based with a little light power thrown in in terms of referring bills to the Supreme Court for a constitutional check but Christ almighty this country needs something. Someone to stand up and cry out One Man, One Vision that we can actually recognise as a country we want to live in.

2011 07 31 windsandbreezes living in Ireland Comments (2) Permalink