Helianthus

Earlier, I posted a list of the things that meant something different in Ireland.

( And then didn't explain most of them. So, remedying that! )

Seder time, or rather, time for hovering awkwardly in the kitchen to see if I can help my m-i-l or else retreating to the living room to hope no one notices I'm a bad daughter-in-law.  Or worse, making awkward conversation with B's parents.  Aiee.

I've been on Tumblr for a while, though basically what happened was I tried posting and tagging a few things, then got lazy and stopped, so now I just check my dashboard and occasionally reblog something. 

I mention this mostly because I'm following Unfuck Your Habitat and since the return from Ireland, my computer room has gone from "hoarding runs in my family, I'm so boned" to "before picture."  I'm now trying to make the transition to "after picture" since my parents are coming for a visit.

This will also facilitate Tumblr use since it occurred to me that Tumblr might be the perfect way to share bits of doujinshi, and in the course of the unfucking I unearthed my PSP disc.  Which is good because the new computer, Meiko, is here now, but I don't really have the hang of scanning with Gimp (or doing other tasks I'm used to from PSP, like increasing color depth on a gif.)

Anyway!  More of Ireland!

( Ring of Kerry, Dingle, Bunratty Castle )

And I'm going to break there, because the great unfucking has spread to the bathroom and the bleach fumes are making me kind of woozy.  Next stage: CAULK.  Our shower's in pretty sorry shape.

So I was looking at yet another Tiger & Bunny/Miku Miku Dance video and someone had commented with "ooh Mr. Kotetsu ooh," and so I've been walking around the house bursting into giggles periodically for the past half hour because, yes, that's a pretty accurate summary of the way the whole fandom feels about Kotetsu.  I haven't actually watched the video yet, too busy giggling.

So!  Ireland trip!

( Dublin! )

And I'm sleepy enough that the entry box is starting to look like a parallelogram, so I think I'll wrap this up and post more tomorrow, including the musical pub crawl, the bookstore clerk taking a class from Terry Pratchett, and Ireland's terrifying mountain roads.

I didn't really have jet lag problems while there. It's here that I'm all weird.

I feel like it has been a week since we left LA.  I think I've actually been up 35 hours, more or less - I dozed somewhat on the two plane flights, and we did nap once we gained access to our hotel, which is a very long story involving the words "Five in the morning" and "our saintly cab driver loaned us his cell phone" and, you know, I'll tell it later. 

Otherwise: Pubs!  Castles!  Illuminated manuscripts, many of them not from Western Europe!  Prison!  (Lucia kind of has a thing about prisons, I don't know.)  I need to look up what "off license" means because it's been mystifying me all day, which means it feels like years!

Husband and I ran off for the weekend, visited the San Diego zoo, did some Temecula wine tasting (hence my tipsy and slightly abbreviated Tiger & Bunny post last night) and now he's watching Avatar: The Last Airbender without me, because he managed to find the third season on TV and I want to watch it more or less in order.  Despite being mostly spoiled due to fandom osmosis.  This was poorly thought-out on my part, probably, but then again, being spoiled as hell didn't stop me from embracing Madoka Magica fandom.  I did watch a couple of episodes.  I like Toph, and Sokka seems to make excellent faces. 

While there, we discovered that the Yelp reviewers of San Diego are a baffling lot who will ding a restaurant stars for having a bad parking lot.  Presumably these delicate flowers would starve to death in LA, which does not to my knowledge have any good parking lots, but whatever, more food for me.  We ate at Yokohama Yakitori Koubou, where chicken gizzards joined the list of things I have tried because of fandom (in this case, because of Fumi Yoshinaga.)

Tomorrow I need to bake a cake and brace myself for the giant heaps of MEAT at my in-laws' place.  Maybe I'll actually have the mats for pasta salad.  I mean, my mother-in-law's an excellent cook for some things, but she's not as good at dishes that aren't made out of animal.