Splendid Soggy Saturday Stroll

After breakfast and coffee, we went out for a walk this morning. It's my kind of day!! Grey, windy, chilly, misty, and then it started to rain. It was just misting a bit when we started out, but this eventually gave way to steadier rain, which was quite brisk and refreshing--I always feel like I can breathe better in a brisk wind and rain. I am not sure Bill enjoys a good soggy walk quite as much as I do!

There was plenty of colour around, too--signs of spring all over.

When we used to walk this way last spring and summer we would always stop and talk to the sheep in a field. No sheep for months, but today in a neighbouring field, there was a cow. She mooed to us and we greeted her.

Then she decided to come and see what we were all about--until she thought better of it and turned off into the bushes!

Looks like someone cut a tree a little further down the road--love the design made by the tree rings!

Things are slowly starting to leaf now--I thought the red leaves coming in on this little bush were striking.

As are the bright pink buds and flowers:

There's always something interesting on the stone walls:

As we were getting back into town we came across another lone lost shoe. A few weeks ago there was one on Church Lane and now this one on Convent Road.  I told Bill that now I have two photos of lost shoes, I have a series started!

Where will we find the next one?

The rain has started splattering against the windows. Bill just got up to look and he said, "Yup. It's pouring. Sideways. Glad I took my stroll earlier."

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Colour Amidst the Grey

Today is one of those days when the sky is exactly the right kind of grey to make colours pop. The greyness is enhanced by grey stones and walls and against those, the colours almost seem to glow.

There are some tiny little daffodils blooming in the stone planter outside.

The moss glows green on the ground and on the walls.

Even the ivy seems brighter winding its way through the bare tree branches.

The building that surrounds this red door is for sale. Easy enough to find it for anyone wanting to have a look.

We stopped in at Tesco while we were out so I could pick up some celery. I use my own plant for when I need small amounts, but I am making stuffing tomorrow and will need more, so we got some. We went to look at the tea and Bill spotted this:

Of course a box came home with me! I did not even notice that there were 50 tea bags in the box until I was taking the photo. The same thing happened when I bought a box of Lady Grey a few months back. The price was less than I was used to paying for such tea in the States and I guess I just assumed it was the same 20 tea bags I got there. I am looking forward to trying this later on this afternoon!

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Roosters, Garlic Chives, Potato Soup

Yesterday we called in at Country Market. In addition to lugging home a 10 kg (about 20 lb) bag of roosters (red potatoes), I also picked up some fruit and a head of garlic.

The garlic has nice big cloves that grow into really great garlic chives and I have a lot of them at the moment!

I decided I might as well make some potato soup!

I put a puddle of olive oil in the bottom of a pot, added 2 sliced onions, 3 cloves of chopped garlic, 3 chopped carrots, and a large chopped red bell pepper. I cooked these in the oil for a few minutes, then added several potatoes that I had diced and some water. I let everything cook and when it was done, added some milk. These roosters are really floury, so there's no need to thicken the broth. I ladled some into bowls and added some parsley snipped from my plant on the windowsill and some snipped garlic chives. Finally, we sprinkled black pepper on top. Of course, there are leftovers and plenty more garlic chives :-)

We had egg sandwiches with the soup--I had guacamole on mine and Bill did not.

It was a quiet day today. I finished the book I'd been reading:

It was a fun little book, consisting of 1 or 2 page essays that gave a brief history of various artifacts of Irish life. He includes many things, such as Mr Tayto (crisp mascot), thatched cottage, peat briquette, the flag, and several more. His earlier book is called, Looks Like Rain: 9,000 Years of Irish Weather.I might have to look that one up!

I also did another peace heart doodle.

I might be done with these doodles for now as I have some socks to make and some crochet/tatting ideas rattling around in my head. I do like the way some of these doodles have worked out though and how the shape seems to change depending on which section you focus on.

Still light outside at 6:15. Sigh. We are gaining daylight fast. I miss the short days of winter already!

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Day of Decision and Spring Flowers

Yesterday unexpectedly turned out to be the day Bill and I made our decision about whether to move and where to go.  After months of back and forth about where we might go, we decided to stay here for the time being. We decided that this was a good place to be and to have as a home base while we use our travel pass to explore other areas of the country. It is centrally located when looking at things from a north-south perspective and I am not that interested in Dublin and other points east, though I suppose we will visit Dublin at some point. Honestly, I have never read anything about it that makes it sound appealing to me, so it's way down on my list. Anyway, this will give us a chance to familiarize ourselves with different towns/areas. Bill has been particularly antsy because he doesn't care for walking the same few available routes over and over again and he has felt uninspired when it comes to his photography, so this will mix things up a bit.

From what we can tell, Ballinrobe has been starved of resources and that's too bad, really. There is a lot of walking and cycling going on in Ireland by locals and tourists alike and while other parts of Mayo have received grants to build trails and things, Ballinrobe has not. For example, there is a lake a couple of miles from town and the river empties into it. There seems to be no way to walk to the lake safely unless you walk through a farmer's land and through some forest. We have done this, after getting permission from the farmer, and it was amazingly beautiful, but it would be great to continue the walk by the river all the way to the lake. Walking on roads can be a scary proposition here--narrow roads, stone walls and speeding traffic do not equal a nice walking experience! There is so much beautiful landscape here that it's a shame people can't experience it as well as they might.

All that said, this is a great little town and I like it. I am glad to be staying.

More signs of spring were evident today when we were out. It was a warm, grey, misty kind of day. Bulbs are starting to flower.

Saw these little white flowers on the library grounds. I don't know what they are.

They are doing some serious tree pruning on the church grounds.

The birds were in a tree outside the library and they had plenty to say!

I have probably walked past this library wall hundreds of times and I never noticed the skull and crossbones!

Inside I've been playing around with my peace heart motif some more:

I stitched the purple one first--4 motifs around--and after I finished the third one I realized it would make a cute flower like that, so I did one like that.

I woke up this morning feeling settled for the first time in a long time. Once we made our decision yesterday I felt such peaceful relief. It felt like the right thing to do. Now we can move forward and not feel like we're in limbo! And we could tell our friend, Karen, who is coming for a visit this summer where she will be able to find us!

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In Between Days

We went out this morning to send our daughter's birthday present and make a stop at SuperValu. We needed some milk and I wanted to get some butternut squash, since the sale ends in a few days. I have a chicken in the freezer and I've been saving bread to make stuffing, so I think this weekend we will have a spring Thanksgiving :-)

It's a real mix of seasons today. It's been windy with rain/hail/sleet since last night, but when we left this morning, the sun was shining on our neighbor's daffodils.

Looks like there will be more daffs and maybe some crocus (?--those purple spiky buds) in the stone planters soon.

Two or three minutes later, just as we were walking into the store, the hail started falling. By the time we left, it had stopped. We dropped off the groceries and looked up some information we needed before going back out into the bright sunshine to send the birthday present. Ten or fifteen minutes later--just as we were coming to our corner--the hail began again. It's been going back and forth all day!

Yesterday I decided that my next heart motif doodle would be some stacked peace hearts.

As I was photographing it, I took one sideways and quite like how different it looks from that perspective.

 Today I plan to try the same peace heart motifs in a different configuration.

Getting dark again! Looks like more rain and hail on the way.
Happy Monday!

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What Day Is It?

We have moved through the last couple of weeks in a bit of a fog. Not sure where the days have gone.

Bill went down with his cold or whatever it was and spent much time in bed, trying to rest when he could. I carried on, trying to get a lot of garlic and veggies into his system. I made some chicken veggie soup one night and by last weekend, was trying to use up some potatoes and cauliflower that needed using. We didn't have a functioning microwave, so I had to think about how to reheat leftovers, too. I decided to make a veggie mash. I figured I could heat it in a pot on the stove or I could use it to make potato/veggie pancakes by adding egg, flour, and grated cheese to the mixture to make a dough/stiff batter.

I cooked, drained and mashed potatoes, cauliflower, and carrots. In a separate pan, I cooked an onion and a half, half a bell pepper, and a few cloves of garlic in some olive oil and then mixed it and some black pepper into the mashed veggies.

I had some with grated cheese for lunch and saved the rest. We had the pancakes a couple of times and there was a little left for lunch one day, too. By then the landlord had delivered the new microwave, so I can go back to my usual cooking routine.

I woke up on Tuesday feeling weird. The same thing has happened before in Maine a couple of times--queasy stomach and slight sinus pressure, but mostly an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. It was hard to keep my eyes open and impossible to function for very long. I made myself get up a few times throughout the day to eat something, but mostly, I slept. I was amazed at how much I slept.  After hours and hours of sleep Monday night, Tuesday, and Tuesday night, on Wednesday I was able to at least stay out of bed, even though I couldn't do much. I didn't care when I was in bed sleeping, but I find it difficult to sit and wait for the time to pass. I wanted to read or stitch, but I couldn't. I was glad when all that was over and I could get back to my cross-stitch project!

I'd started with one of my heart charts, doing just the outline. I then worked from there to the center, stitching around the outline, each new line in a different colour. I was liking the interplay of the colours and the way the shape changed in subsequent rounds.

I used embroidery floss and perle cotton. I was partway through this when I had to set it aside and I was glad to get back to it. If a day goes by when I do not have yarn or thread in my hands, I get cranky.

Once I finished that, I started on another heart, this time working my way out instead of in.

I used size 8 perle cotton, embroidery floss and size 20 crochet cotton for this one. The aida is a pale pink. I'm using bits from the scrap pile.

I am quite enjoying this little heart doodling and I have a few more ideas to try out. I have a vague idea about how to use these doodles when I am finished with them, but that may change!

So we begin a new week both feeling back to normal, pretty much. Bill still coughs once in a while and is a little tired, but he is back to his book on the history of Ireland in the 70s and plans to finish the book within a couple of days. I picked up a couple of books from the library yesterday and am currently reading short bios of 40 irish woman artists. I am back to my stitching and getting ideas. We have the new microwave now, so I can go back to my usual way of cooking--I hated turning the oven and stove on all the time because it was such a waste of electricity! I much prefer batch cooking.

We will now start playing catch-up. We are coming to the point of decision when we will have to decide about giving notice here. This means we have entered the unpleasant territory of trying to contact letting agents. I don't enjoy this, but it is what it is--people here are used to not having calls returned and email messages replied to--we were warned about this from the beginning. We'd started the process just before Bill went down, knowing we would probably not get a reply (I should say that letting agents in Clifden and Killybegs seem to be quite on the ball and they have been the exception, in our experience). My plan was to follow up early last week, but neither of us was in any shape to make appointments or travel plans then, so I put it off until Friday when I was coherent. Next week we will either have to start pushing harder or let it go. Guess we'll see what the week brings!

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Comfort Reading: Alice Taylor and Miss Read

On Saturday we called in at the library to pick up a book that had come in--an omnibus edition containing two Thrush Green novels written by Miss Read. When we walked in, Mary turned to the shelf behind her and was reaching for a book. When I got to the counter, she said, "Alice Taylor has a new book out. I kept it for you!"

Mary had recommended Taylor's book, The Night Before Christmas, to me before the library closed for 2 weeks at the end of the year. I loved the book and went back for more of her stuff. She has 3 novels and several books about her childhood and village life in a farming community in County Kerry. Mary tells me stories about how much the stories Alice Taylor tells echo her own childhood on a farm in County Galway. For her, the books bring back happy memories--she is always very animated and smiling broadly when she talks about this. For me, Taylor's books are an insight into Irish life not that long ago and give a sense of how things change. Mary is probably in her 50s, so her childhood is not ancient history--it's fairly recent. Things have changed a great deal in a short period of time. In the end, though, these are just fun books to read. The stories are often funny. These are really human books--you see people at their best and in times of trouble getting on with things. You read about love and loss, friendship and community, joy and sorrow--big themes to be sure, but written in a down-to-earth and comforting way. The descriptions of day to day life also make me appreciate stoves and washing machines!

The Miss Read books were also fun reading and perfect for this past week when I was on either end of my migraine! Someone mentioned Miss Read to me and I knew I'd heard of her but had never read anything by her, so I looked her up in the library system. The omnibus volume was about all there was, so I requested that. It's 2 of her Thrush Green novels--The School at Thrush Green and Friends at Thrush Green. On the second page, one of the characters picks up her knitting. I was smitten. I just loved this village and these people. I wish the library had more of these novels for me to request! I love books about English village life that have a lot of domestic detail and these do. There is no grand plot here--just narratives about people going about their lives. At a time when so much of what I see when reading "news" is ugly and heartbreaking, it is comforting to immerse myself--at least for a little while-- in a small world full of kind and caring people who look out for one another, understand the quirks and weirdness of their friends and neighbors and accept them and keep on caring about them in spite of the quirks.

Poor Bill could use some comfort reading today. He started coughing last night and said that when he went for his blood test the other day, there was a guy in the very tiny waiting "room" who was coughing all over the place and not bothering to cover his mouth. After a night spent waking up every hour or so to cough, he's tired today and still coughing some. The book he is working through is a 700+ page history book about Ireland in the 1970s. It's a great book and quite well-written, especially considering the author is an academic. But it may not be the kind of book to read when tired and coughing. I suggested he set that one aside and pick up one of the novels he has--he can whip through that and go back to 1970s Ireland later!

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