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.