Goodness, is it really that long since I updated this? Well, it isn't all my fault. Life is Real, Life is Earnest, Life is jumping on me from all directions at once! Gah.

Hm. The election is well over by now; Fianna Fail didn't quite get an overall majority and are now in talks with the PDs about forming a coalition government. Again. The main excitement in the news of late has been the childish behaviour of the captain of the Irish football (soccer, to any Amis reading this!) team. Said team is playing in the World Cup (first match in a day or two), and Roy Keane took exception to the training facilities - or lack thereof. Rather than fix what he could and put up with what he couldn't, like a normal adult, he threw a tantrum and said he was going home. Pretty behaviour from a thirty-year-old team captain! At the eleventh hour, he was persuaded not to leave. Instead, he expressed his greivances to an Irish Times reporter in an interview - reasonably lucidly, I must admit. Next thing we knew, there was a team meeting, in which our Mr. Keane lost the run of himself altogether and, abandoning self-control, threw a massive wobbly and insulted the team manager on every possible level, from his ability to manage, through his ability to play the game (Mick McCarthy was captain of the Irish team when it was first in the World Cup, back in 1990), down to his personal habits and ancestry. Needless to say, Mr. McCarthy fired him on the spot, and quite right too. I don't care if Mr. Keane is the best player on the team (so, at least, I'm told; I have no great interest in football and followed this drama as a drama), that doesn't give him the right to behave like a spoiled five-year-old.

At any rate, he's gone, he isn't coming back, and good riddance. The other players on the team have publicly backed up their manager, and now we're all calming down and getting ready for the first match, against Cameroon. Why am I saying "we"? I don't really care, though I would be amused if Cameroon (who, I think, are playing in their very first World Cup) beat Ireland. Senegal (another first-time team) beat France today; the French guy at work said woefully, "I wish I were a mouse!" and tried to hide behind one of the partitions between the desks.

It's pretty much impossible to forget about the World Cup, anyway, when half the houses on the road are decorated with green, white and orange bunting and huge great flags, and half the cars in the country are flying miniature flags, and every shop has green, white and orange decorations and has somehow managed to connect its stock to the World Cup! So I might as well enjoy the parts of it that appeal to me - like the recent upheavals in the team and the amusement value of a top team getting beaten by a completely unknown one. (Yes, I have a bitchy sense of humour. And?)

Enough football.

E was in Ireland last week, for some kind of family gathering, I think. Naturally, said event was at the far end of the country from here...well, more or less. In the Limerick area. Of course, by American standards Limerick is within commuting distance of Dublin (only 120 miles!), but not by Irish standards. And not when our roads and public transport are as iffy as they are. (Not that public transport here is bad - compared to, say, Los Angeles I believe it's miraculous! - but it's not as good as it might be.) So we settled on meeting half-way. Which is why, at eleven o'clock last Saturday morning, I was getting off a bus at Kilkenny railway station. (Stop looking like that! Trains do go to Kilkenny railway station too. But buses are cheaper.) Kilkenny is not, in fact, the halfway point between Limerick and Dublin, unless you take a somewhat bent route. But Portlaoise, which is, has nothing to do that I ever heard of. All there is there is the Braun factory and the prison they keep terrorists in. And even if either of those gives guided tours, which I doubt, you wouldn't want to see round it anyway. So we went to Kilkenny, which is Historical, and has a castle and a cathedral and such.

We had arranged to meet at the main entrance to the railway station, which seemed like a good idea before I actually got to Kilkenny (I'd never been there before). When I did arrive, it transpired that the station has a long, curving, gravelly driveway from the main road to the actual station building - and more confusingly, has no indication at the entrance to said drive that this is the railway station. So, after dithering about by the main entrance to the station building for 20 minutes or so, I decided that waiting down on the road might be a smarter plan. Conveniently, there was a bench just by the station gates, so I sat on it and observed the cars at the nearby junction, mentally eliminating all those with local registrations; since E and her sister were in a hire car, it would most likely have a Limerick, Clare or Dublin registration. At length, a Dublin registered car containing two women pulled up at the traffic lights - this looked promising! And then the driver wound her window down and yelled, "Dorian?" It was them! Half an hour late, but they'd been delayed leaving Limerick and had, I gather, had some trouble finding Kilkenny railway station; I'd blithely assumed it would be signposted, but it wasn't!

We left the car in a multi-storey car park (after driving in circles a bit and getting stuck in dead ends; Kilkenny is a rather confusing city), and went off to look at the castle. It turned out to be the first Historical Sight in this country I've been to that makes you book your tour in advance; most of them just take your money and when they've collected enough people, start trundling you round. But it was quite a good plan; we bought our tickets for the half one tour and had time to go and get something to eat in the cafe. Where I had to explain sausage rolls to E and Cathy, much to my surprise. I hadn't known they don't exist in America. (For any Amis reading, they're basically a bit of sausage-meat rolled up in puff pastry - large for lunch or bite-sized for cocktail parties.) Anyway, we had them, and the two of them seemed to like them, though E did say she thought they'd be nicer if they hadn't been microwaved. They would have been, too; they'd obviously been cooked, let cool, and then kept fresh in a fridge until we came along, at which point they'd been bunged in the microwave to heat them up. The result was on the soggy side.

We had a good chat while we ate and waited for our tour to begin, and E and I got on very well - I do love it when I meet e-friends in person and they turn out to be just as cool in real life as they are in e-mail! Cathy, unfortunately, had come down with a nasty cold and was feeling as miserable as one generally does in such circumstances; I think she enjoyed the day, and meeting me, but would really rather have been nursing her cold in bed! What a rotten thing to have happen, though, to go thousands of miles for a holiday only to become ill. E had had the bug earlier in the trip, I gather, but was feeling okay again by this stage. Thank goodness, I don't seem to have caught it off them! Though of course it may be one of those ones where by the time you're at the feeling-miserable stage, you're not infectious any more.

Anyway, eventually it was time to do the tour, and it was very cool. Kilkenny Castle is one of those ones that you find all over this country, that started out as a Norman fort but got added on to, partially destroyed, rebuilt, renovated, and so on for centuries. So it's a neat combination of fort and stately home. I was very taken with the Keyhole Dining Room, which is shaped like a keyhole - a circular bit at one end with a long bit leading from it. The circular bit has what looked at first like very deep bay windows - then the guide informed us that the circular part was in one of the original Norman towers (the long part is a later addition), and the windows are that deep because the walls of the tower at that point (first floor - or second if you're American) are nine feet thick! (The windows themselves, of course, are also a later addition; Georgian sashes rather than Norman arrow-slits.) There's also a very wonderful picture gallery.

The whole thing is even more impressive when you consider the castle's recent history; it was owned by the Butlers of Ormond who, like most aristocratic families, have houses and lands all over these islands. This particular family also has long and close ties to the English monarchy, and in the mid 1930s, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, they decided they didn't want to live in Ireland any more. So they held a grand auction of all the furniture in the castle, and then went off to live in one of their English houses, leaving Kilkenny Castle to become derelict. In the late 1960s, the Earl (or maybe Duke, I can't remember) of Ormond finally decided he'd had enough of this millstone, and sold the castle to the Kilkenny Historical Society for the nominal sum of fifty pounds. (Apparently, after that, he was inundated with letters from people asking if he had another castle or so for sale!) At some point after that, the Office of Public Works took it over. And ever since, they've been restoring it. What a task! The roofs had fallen in, the floors were rotten, the furniture was all long sold off... The work still isn't complete; I gather they're working on the final wing of the building now. But what they've done...it's just amazing. The building is sound once again. They've bought - in some cases had made - appropriate furniture. They've had wall-coverings recreated from the tiniest scraps found clinging to the walls. They've got the pictures, the knick-knacks, the carpets and upholstery - all the bits and pieces that would have been in an aristocratic home of approximately the Regency period. It looks absolutely fantastic, and it must have cost several fortunes to do! If anyone reading this is ever in Kilkenny - go see the castle! It really is wonderful.

Once we'd seen the castle we wandered about a bit. Mooched into a bookshop, but didn't see anything we fancied (only three cases of spec-fic. Bah!). So we gave up and went to a pub for a couple of pints and some more chat before it was time for me to get my bus home. It was a great day. Lots of my e-friends have met up at cons or such; most of them do at least live on the same continent! But this was my first chance to meet any of my fellow-workshoppers, and it was a bonus that it was someone I particularly liked from her e-mails and our occasional meetings in the Zoo chat-room. (I've met e-friends in real life before, if only a couple, but they're from a different list.) It was even more of a bonus that we got on so well in person; there's always that fear that maybe you won't like each other in real life. But we did. Yay!

When I got back to Dublin I met up with Patrick and a friend of ours, Aidan, and went out to Aidan's place for the night. He lives out in Saggart, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, where his parents have a very nice house. We met his cat (very friendly) and one of his brothers (also friendly) and spent the night sitting about watching TV, listening to music (sometimes simultaneously!), chatting and drinking home-made (and very good!) wine. Around half three in the morning some more friends showed up; by that stage, having been up since seven, I was wilting a bit, and Patrick and I crashed around four or half past. Fun all the same.

As a result of all of this, I missed most of training on Sunday, having had to go home and feed the cats, do some laundry and shop for groceries. Ah well.

This was also the weekend my computer was laid low with tuberculosis of the hard drive; it had spent a couple of days coughing and clicking before finally dying. The good part is, it's not the drive all my stories and things are on. The bad part is, it's the drive half the programs are on, and the computer won't go now. And I can't afford to buy it a new hard drive. Not to mention the fact that, despite being well souped up, this is still a Pentium 166 we're talking about; half the drives available in the shops won't work in it anyway! The solution, for the moment, is going to have to be to put all the programs on the other drive, which I gather is going to entail using Patrick's computer as an intermediary. In the meantime, I'm using his computer, which I hate. It's new and shiny and has Windows XP, which keeps doing things I don't expect, and every so often IE hangs for no apparent reason, or things go horribly slow, and it's just all bad. Plus it doesn't have Netscape or AIM (gods, I miss our chat-room!); it doesn't have my bookmarks or my saved e-mails or...all the stuff that I've set up or accumulated over the last however-long-it-is (my computer used to be Patrick's, but I used it too, until he bought this one a couple of months ago). And the keyboard is horrible. I think it's meant to be "compact". Actually, it's just a pain in the neck to use. Ack. I want my baby back! Patrick's at the Heartland Games this weekend, though, so it'll be Wednesday at the earliest before he can do that file transfer thing with my hard drives - I, unfortunately, have no idea about how to take drives out of one computer and put them into another.

Then there's Tazey. One of our cats. Who we procrastinated about getting fixed, with the result that she got pregnant before we could. I thought she had another month to go, but she gave birth on Tuesday. To a single kitten. (Which, I suppose, explains it; you don't expect a cat to only produce one kitten, and she'd have been bigger if there were more.) We only actually found it on Wednesday evening; she chose a black sack full of old clothes to give birth in, and the kitten was squashed down the side of it. Unfortunately, Tazey, although very pleased with herself, didn't seem to have much idea of what to do with a kitten. Despite our best efforts, she would keep lying on it. You can guess what happened. On Thursday evening I found it dead. She must have smothered it.

Not that we wanted a kitten or kittens in the first place; this is not a cat-friendly area (we've lost four cats in the two and a half years we've been living here), and it's no fun watching kittens grow up only to have them vanish. Nor is it much fun to have to give them away - but we'd sort of got comfortable with the general idea and were looking forward to having kittens about the place for a couple of months, at least. And now the kitten has been and gone in a day, and it's crap. I can't really blame Tazey; she's not even a year old herself, and Gandalf was fixed before she ever came on heat (and doesn't like Tazey anyway), so it's not as if Tazey even had any role model to show her how to cope with offspring. But it's still horrible.

The only faint consolation (and it really isn't much) is that the kitten was pure white all over, and I seem to recall hearing that pure white cats often have defects of one kind or another, so maybe it wouldn't have lived anyway. But that doesn't help a whole lot.

And just to top off a rotten week, Patrick lost his job.

And it's a Bank Holiday weekend, and I don't get paid until after it. So I'm broke over a long weekend.

Sometimes I hate life.

I can't even think of a cheerful note to end this on. The best I can do is to stop now before I make myself terminally depressed. I shall go and re-read "Jennie", which suits my mood. I think. I remember crying buckets over it as a child.