it lives!

[leedy]

Greetings from quasi-tropical Dublin. As you can see, I am not dead, though (due to not having the interbets at home and not needing constant relief from at-work boredom) I haven't been updating and have only been very quickly skimming my friends list - sorry if I've missed any big news. Anyway, I am well, and here are some of the things I have been doing:

• House things! Featuring solicitors, surveyors, signing things, and, er, other things beginning with 's'. Still not all sorted by any means, but hopefully will be all done before the end of September. We went back to look at the house on Monday and take some photos for our solicitor and, phew, we still like it very much. The kitchen is a bit titchy, but the garden is even nicer than I remembered (pretty plants!), the main bedroom is HUUUGE, and the house in general just feels nice and characterful. It also has a peculiar large cupboard in the hall with a stained-glass window in it - no, I have no idea why. Hopefully the surveyor won't find too much wrong with it (it's a fairly unreconstructed 1930s house, though it does have central heating and the miracle of modern plumbing). My parents came round for the inspection and also approved, and my father has already befriended some of the local old ladies.
• Battles on Monday night, which was AWESOME. They play strange choppy jumpy drum-guitar-keyboard music with very complicated rhythms, which might all be a bit chin-strokey except that they also have THE FUNK and are enormous amounts of fun. I jumped around grinning a LOT, despite the unbelievable heat in the venue (somebody spilled a pint on me and I swear, it evaporated). My friend Mark doesn't like them because "their notes are too short". He is WRONG.
• Swimming in the sea!
• A walk in the mountains with B, wwhyte, and heroic Dog Of The Mountains Dizzy. Glorious views and a lovely walk, despite the heat and the CLOUD OF FLIES which annoyingly followed us up two hills. At several points I wished I had a tail. Oh, and at the top of one of the hills, we found a passage grave, which was cool (in both senses of the word).
• Sitting around in parks reading books in the sun.

All very lovely, really, apart from having a giant strop at a dry cleaner yesterday. I left a dress in to be dry cleaned and when it came back, a tiny teensy inconspicuous stain on the bodice had mysteriously turned into a much more noticeable greyish smudge. Hmph. I wouldn't mind if they'd been even remotely apologetic or said that dry cleaning can sometimes do these things, but they were actually quite rude when I pointed it out, going so far as to suggest that it had looked like that in the first place (it didn't) and denying all allegations that they might have tried spot-cleaning the stain ("He just wouldn't do that. That's impossible."). I eventually harrumphed off with said garment in a state of high dudgeon, vowing never to return. Grafton Cleaners - just say no.

I am off to Leitrim this evening for a wedding, so I hope you all have a lovely rest of week.