whew!

, Ted and I watched Human Nature/Family of Blood yesterday. *clutches heart and staggers around* That’s not just doom. That’s chocolately doom: the kind of doom you just can’t resist. Wow. God damn, but is good. I will be falling upon him and weeping and strangling him a little bit and going AUGH a lot at MeCon, I think. :)

It has been a completely smashing week. took us down to Kinsale on Saturday and gave us the history of Ireland as relevant to Kinsale, and brought us to Charlesfort and then down to Kinsale Head, where we could admire how on one side the Atlantic ran up against the island all rough and tumble and on the other side there’s a gorgeous great huge cove, and then around to an awesome old abbey and to a beautiful little seaside town where we had dinner and eventually went home from. I have pictures of all of this. I will post them. Soon. Possibly after I’ve fed Zilli, who is standing at my hip and howling…

Ok, that’s done. Um. Sunday we did indeed run up to Dublin to meet Mira Furlan, who was charming, and to have lunch and a spot of culture with . He brought us to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle, where we both had lunch and then were run through the library/museum at a hysterically high speed, admiring Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscript pages at top speed and pausing only briefly over the ancient Japanese scrolls which, as said cheerfully, looked like a sort of proto-comic. We did, despite him, stop to gape over the fourth century papyrus fragments from, like, THE BIBLE, and then we were whisked along, giggling, as he had many other things to show us and very little time to do so if we were to go see Mira Furlan on time. “Besides,” he said, “you’re Americans, it’s not like the culture will stick anyway.” *laughs and laughs*

At Forbidden Planet we ran into , who was down from Belfast, and so after talking briefly with Ms. Furlan we all went out for hot chocolate together and had a very nice time indeed, though it was eventually broken up by having to go home to help Herself finish packing for their trip to Paris this week. Gosh. It’s a hard life. :)

Yesterday Emily and I went up to Bray to hang out with Mom and Dad for a few hours before Emily had to go home today, so that was very nice, and today I put Emily on the bus for the airport and do hope she’ll get back to the States safely. So yeah, it’s been a very nice, if exhausting, week. I’m disgustingly sweaty and icky and unclean.

And while I’ve been off gallavanting the last day and a half, my husband has cleaned the kitchen, mopped the soot up from the bedroom floor where we’d discovered Lucy’d deposited it, done a metric ton laundry, paid the car tax (after … meh. See, we’d asked the dealer no fewer than 3 times if the car tax was included in the cost of the car, or if we needed to pay it, and he assured us repeatedly that it was all taken care of, but we never got our paperwork for it, and it finally turned out that no, the car tax is completely separate and the dealer has nothing to do with it, so we had to go get it paid, ngh), and gone shopping. Just in case anybody doubted it, let me make it clear that Ted is very, very wonderful.