Well, that didn’t work. :)

Well, that wasn’t very successful. :)

The train was nearly an hour late, making us sufficiently late into Dublin that we couldn’t possibly catch an early movie. So no Casanova in the morning. Instead we had lunch, where we were asked if we were here on holiday and told that Cork was lovely, and picked up the tickets to Mirrormask. I also attempted to shop for shoes.

Have I mentioned the shoe stores here? They’re like crack cocaine. Everywhere you turn somebody’s offering you a hit. Ted said a couple weeks ago, “I never realized you were a shoe hound,” and I said, “I’m NOT! It’s just there’s so much supply! They’re all OVER the place! It starts sucking your brain!” However, the enormous number of shoe stores have not yet proven (not that I’ve tried very hard) to carry shoes that actually fit my fat feet, so despite the tantalizing atmosphere, I haven’t fallen into that particular pit of doom.

So we went to Mirrormask, which was playing as part of the Dublin Film Festival. It’s an odd little movie. Labyrinth-like, in an even-more-surreal way, and reasonably likeable in its surreal way. As likeable as I find any of Neil Gaiman’s work, certainly. It didn’t really engage me emotionally, except the first back-in-the-real-world scene at the end, but sort of mild intellectual interest is generally my reaction to Gaiman’s stuff, so it’s certainly no worse than anything else he does. (And yet I enjoy his blog so much. I don’t get it.)

After the movie, the star of the movie, Stephanie Leonidas, was there to do a Q&A for a few minutes, so that was pretty cool. She’s incredibly tiny, and was very sweet and charming answering her questions (which were mostly along the lines of, “What’s it like to work with (insert name here),” and to which she pretty much uniformly replied, “(Name) is lovely, he really is,”), and yeah, that was generally kind of neat. I’m not entirely sure one is supposed to come away from sighting a film star thinking, “Even if I was in the best shape I could possibly be in, I’d apparently never make it as a movie star, because I just couldn’t be that tiny,” but that’s mostly what I thought. :)

Then we failed to see either Aeon Flux or Casanova *after* Mirrormask, because it turned out the latest train back tonight was at 6:25 and there was no way to see a movie and make it to the train on time. So our 3 movie day turned out to be a one movie day, but we generally had a nice time anyway. :)

We came home and I watched three episodes of season two Dead Zone. A good day, in all.

Oh! I just came up with a Plan, a day or so ago. I started my Walk to Rivendell 3 years ago on March 26. It is suddenly my goal to complete that walk–which is to say, arrive at Mount Doom–by March 26 this year. I have…oh, hell. 72 miles. Ack. I thought I only had about fifty. Wow. I’m going to really have to not screw around to accomplish this! Ack!

miles to Mount Doom: 398