Wednesday Tunes

Some weeks I forget what day it is. This is one of those weeks.

Watched a movie a while back called "Wind that Shakes the Barley". After visting Ireland, I decided to watch it again, makes more sense now that I know more about Irish history. You don't have to go to a place to learn the history but visiting Ireland peaked my interest and I've been reading books and watching movies (well one movie) about Irish history. Great movie and highly recommended by me. Anywho....... here's a song that is in the movie - "Óró Sé do Bheatha 'Bhaile"



Óró Sé do Bheatha 'Bhaile -


Here is a full version
The Dubliners - Óró Sé do Bheatha Bhaile




Here are the words

English translation
(Chorus)
Oh-ro You're welcome home,
Oh-ro You're welcome home,
Oh-ro You're welcome home...
Now that summer's coming!

Welcome oh woman who was so afflicted,
It was our ruin that you were in bondage,
Our fine land in the possession of thieves...
And you sold to the foreigners!

Chorus

Gráinne O'Malley[5] is coming over the sea,
Armed warriors along with her as her guard,
They are Irishmen, not foreigners nor Spanish...
And they will rout the foreigners!

Chorus

May it please the King of Miracles that we might see,
Although we may live for a week once after,
Gráinne Mhaol and a thousand warriors...
Dispersing the foreigners!

Boy Names

Boy's are soo hard to name!! Must be why we're having three of those and only one girl. So, not sure if you're vote will count but go ahead and throw your 2cents in on which of the following names you like.

In no particular order
Charley
Alex
Landon
Chase
Chance (maybe spelled different)
Gage
Wyatt
Ezra
Oliver
Trey
Parker
Deacon (maybe spelled different?)

Middle name will more then likely be Jones but could be Ralph or Richard (all family names)

Probably going to go any minute...........course T has been saying that for a week and a half now. But this is the week, then we'll have to decide on a name.


The voting lines are open............

Picture Collages

I've noticed that many blogs have picture collages. I've looked around and really can't find a program that I like or that does what some of you do. It seems like a much better way to share multiple pictures together instead of having 10 separate pictures.

So send me where you all do your collages to post on your blogs.

Thanks!!

Irish Food

As I mentioned before one of the main reasons we choose to visit Ireland was because it was foreign without being too foreign. Ireland really felt like visiting another state and their food was no different. One of my friends who visited Ireland a year before we did, didn't try much of the food and said they ate mostly at Italian restaurants. Boy did he miss out! Every place we ate had fantastic food! I don't remember not liking any of the places we ate at. Well, there was one that I'll talk about later.

I had Irish Stew and I did ask for 'bangers & mash' but the waitress wouldn't let me, she gave me a disgusting look and told me "NO". So, I ordered something else. Wish I could remember every place we ate, but I don't. But if you do go to Ireland, just know that anywhere you do eat, it's good.




I don't remember which restaurants these pictures are from, they are the only food pictures I did take. The one below is Irish Stew, I love Irish stew!! Wish I would have had it every night for dinner but only tried it once. Since we had pre-paid for our Irish Breakfasts with the vacation package we got from Exploring Ireland, we decided that we could get by only eating dinner and snacking for lunch. Most of the time we just walked around looking for restaurants that looked good which more often then not ended up being pubs, especially in smaller cities/towns. We did eat at subway a few times but manly because it's expensive to eat out every day and we were trying to save the budget. They don't have regular mustard in Ireland - no where in Ireland! Which really changes the taste of a subway spicy italian. We also found a great Chinese restaurant in Dublin next to our hotel that was practically free it was so cheap.



There was a bar we went to our first night in Dublin by one of the trendy areas that wasn't so great. I ordered a hamburger (yea, not Irish I know) plain. I thought that plain ment that it would come with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup. Yea, it didn't come with any of that! It came with a bun and a piece of meat! And then since they don't work off of tips and we didn't order beer, we didn't see our waitress again!! We avoided places like this and ate great the rest of the time.

Some other FYI's.....
Coke is more expensive then beer and comes in a 12oz bottle
They do give you ice with water
Waitress's don't work off tips, so you rarely see them (wish we wouldn't have tipped so much)





The pictures of us are at the Brazen Head, Dublin's oldest pub and a fantastic place to eat. I highly recommend that if you do visit Dublin that you visit the Brazen Head. Not only is the food great but it's got an awesome atmosphere.

HaHa!!

I set up a new gmail account!!! Yes!! I win!! Alright, not sure what I win if anything but now I can continue using blogger and this blog by linking my new pictures to this email account. On the downside I have 5 email accounts. One for work, one I use, one I use to use but is not just a spam collecting email, school (maybe I don't have that one anymore) and now this one. Good times online!

What to do?

I'm at a loss on what to do with this blog. Google only allows so many pictures and I've reached that limit. Actually I reached that limit sometime ago but I have been deleting pictures as I add new ones, but I'm done doing that. So, if I want to continue blogging here on blogger I have to either continue deleting old pics to add new ones or blog with no pictures. Blogging with no pictures is worse then reading a book with no pictures.

So, I'm going to play with wordpress and see if I want to switch over. I kind of don't but then I'll no longer be able to post pictures and I know how you all die to see pictures.

Wednesday Tunes

Mos Def - "Quiet Dog"

Missing This

Everyone morning while we were in Ireland we had an "Irish Breakfast". Funny that they name it an Irish breakfast, wonder if they do that just for us tourist or if it's always been called that? But seriously, loved it! T didn't like it, she's not much of a meat eater and since it's mostly meat, it didn't really work for her. But everywhere we went they served basically the same thing; Irish bacon (ham in America), sausage, eggs, tomatoes, brown/white pudding (talk about this in a minute) and toast, and then sometime fruit, cereal, hash-browns/potatoes and yogurt were part of the breakfast as well in some type of variation.

I tried the white pudding, it looked kinda of like a sausage paddy but was soft and bread like. It didn't taste very good, it wasn't bad or disgusting just not good, so I didn't eat any more of it. Come to find out after we were back home, it is also called blood pudding. Blood pudding is a sausage made of blood. NICE. And I ate that?

Hate Being A Dad

I swear I cry at more things now that I have kids then I have ever in my entire life! At commercials? Really?



No, we are not dead. Just haven't been in the mood to blog. Spend most my computer time elsewhere, mainly facebook. Maybe one day in the near future I'll get back on track with this blogging thing.

Ireland

For my graduation present I gave myself a trip to Ireland. Why Ireland? Why not? I've never been off the North American Continent and thought that it's about time that I had. And what better place to visit than Ireland?

Going to give you an overview of our Ireland holiday in this post then for those who care or just for my own entertainment I'll blog a few posts with more detail.



This is my google map of our itinerary, we stuck to it for the most part. The problem is that we didn't have google on the road and I didn't get around to print the maps so we looked at it in the morning when we could and did the best we could to remember where we wanted to go. A great help was that we used an Irish travel agency - Exploring Ireland. The main reason we went with a travel agency is that we did not have the time to research where we wanted to visit and to find hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. We gave Explore Ireland an idea of what we wanted to see and do while we were there and how long we were going to be there and they found our rooms, a car and gave us a suggested itinerary. We were thrilled with Exploring Ireland - all of the hotels and B&Bs they sent us to were great, we didn't have a problem with any of them or the car rental. The best part was that we paid Exploring Ireland and they gave us vouchers, so we didn't have to worry about paying each hotel/B&B some of which wanted cash, so we didn't want to carry around extra cash.


We spent the first 5 days in Dublin. The first night we spent at the Fitzpatrick Castle in Dalkey, which I think they built the castle with the idea of turning it into a hotel the minute it was done. It didn't seem like much of a castle. This was about a half hour south of Dublin and to get there we took the crazy taxi, thought for sure we were going to die! The first day is a blur - seemed like two minutes after the sun set it was rising again and I cannot sleep on planes.

I love Dublin! It felt like an American city. I compare it to Washington DC because both cities are the capitals with government buildings and memorials and both are low rise, no tall buildings but still very densely populated. There is so much to see and do in Dublin that we should have spent more time there. One interesting thing is that the whole country shuts down at 6pm except pubs. There was nothing to do after 6pm, even some of the parks shut down, except go to pubs and since we don't do much of that we just roomed around the streets.



After Dublin we got a rental car with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car and the driving on the wrong side of the road and no GPS. The first day of driving was kinda nerve racking- everyone drives 50-60mph on skinny winding roads and trying to remember to stay on the left side. Their sign system is difficult to figure out (when there are signs) and it takes a bit to get use to all the round-a-bouts. But after two days of driving it got kinda fun and I actually miss the round-a-bouts, much more efficient. They are in the process of building a freeway system, some of which has round-a-bouts, think about that, driving on I-15 and coming to a round-a-bout to get onto I-80. The freeways we did drive on were very new and most of the time we were the only ones on it.

The greatest thing we did besides the Hop on Hop off bus to tour Dublin, that gave us three days of using their tour buses, any city bus and the airport bus (that we used to get our rental car) was purchasing the Heritage card. Everything we went to cost money, 1 euro to 15 euro each, that adds up and makes the decision of what we wanted to visit. The Heritage card gave us access to all nationally owned heritage sites. We more than used what the card cost us and went to many sites that we wouldn't have gone to with out the card. We ended up focusing our site seeing on what sites were listed in the heritage book which we should have done in the first place.


We loved Ireland. Around every corner was another breath taking view. We have hundreds of pictures of scenery most of which T took while driving past. We would have needed another two weeks at the least to stop at every picturesque opportunity. T's favorite was the Muckross House and the Ring of Kerry. I would have to say my favorite was Dublin and the history of the whole country.

Master of the Universe!

I AM DONE WITH SCHOOL! I think that I have dragged it out long enough. I am ready to move on with my life, ready for the next chapter. Not that I have really been waiting to be done with school to move on, but have with some things.

For those who don't know or don't remember I have spent the last three years working towards a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Utah. The MPP program at the UofU was challenging and rewarding and definitely pushed me to work hard and find hidden abilities. I will miss the class discussions, friends and meeting new friends but I will never miss writing research papers. So yea - I'm down with MPP.

Palace Beautiful

Palace Beautiful is a beautifully written book. I'm not just saying that because the author lives in my ward (thats why I read it) but because it is. Actually the ONLY reason I read this book is because the author lives in my ward. This is not my genre, I would have never in a million years picked this book up. If you go to my goodreads and check out my book list, this genre of teenage girl books is not there.

With that said, I ended up enjoying Palace Beautiful. It took me about 50 pages or so to get past the teenage girl part and into the book but after I let my prejudice go, I couldn't put it down. I loved the story and the way it was written. The book is about two sisters who move to the Avenues in Salt Lake City and find a journal in the attic of their new house. With a new friend the sisters read the journal of a 13 year old girl from 1918 during the Influenza and go though their own story of being 13 in 1985. While I enjoyed the main story, I LOVED the journal story!! The girls read the journal in sections, making you wait in anticipation for the next time they're going to read the journal. I have learned a lesson that I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. Just because it's a book for teenage girls doesn't mean that I won't like it. I hate to admit this but Palace Beautiful made me cry a little. The story has a great life lesson for everyone every age and while I highly recommend this to all teenage girls I would also recommend it for all.

Who knows, with my new lesson in life I might even read the Twilight series.