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…
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…
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…
Less than that even, now. The movers are coming in 12 hours. Actually less, or they’d better be. Things are more or less packed, with the emphasis on more. As Ted said, at this point it’s almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. It’s hard to tell what’s unpacked anymore because there are boxes all over the damn place. We’re all very tired. Poor Indy is high strung with excited nerves and exhaustion. Ted and I are just exhausted. We keep saying, “It’s only Monday,” with disbelieving horror.…
I forgot to show you guys the place we’re moving into. It is an actual Georgian (or Georgian-style; we don’t know when it was built) manor house. Not a huge one: it’s 4 bedrooms, not, like, 38 or something. But it’s an actual manor house. It has a living room AND a sitting room. And that is, yes, a gazebo; please do not shoot it with an arrow. It has about an acre of grounds, and a brook running through them, although the brook is in the badly overgrown part…