So the thing about Irish houses is they mostly have laundry facilities in the kitchen. This is because even up until about five years ago, “all mod cons” — all modern conveniences, including, say, a washing machine (but not a tumble dryer; those are more than Modern Conveniences) — were stil fancy enough to be mentioned in house ads, and most of those Mod Cons ended up in the kitchen because it’s where the running water was. We spent the first 3 days in this house with our 6′ butcher…
Our living room is about 20 feet long, and will contain the dining table when we’re done, so it will henceforth (at least in these hallowed pages) be referred to as the Long Room. The living room half of the Long Room is pretty well sorted now: (For the record, Young Indiana’s leg is not strangely deformed, it’s just the photo is a panorama and he moved while I was taking it. :)) It and our bedroom are about the only two spaces that can be considered pretty well sorted…
We are, after a very tiring day of cleaning, out of the Dublin house. It took longer than we hoped, but it’s clean and we’re out, so that’s that. Done and dusted. The woman at the post office, the guy at the corner shop, and various others all expressed surprise and dismay that we were moving away, generally couched in terms of a horrified, “*Drogheda*?” followed by, “Oh, well, that’s not so bad,” when informed that Ted works in Swords which isn’t too bad a drive from Drogheda. So we’re…
So I was doing okay until I almost set the kitchen on fire. Our stovetop dials turn very easily. Something got pushed against one and it turned on, which normally isn’t a problem because the power to the stovetop is controlled by a wall switch that we leave set to off. But I turned the wall switch on so I could cook something in the oven, and I didn’t notice that beneath the stuff on the stove a burner was on. (yes, I know, NEVER PUT ANYTHING ON TOP OF…
The movers called at 10 and said they were running about half an hour late. They arrived and began work at half ten, worked with admirable and somewhat depressing speed (it took them SO LITTLE time to pack up a giant room full of book boxes that had taken me weeks to fill), threw the last things we hadn’t quite managed to get into boxes, into boxes, got everything including the trees and the barbeque into the truck, and hied themselves off to Drogheda where they got lost trying to…