Well. It’s been a very very nice weekend at the Murphy-Lee-Sandness household. Friday, a friend of mine from high school (I said, throwing relationship terms and time frames around casually; this was without question the first time I’ve ever exchanged more than five words with the guy, and he graduated before I *entered* high school, but he was a drama student and I knew who he was, and we’ve emailed casually since 1994 or so when he discovered the first web page I ever had, at the NeXT lab in Fairbanks, and dropped an email to see if I was Tom Murphy’s daughter, and we both lived in San Francisco for a while but never actually met up, and when I told Shaun I was meeting a friend from high school, he said, “…in *Ireland*?”) was in town, so Ted and I went in to meet him, and rather than try to squish meeting and maybe dinner and all that into the time before the last train left for Athy, we decided to stay in town. (My, what a long sentence that was.)
Since we were staying in town, we went out with Deirdre and Gavin to the traditional music festival that was going on in Temple Bar, and listened to music for a couple hours, then wandered around Temple Bar looking for more music. Eventually we found it, but it was standing room only and between not being able to see the musicians and being shoved violently every few seconds, I decided I wasn’t having enough fun to stay. Deirdre and Gavin did stay for a while, but Ted and I trundled on home. Ted’d drunk four pints of Guinness and a glass of wine, so he was quite cheerful. :) I’d called my friend to invite him and the guy he was staying with to meet us at the pub we were at, but then I didn’t hear my mobile (mobile! see! i’m learning irish!) ring, and while apparently they did make it to the pub, we never saw each other. Oop.
Complete tangent: Irish as a language has no definitive word for “yes” or “no”. (Wow, we all said, that explains a lot.) The Irish as a people base their English phrasing on the Irish language, which explains why if you ask someone if they’re going to the store, they say, “I am,” or, “I am, so I am,” or, “I’m not,” or, “I won’t be.” It also explains why they say, “Will I be putting gravy on that?” instead of, “Do you want gravy?” and many other things, including why it’s sometimes completely impossible to understand what an apparently-English-speaking Irishman is saying. There’s a Dublin accent that sounds Cockney, and between that and the phraseology, it really is a different language!
Right, then. :) Saturday, rather than manage to get up in time to go to a movie, Ted and I decided we’d go to the farmer’s market, but instead we went to lunch and wandered through a bookstore and forgot about the farmer’s market. Oops. :)
Hm. I have many other things to write about, but I’ve spent my allotted fifteen minutes on this journal entry, and my fingers are all warmed up for typing now, so I’ll have to write more later!