Ireland Revisited: Alive in Dublin

Day 2 of 35: Thursday, August 5, 2010

O'Connell Street Bridge, Central Dublin

The exercise of the day before seems to have worked, since we were no longer dead come Thursday morning. Unlike 2006 -- when it seemed to take us a week to shake the jetlag -- we felt almost peppy after a quick, 13-hour nap.

We spent the day strolling the central part of the city with extended stops at Trinity College Dublin and the National Museum's Archaeology section. At Trinity, we were entranced by the Book of Kells display, but absolutely dumbstruck after walking up a short flight of stairs from it and entering the Long Room old library. (The Long Room link is to an interactive, wrap-around panorama; it may take a while to load, but is well worth it.) If ever there was a cathedral to learning and the preservation of thoughts, this is it. Photography is not allowed there, nor is touching the books, and that's a good thing, else we would have spent at least a week in that one room.

As the day progressed and our legs wore down, the crowds around us grew and grew, especially along Grafton Street -- and it didn't take us long to notice that among the many languages and dialects we heard around us, two were conspicuously rare: Irish and American English. The rarity of Irish is easy to explain -- it was tourist season, after all. The lack of American tourists was a bit startling to us, though. In 2006, we encountered many of our countrymen and women all over the island. This time, not so much. The much worse condition of the economy in 2010 than in 2006 is one obvious reason, as was the dollar's weaker position versus the Euro, but we were surprised at the degree of the evident dropoff in tourism from the US.

Here are a few images from the day (a slideshow of 20 more can be seen over on sharrington.net):

An Túr Solais ("The Monument of Light," more commonly called "The Spire of Dublin"), which dominates O'Connell Street by the General Post Office, was constructed in 1999 on the site of Nelson's Pillar. Nelson's Pillar, a controversial structure from the time it was built in 1808, was destroyed by some IRA washouts in 1966.

View down the Liffey toward the Custom House dome from the middle of the O'Connell Street Bridge.

Trinity College, Dublin.

Diane, above, unaware of an admirer. She was resting after our visit to the Book of Kells display and the Long Room in the old library, and I was strolling around taking photos, including this telephoto shot from across the quad.

Arnaldo Pomodoro's "Sfera con Sfera" ("Sphere Within Sphere"), above. My first exposure to Pomodoro's work was in 1969, when he was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and I was a first-year graduate student. I remember vividly my delight at finding -- unexpectedly -- his various works in glens, glades, and gathering places around campus. In a neat confluence, the work shown here is directly adjacent to Trinity College Dublin's Berkeley Library.

I hung around outside the Berkeley Library for a while, watching this fellow painstakingly set up his equipment for a Very Serious Shot of the Pomodoro sculpture. Over a period of about fifteen to twenty minutes, he adjusted his tripod's height over and over, twisted his lens repeatedly to find just the right framing, and moved his whole tripod structure left and right (sometimes by minute amounts), trying to get just exactly the right combination of visual components. Once he had his vantage point's angle and elevation just right, he waited for the instant when nobody would be in the field of view, either in person or in reflection. Repeatedly, he appeared ready to press his remote-control shutter button, only to have someone wander into view.

Finally, his moment arrived. He held the remote up in his right hand, then hesitated, squatted back down to look one last time into the viewfinder, and...

... a half dozen little kids came running out of the library, full-speed, and jumped onto the outer Sfera, spinning it around its vertical axis like a carousel, completely changing everything about the composition.

The photographer slumped down for a moment, and then slowly and methodically disassembled his equipment, put it away in his backpack, and left. We saw him again about an hour later, wandering along Grafton Street, looking left and right as he walked, searching for another target.

The National Museum's archaeology section is in a gorgeous old building on Kildare Street, near St. Stephen's Green. Photographs are not to be taken in the Museum, as I was very, very politely informed shortly after taking this one by the fellow looking at us here.

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Please visit our 20-image slide show from this day on sharrington.net!

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Next: August 6, 2010 -- The National Stud
Previous: August 4, 2010 -- Dazed in Dublin

Ireland Revisited: Dazed in Dublin

Day 1 of 35: Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Rushing to Dublin at dawn. According to the cool screen in front of my seat, our land speed shortly before this photo was taken was 695mph (assisted by a 170mph tailwind), the fastest I've ever known I've been moving.

Sleepless but excited, we arrived at the Dublin airport at a little before 8am, local time. That's about the same time of day and exactly the same condition we had arrived four years earlier, and we faced the same problem: we wouldn't be able to check in to our hotel until mid-afternoon.

Dublin Airport's new Terminal 2, nearing completion in August, 2010. It's impressive and award-winning -- but, unlike the old terminal, it wasn't engineered by the Chieftains' original flautist.

The way we handled the issue on the previous trip was straightforward if not elegant. We went directly to the hotel and sat in the lobby for a few hours, listing like zombies, until the staff took pity on us and prepared a room a bit early. While that worked, in retrospect we didn't think it helped recovery from jetlag very much since it didn't provide anything in the way of exercise before sleeping (something that's recommended for travelers over many time zones.)

So this time we took our luggage via shuttle van to the hotel, arranged for the bags' safekeeping, and took the hotel shuttle right back to the airport. There we caught an express bus into Dublin for some sightseeing and (at least on Diane's part) some shopping. We never got any closer to Dublin itself than the airport in 2006, so going into the city was high on our list of must-dos for this trip.


The primary thing on my agenda was to see the epicenter of the 1916 Easter Rising, the General Post Office on O'Connell Street in the heart of Dublin. The primary thing on Diane's agenda was to get a hair dryer that runs on European voltage.

Not just a post office, the Post Office

Not just a national shrine, but a hardworking post office

We accomplished both things. Like zombies.

As you can see in the slide show of some of the day's photos (intentionally left askew as they were taken), I could tilt on the street this time just as well as I could list in the hotel lobby last time. As we wandered agog and dazed, it crossed my mind that maybe this was what Leopold Bloom felt like in the latter part of Ulysses, so maybe it was appropriate that I see Dublin for the first time in that state. When we finally located hair dryers (I think it was in a Macy's, but I may have been partly dreaming by then), a middle-aged gentleman smiled at me while I with eyes glazed watched Diane do her shopping among the hair dryers. "You're the husband?" he asked. I nodded faintly. "You're a saint," he said. I told him that the only part of being a saint I had achieved was feeling dead.

This sign (and the wall behind it to its right) added to the sense of hallucination. (Click on any image, but especially this one, to see it in a larger format.)

By the time we arrived back at the hotel, both of us were feeling saintish dead, but very, very happy. We unpacked, ate, and collapsed.

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A slide show of 18 images from this day is available at sharrington.net by clicking here.

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Next: August 5, 2010 -- Alive in Dublin
Previous: August 3, 2010 -- On Our Way

Ireland Revisited: On Our Way

Day 0 of 35: Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Leaving San Francisco: checking luggage and getting United Airlines Departure Management Cards

This trip had an odd pair of bookends: close encounters with famous old rock guitarists. While trudging through security in San Francisco we were in line next to Carlos Santana; the night before departure from Dublin at the end of the journey we stayed in a hotel room next to one occupied by Ronnie Wood. I don't know what to make of that.

I do know what to make of United Airlines' "Departure Management Cards," though. I hate them.

When we checked in at the United counter at SFO for our flight to Chicago (where we were to connect to an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin,) we were given what we thought were boarding passes. Looking at them more closely, though, they were labeled Departure Management Cards. My thought that the term was just pretentious preciousness of corporate language disappeared when we arrived at the gate. It turns out that they mean that your flight is overbooked, and actual boarding passes will be issued at the gate -- for those who are selected by an undisclosed process.

We had a tense hour at the crowded gate as passenger after passenger was called to the counter to be given an actual boarding pass. Our questions and protestations that we had bought the tickets eight months in advance and that we had an international connection to make were met with frigid politeness but nothing else.

We got the last two boarding passes, and were the last passengers to board.

We didn't really need that exercise of our adrenal glands, but it did prepare us psychologically for the return trip five weeks later when the same thing happened in Chicago on the last leg of our return journey.

Aloft between San Francisco and Chicago

After that, the trip was smooth. The connection in Chicago was trouble-free. It was a delight, actually. When we checked in at the airy, uncrowded Aer Lingus counter we were greeted by a young employee who was as warm and helpful as the United folks in San Francisco were the opposite. When she spoke, and Diane and I heard her Midlands accent, I think we both grinned about as widely as was physically possible.

Aer Lingus's St. Aoife in Chicago, ready to board

Soon after lifting off from Chicago in the late afternoon, headed eastward into the night, we settled into our diversions, Diane with her iPod and movies, me with the active flight map on the screen in front of me and with Campbell Black's autobiographical All That Really Matters, written under his pseudonym "Campbell Armstrong." (We were to meet Campbell and his wife Rebecca in a couple of weeks, and I wanted to be prepared.) The book -- published in the U.S. with a title Campbell hates, I Hope You Have A Good Life -- was a riveting diversion.

We didn't expect to sleep on the flight, and we didn't. Someplace in darkness over the Atlantic, Tuesday turned into Wednesday.

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Next: August 4, 2010 -- Dazed in Dublin, and the slide shows begin on sharrington.net.
Previous: August 2, 2010 -- Prologue

Ireland Revisited: Prologue

View from our hotel window: two planes departing from San Francisco International Airport.

One year ago today, Diane and I left home on our way back to Ireland, but we didn't leave Northern California that day. We stayed the night of Monday, August 2nd, 2010 in a hotel near the San Francisco airport, thinking that we would be more rested for the long flights to Dublin that way. That was probably true, but we were both so excited that neither of us slept much that night, anyway.

What follows for the next five weeks in this blog will be short, day-by-day accounts of our second trip to Ireland on the one-year anniversary of the days -- or at least that's my intent. Despite having had a year to prepare for this exercise, I haven't written out the posts ahead of time, so the project might morph a bit as we go on.

Destination: the Bothy, Birr Castle Demesne.

My main hope for these blog entries is that they provide context for photos from the trip that will appear over on sharrington.net, as a similar project did a year after our first trip. Those photos will start to appear on August 4th, but each entry here will have a picture or several, too, as this one does.

The Ft. Harrington pickup, waiting to be picked up in the hotel parking lot. Adam and Lynda met us at the hotel to say good-bye and for Adam to take command of the Dodge. (Viewed in a larger size by clicking on the photo you can read the stickers: Offaly and Tipperary, the two Irish counties in which parts of Birr Castle Demesne lie.)

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A HUGE THANK-YOU

Regular readers of this blog know that we live in a place that isn't exactly easy to care for or, for newbies, to get to. It is inhabited by more animals than is reasonable unless you're in a business that requires them, like farming or chicken-racing. It requires a lot of work just to keep the rain forest from taking over, let alone keep "clean," a word I seem to remember meaning something other than what it does after a dozen years of living in Fort Harrington.

It is, in short, a hard place to take care of.

It's especially hard to take care of it if it's not where you live, is two hours or more from your home and your spouse, and is not set up properly for you to do what you need to do for a living (say, for example, has no suitable studio space but does have a dog that barks at random times, both of which can be a hindrance if you're in the voiceover business.)

Adam in Ft. Harrington

Thank you, Adam Harrington. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Next: August 3, 2010 -- The return begins.

Kelsey's Imp

Now we are twelve and have perks.

We brought Fonzie home from his cage at a cat show in 1999. We were there just to gawk, not intending to bring anyone home with us, since we had just moved into our new place (soon to be named "Ft. Harrington"), already had three cats and had just gotten our first dog a couple of months before, and didn't really need something new to deal with.

But then we saw this imp in a cage. He had been brought there by people from a cattery in Southern California, but only to keep his Abyssinian littermates company because he wasn't at all show quality. When we first saw him in his cage, his area was deserted because his companions and owners were off being judged in various other venues. We waited until his one of his owners came back, and we asked how much she would ask for him.

We went home shortly thereafter, our checking account $50 emptier and our hearts, as it would turn out, immeasurably fuller. His name was "Fawn-do" after his coat color, but that wouldn't do, so we modified it a little -- not too much, since he was old enough to associate the "Fawn" sound with himself -- to "Fonzie."

When we got back to his new house and opened his cardboard box, he scuttled under the big bed, as was to be expected. The other cats, Boo, Max, and the imperial Oolie, showed mild interest that something might have scuttled under there, but didn't follow. Our new dog, though, put his nose right under the bed, curled tail wagging rapidly.

We feared that he might get his schnozz shredded, or that the new cat would be freaked out by the first dog part he had ever seen, but neither happened. What did happen was that Fonzie came right out from under the bed and greeted Kelsey with a cat-bow: a stretch with the front legs extended. Kelsey was taken aback, but not offended, just curious.

Fonzie was smitten, and remains so to this day, a dozen years later.

Fonzie and Kelsey as youngsters in May, 2000.

It was pretty much a one-way love affair for the next decade, with Fonzie clearly having a fondness for the yellow dog that he never showed (or shows) for any of the other four-footed creatures. He used to follow Oolie around, and would actually actively learn behaviors from The Black Freighter*, but respect and fondness are not the same thing, even for a cat.

Kelsey, though, is an aloof dog, probably predisposed to that by the Akita genes in his mix. While he would tolerate Fonzie's down-the-hall dance ahead of him in greeting, he never actively sought the cat out for anything. But that is starting to change.

Fonzie is now our oldest cat, and he has begun to enjoy a perquisite that other elders of our pride have had: he can go outside with us from time to time. Like Boo before him, in his elder years we are confident that he won't wander outside the Fort's perimeter. (Oolie had us believing that was also true for him for a while in his later years until he found out that he could get to the road via the sluiceway under the barn. I found out about that when I arrived home one day to find him sitting calmly at the end of the driveway, watching cars and trucks speed past.)

Oolie at the potting shed, 2007.

Kelsey and the spaniels, of course, are always with us outside. The spaniels generally are comfy on the deck furniture cushions, or in the shade. Kelsey, bless his heart, can never stop being the guard dog, and is almost always on vigilant patrol. When Jax isn't asleep outside, he plays Lieutenant Jax to Captain Kelsey, following him by a respectful dog-length.

Captain Kelsey and Lieutenant Jax on patrol.

But now Fonzie has joined the outside group for the summer. Last weekend, he became the Lieutenant on patrol with his big yellow pal. It was hilarious and heartwarming at the same time, as these photos (best viewed at a larger size by clicking on them) hint:

Checking scents from the North.

Here, I'll mark this rock for you...

... and I'll mark this for you, too...

... and I'll mark this for me.

Two of a kind.

Of that last photo, an internet acquaintance from the Ukraine via the "Flickr" photo service says, "They look like brothers." Yes, they do.

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* The instance of Fonzie learning something from Oolie that Diane and I still shake our heads over was this: Oolie was a very, very clever cat. One of the doors to our main bathroom is a sliding pocket door. One day, soon after we had moved here, I watched Oolie try to figure out how to open it -- and eventually, after about ten minutes of pulling and pushing on various parts of the door, he found that if he put a paw under the door, palm up, and gained purchase on the bottom with his claws, he could pull the door open. Fonzie eventually figured out the same trick, but only after watching Oolie do it several times. None of the other cats has ever figured it out.

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Oh, No.

In Belfast last night:



Yes, it's as bad as it looks.

When we were there a year ago, the occasional "RIRA" graffiti in Ulster cities and reports of UVF thuggery could be dismissed hopefully as the work of low-level hooligans using centuries of conflict as an excuse for what they would do anyway. After all, street crime is endemic to modern urban societies, isn't it?

Hope remains that this does not escalate, but the anxiety is ramping up.

UPDATE: Good background piece on the current state of affairs in Short Strand. The comments are illuminating, too.

Does She Still Need Me? Will She Still Feed Me?

One of the questions in Sir Paul's ditty isn't a question for me, though: if I'm out 'til quarter to three, I'm certain that whether or not the door is locked will be way, way down on my list of concerns.

I'm sixty-freaking-four years old today. How did that happen?

Predictable YouTube drop-in:

The Red Menace, 6/18/05 - 6/18/11

Red lurking in the rose garden a month ago.

Just yesterday I wished her a happy birthday in this space. I knew she was contrary, but this just takes the cake.

I found her stiffer than Richard Nixon in the hutch this morning. After the others had happily jumped over the carcass on their way to the feeder, a quick inspection showed the probable cause: she almost certainly had been egg-bound. If she had shown any signs before the ultimate one, we probably would have been able to get her through the problem, as we had with others before, but she didn't.

Condolences are not necessary. This was one mean chicken, also given to occasional episodes of gender confusion. Were we serious farmers, not dilettantes, she would have been Sunday dinner long ago.

Her most frequent victim in either mean or gender-confused mode was poor little Sugar, a meek and sweet-natured Araucana. When both of them were a few months old, Red lost a toe during a run-in with a wire fence. We put her in a cage in the potting shed for recuperation, a place where she couldn't get her bandage dirty or lose it. For company, we put Sugar in there with her until it became evident that Red was beating up the smaller bird. After recuperation, Red always had a thing for her former cellmate -- never quite enough for us to put a permanent end to things or even to separate them at night, but frequently causing "oh, jeez, Red, cut it out" moments.

Sugar

Sugar's a beautiful bird when she has all of her feathers. At least now we can count on that being her standard condition.

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Happy Birthday, Adam!

Christmas, 1972. We both look a little different now.

Happy birthday, Adam! You're 41 now, the biggest such number a son of mine has ever had. Keep 'em coming.

I'm proud of you, you know. But I hope you also know that's just a bonus, not something necessary.

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(Happy birthday also to Jax, Red, Sugar, Bratty, Goldie, and Sir Paul.)
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Two Days in May

Spanning four generations: Adam Harrington, Grace Harrington, Calvin Murphy.

We had an all-too-rare happy circumstance at Ft. Harrington this weekend: a visit from part of the Atlanta branch of the family tree.

My late mother's youngest brother, Calvin, and my cousin Edith's husband, Joe, came by for an afternoon and evening as part of a two-week swing through California. They arrived here after a four-day culinary tour of San Francisco -- but we fed them anyway -- organized by the Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) organization. The next day, they were on their way to Southern California for more action.

Their visit to Boulder Creek was on a Friday, but Grace's teacher let her skip school for the day to come meet her great-great-uncle Calvin, and her Uncle Adam (being his own boss) provided her ride from the East Bay.

The memories and the laughter flowed abundantly, and Grace had the grace (young lady that she's becoming) to listen attentively and smile a lot. She also impressed me with some astronomy that she's been learning, not just of the memorizing factoids kind, but that's a topic for a different time -- the point here is that she's fast becoming perceptive as well as smart, and that served her well on Friday.

In a neat small-world coincidence, a very longtime close friend of Joe's -- childhood and college -- lives in Boulder Creek, so he was invited to the gathering, too. He and Joe spun some pretty good reminiscences about their college days in Southern California (including one from Joe's job as a meat delivery boy involving Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman). Their longtime connections to film and tv production had us all fascinated, but Adam especially so given his profession as a voice actor.

Clockwise from left: Joe, Diane, Calvin, and Dick enjoy the spaniels. If you click on this and view at a larger size, you'll see Kelsey's butt in the background as he watches Adam's posterior go up the walkway toward the gate to the road. Kelsey loves company, and is distressed when any seems to be leaving.

At some point in the late afternoon, one of our three guests -- I don't remember if it was Calvin, Joe, or Joe's friend Dick -- remarked on how rapidly the light changes here in the fort because of the surrounding tall sequoias. I woke early the next morning, just before sunrise, and that remark came back to me. That day, Saturday, was to be clear after the morning fog dissipated, so I decided to set up the camera to try my hand at a time-lapse through the day to see exactly how the light's patterns marched across at least part of the yard.

View of the time-lapser from the front (and the boy spaniel from the rear.)

I set up the tripod and camera to capture a view generally northward from one corner of the house toward the little rose garden with some of our redwoods providing backdrop. I set the camera's computer to take one exposure every two minutes and set the process in motion at 6:15am. I stopped the series when the fog started to come back in at 7:11, 390 photos later.

The result surprised and tickled me for the most part. The one disappointment was that I had selected too shaded an area for the exposure meter to monitor, so some of the foreground during midday is badly overexposed. One thing that I thought would be disappointing turned out to be an advantage: the wind picked up during the day, and I thought that would make leaves and branches move around too much from frame to frame. Turns out, on viewing, that was a big plus -- the trees and bushes appear to be dancing through the day.

View of the time-lapser from the rear.

The surprise was the four chickens. I knew they moved around during the day, but had never paid much attention to just how active they are. Lucky for us, they spent a lot of this particular day in the camera's field of view, rather than in any number of other places in the fort where they wouldn't have been seen.

View through the time-lapser.

You can view the result in the little box below here, of course, but it's really better viewed at higher resolution -- 720 or 1080p if your connection and patience will allow such a large download -- and in full-screen mode. If you don't, there's a lot of little detail trying to flash at you that you might miss, like this, for example:

Small detail, cropped from one of the time-lapse frames.

How ever you view it, watch it all the way to the end (it's only about three and a half minutes long.) The background still photo behind the music credit is worth the wait.

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Little Girls, They Steal Your Heart

They are the emerging power trio in the extended clan: Grace, Kiana, and Gisella. They live close enough to each other that they share a lot of time, and by the time they're in their teens they will own everything we have. They started with our hearts, after all, and any pickings after that are much easier.

Trying to keep track of who is related to whom and how in this family is hard without a scorecard, so here's a quick refresher: Grace is my granddaughter, my late son Doug's daughter, and she turns 9 this August. Kiana, age four, is Reva's daughter; Reva is my son Adam's half-sister. The youngest of the three, Gisella, is Adam's step-granddaughter. For simplicity, we think of them as cousins -- hell, most of the time we all think of each other as cousins.

The power trio gathered in Grace's back yard today, Easter, to hunt down treats.

Kiana and Grace debate the merits of different kinds of bubble solution.

Grace (yes, she changed her outfit -- she does that kind of thing, being a girly girl and all.)

Grace, Kiana, and Gisella on the hunt. (The gray fuzzy thing at left is an actual bunny -- Grace's soon-to-be-stepdad, Ryan, brought a pair of rabbits to the family.)

Gisella, admired by Adam.

Kiana a-hunting.

Gisella with loot.

While all girl, Grace defies stereotype and has been a nimble tree-climber since shortly after she could walk. Hiding Easter eggs for her is a three-dimensional process.

Gisella and Kiana in awe of their cousin's aerial prowess.

A milestone: Grace's first picture with Granddad's big, clunky camera. After just a little bit of initial hesitancy, she banged off this shot: Reva's dad Parris, Reva, Kiana, me, and Adam. Not bad, eh?

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