Lost in a poof of Logic!

To all of my readers, I very much hope I have not let you down with my, rather eternal, absence from the blog world.

I have had a modestly busy couple of weeks, added to the fact that I had nothing particularly interesting to tell. Nonetheless, I shall update you on my last couple of weeks soon enough with pictures of London and a detailed description of my incredibly exciting life in the land of Guinness. As for now, I am alive and well; I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas break.

Cheers

Update and garage works

Hello everyone! Here is a brief update of the last week or so (Nov 29 to Dec 7).

Ellen and I returned to Ireland from the great and majestic United Kingdom on Saturday the 29th after quite a short airplane flight (not more than 80 minutes). I feel inclined to write a few lines about the airplane company that got us there and back, Ryanair. First of all, the round trip cost us about 10 Euros each! Which leads me to wonder: how, on God's green earth, have they managed to do such marvelous thing? I have searched the Internet for any sort of answer but found none. Nonetheless, I noticed a few things about the airline. If any check-in luggage is possessed, it costs about 20 Euros per item, which already pays for a normal ticket. Also, the costumer service is rather poor; a somewhat cavalier treatment of the customers, per say. On the flight back from London, the air attendant seemed to be, originally, from somewhere in Eastern Europe and had an incredibly strong accent; to the point that I thought she was speaking Irish (Gaelic) until Ellen proved me otherwise! Therefore, this leads me to believe that their employees are not the cream of the crop. Finally, either they use the empty room in the otherwise-used-as-a-luggage-compartment area for mail purposes, OR they just save loads of green on fuel. Whatever it may be, if your purpose is to get from point A to B in a cheap and fast manner Ryanair is probably the best choice.

Now, to some more interesting topics. Ellen had a particularly cruel schedule at work last week; this left us with not many things to do as far as traveling entails. Nevertheless, I have undertaken the task of remodeling Ellen's house garage. Anne (Ellen's mother) wanted some tiles to be put up on a wall as well as some shelves and to move some outlets around. Given my, modest, training (gracias viejo!) in construction I felt well capable of doing so. All in all, construction in Ireland is remarkably similar to that of the US; drywall sheets on frames made with 2-by-4s. Anyhow, here are some pictures of my progress in this task.

Just getting started

Ongoing tiling

Shelves up and already overburdened with items!

Dara and grouted tiles

Dara and the other wall

I suppose that the hardest part was to figure out what to do with the tiles, in terms of a pattern. I was given a box with left over tiles from other jobs. There were lots of beige tiles, fewer blue tiles and almost no white tiles. So, after some intense hours of hardcore mathematical pattern recognition and minimization problems :) the given pattern was chosen.

More to come soon.

Limerick

I will be situated in the city of Limerick for about 2 months. This is where Ellen and the rest of her family live and work. Limerick is said to be the birthplace of Rugby in Ireland and home of one of the best Irish Rugby teams, Munster Rugby. This team recently played a friendly match against the New Zealand All Blacks and lost by only two or three points.

The city has a population of about 90 thousand inhabitants and is cut in half by the Shannon river (a tidal river). Anyhow, I decided to go on a photo tour around Limerick and post some online, so here they are.

On the way to King John's Castle.


Parceled hills on the outskirts of Limerick.

Lovely colorful shop in King's Island.

Shannon River, with King John's Castle to the left.
Christmas decorations light up downtown Limerick.

Gloomy!

Beautiful streets of Limerick.

Landscape view of Limerick.

Pictures of London to come quite soon!