Call off the dogs…

OK, OK, I’m back. You may ask, “Where have you been?” Well, it’s a long sordid tale, involving a giant Philippino, too much coffee, festering open wounds, and a Croatian midget stripper with no legs. I can’t really talk about it until the charges go away.

Personally, I don’t think that midget will stand up in court.

Actually, after I got back from the trip to Scotland & Ireland I wasn’t feeling like myself. Of course I didn’t go to see anyone (or anyone with a rudimentary medical training) about this, because I just felt it was midsummer malaise. But then things started to get strange. I was nodding off at work, and couldn’t seem to get to sleep at night. I stopped drinking coffee, but it didn’t help. I stopped drinking beer, and that didn’t help either (thank God). I was restless yet didn’t have the energy to do anything. Then my boss came to me with a corrected version of something I had written, and it was full of misspellings. My boss said he was full of misgivings. I was starting to have headaches, and it became even more difficlut to concentrate. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a hospital bed two weeks later. The doctors told me I was in a comma for two weeks.

The last paragraph was an inside joke. If you didn’t get it, sorry but you must be outside.

So here’s the deal. We lost an engineer here at work. His workload became my workload, and my own workload was not “how you say” small. So I had been working quite a bit of overtime. That was for the month at the beginning of this little sabbatical. Then I just got a little writer’s block. That on top of being lazy, and here we are…

So Ireland, you ask?



Well after waving goodbye to the haggis, we flew into Cork City in the rain. We took a taxi to our hostel and checked in. It was mid afternoon by this point, so we headed into town in search of a pint of stout. And it was just our luck (some might even say it was the Luck of the Irish) we found an establishment that had some. The pub was called the Raven, and the barmaid gave us each a pint of Murphy’s. With apologies to my sister, I found the Murphy’s to be quite good. The barkeep reminded me of a friend’s wife, only she was younger, had many more piercings, and larger “Howyadoin’s”. I won’t mention who she looked like, because I was beginning to have impure thoughts.







We ended up at Clancy’s Bar and had a few more stouts. I had a bowl of soup and some Cork fish pie. Cork Fish Pie is fish in a cream sauce, with a mashed potato topping. Sort of a shepherds pie … without the shep. It was one of those dishes that sounded like it would be good, theoretically; however, empirically, it was not up to snuff.

We sat at Clancy’s among the Faire Colleens and watched the Manchester United vs. Chelsea soccer game. It was quite a game, and a much livelier crowd than I would have expected in Ireland for two English teams. After the game we walked back to the hostel in the rain and retired for the evening.

The next morning I took a cold shower. It was invigorating, but far from pleasant. It was still raining, but only lightly now. We walked into town for a bit, and things looked a bit dreary. We didn’t go on the Beamish tour, because it’s just a video presentation and you have to pay for it. “No thanks, I’ll waste my money in a proper pub, thank you very much”. We did go to the English Market though. This place is basically an indoor farmers market and is pretty cool, but we didn’t buy anything.



We decided to grab lunch then catch a bus to the Blarney Castle. The weather came around for us on the ride, and the sun even came out for us. We toured the castle and kissed that stupid rock. This thing is supposed to bring eloquence to those who kiss it … and I haven’t been able to put two sentences together since then. Who knew?





We did a little shopping at the gift shop, and caught a bus back to Cork. When we got back I asked the hippy at the desk about the hot water (or lack thereof). He went into this long description of how it doesn’t always work on every floor, but it’s never out on all floors at the same time, and how I should just go to another floor if the water is not hot on my floor. He said that the pipes are old and he doesn’t understand the system (which was apparent to me, but I was tired and just let it go). There was no hot water the next morning either, but at least it was tepid.