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We "discovered" the Junie B. Jones books earlier this year and have had a lot of fun reading through the entire series with Charlotte as her bedtime stories. We've read almost all of the books that take place in her kindergarten, and have even jumped ahead a few to read several of the first grade adventures. Charlotte gets a lot of enjoyment out of the stories, and I get to have fun coming up with all the voices of the characters.
When we first learned about the series, I believe it was Charlotte's kindergarten teacher who told us about them. Right off the bat she let us know that sometimes Junie B. does not use correct grammar or correct words. Okay, fine. Five-year-olds are not known for their impeccable grammar or grasp of English verb tense exceptions. It's to be expected, particularly in the context of being used in a novel where the main character is the narrator AND a five-year-old to boot. But who knew this was such a heated battle among parents?
Frankly, I don't expect every single thing my child encounters to have to be a formal learning experience. I suspect that a lot of the people who are so upset about Junie B. Jones are also the sort of people who feel their children should wear a helmet at all times and never eat anything that wasn't personally hand-grown by their own private organic farmer. Indeed, isn't one of the ways we improve our command of the language through being exposed to its improper use in a way that helps us understand the errors being made? We're already turning into a society full of illiterate morons, drowning in an ocean of bad grammar, bad taste, and bad judgment; you would think that people could see this as an opportunity to point out the errors and share a little one-on-one parent-child education.
It's not that I don't have a few criticisms of the books myself. It's pretty obvious to me that Barbara Park, the author, is writing for theparents as much if not more than the children who hear these stories. Sometimes too much so. A lot of Junie B.'s speech affectations and word choices are meant to deliberately draw a laugh from the grown-up reader and are somewhat lost on the child. It's okay in small doses, but as the cumulative effect of reading the books builds up, it gets old. If she really wants to write to the adults, then the affectations do not need to be so in-your-face, and some attention should go to developing the adult characters who appear routinely in the books but as little more than flabbergasted foils. Character development of everyone other than Junie B. is pretty much non-existant. But I think those are minor quibbles.
Permalink | Comments (0)For quite a long time, we used to have a cleaning service that came in every other week and cleaned our house. "Clean Day" was as close to a religious experience as I think I will ever have; there was such anticipation and joy at the thought of coming home to a house that seemed to magically clean itself. Even after I started my "sabbatical", we kept the cleaning service as long as we could afford to (which, in retrospect, was probably too long). Eventually though, we had to give it up and shoulder the burden of doing our own scrubbing, dusting and vacuuming. Which is, of course, why The (Real) Big Red House looks like a disaster area these days -- we SUCK at house cleaning. Lately, we've even taken to watching the BBC show "How Clean Is Your House", just so we can feel like SOMEBODY is worse than we are (and, believe me, they are).
Discipline is part of the problem for us -- our intentions are good (aren't they always?), but we're easily discouraged and always ready to procrastinate. I think if we could break things down into more manageable chunks rather than having to face an entire weekend of housecleaning, we might be more likely to do it. Or not. Who knows.
Apart from wanting to have a clean house again, we also have this notion about getting Charlotte to do some household chores. She's old enough now to be able to pick up after herself, put away her clothing, etc. But convincing her that it's worth doing includes getting ourselves back on the straight and narrow. I ran across this website at the very useful Lifehacker site a couple of weeks ago: it promises to help you devise a cleaning schedule, assign jobs to specific indivduals, and let you break down big tasks into individual steps. I don't know that lazy housekeeping can be solved with online software, but you never know.
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All of us at The (Real) Big Red House have been jonesin' for a Nintendo Wii pretty badly, but the very tight availability of the consoles earlier in the year sent us in a slightly different direction -- we each got a Nintendo DS Lite. Bridget got hers first as her birthday present, but before long the three of us were squabbling over whose turn it was to use it, so we bought one for Charlotte for her birthday in May. I then demanded one for myself as a Fathers' Day gift, because I didn't want to have to wait until August to get one.
So now that there's no squabbling over who gets to use the console, instead we squabble over who gets to use which game cartridge. This little accessory solves some of that, plus opens up the possibilities of playing many different games (I will let you use your imagination as to wha tI'm talking about). When we're not squabbling, though, we are having a ball. Unlike with the PS2 that sits forlorn and unloved in our family room, Charlotte can actually manage the simpler controls and has discovered that she likes to play video games. And we have had a ton of fun playing some multiplayer games together: part of our Fourth of July experience this year was all sitting together in the family room playing MarioKart.
The DS units have built-in wireless networking, you see, and can be used in ad-hoc mode to create a network between players within close physical range of one another. They can also connect to WiFi networks and connect to other players via the Internet. And, if you've got the web browser cartridge, you can use the DS as a portable web access device. I haven't been able to get any of our DSes connected to our home wireless network yet, but that seems to be due to some quirk with our Linksys wireless router not liking any client that isn't another piece of Linksys gear. But it hasn't really been all that important yet, since we're able to connect to one another.
Via Engadget, I read this AP story yesterday about a pilot program at Safeco Field in Seattle, where you can use your DS to connect to an interactive service offered by the ballpark. It lets you order food and drinks, watch video of the game in progress, play trivia games, and so on. It costs $5 to use the service, but considering how many different ways sporting events find to separate you from huge wads of cash, that seems pretty small. Personally, I think it's probably worth the $5 to eliminate the hassle of buying food and drinks from the concession stands, regardless of whatever else it lets you do. (The photo above comes from a Flickr user who brought his DS to a game and tried it out.)
I know that some Mutual Friends of Torrez have had success web browsing with their DSes, so I look forward to trying that out sometime. If I could carry around my DS instead of a laptop, that would be pretty cool. And I suppose I could always duct tape my cellphone to my DS for a sort of homemade iPhone, but I might not have to for long. I read last week that there's a video camera coming out for the DS soon, and the thing already has both a microphone and speakers, so it's only a matter of time before someone gins up an IP videophone that uses Skype or some other Internet telephony service.
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The town where we live really goes all out for the Fourth of July. Every year they have a four-day extravaganza of events: pancake breakfasts and chicken barbecues, "Family Fun Day", a carnival and not one but two fireworks displays. The year that we moved into The (Real) Big Red House we went and checked it out, but Charlotte was still just a baby and much too little to get much out of it. We skipped it the next couple of years for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the last couple of July 4ths have been hotter than hell, and who wants to spend all day broiling in the sun just to watch some fireworks.
Well, the weather was far more cooperative this year, and Charlotte is old enough to go on some carnival rides, so we went and did "Family Fun Day" last Saturday afternoon and then went back again for the big fireworks show on Monday night. Not unlike the Esplanade on the 4th, or on-street parking spaces in Southie during the winter, the citizenry of Our Fair City stake out their real estate for fireworks viewing early in the morning of that day. In fact, the even organizers have had to go so far as to tell people that they can't start putting out blankets until 9:00 a.m -- in Boston it was a bit of a tradition to start lining up for Esplanade spots in the wee hours of the morning of the Fourth, until 9/11 turned everything into a security risk.
As a rule, we are generally not well-organized enough to do things like stake out a picnic spot twelve hours before an event, but this year Bridget actually happened to be driving by the town green just as the die-hards were doing their Christopher Columbus act, and she had a couple of beach chairs in the back of her car. So she stopped and plunked them down on our own little corner of heaven.
To our general surprise, the chairs were still there when we finally showed up for the evening, sometime around 6:30. Our immediate claim-stakers had even left us enough turf to spread a small blanket. If we'd had a mule, we could have started dirt farming right then and there, but we settled for munching on Double-Stuff Oreos and other picnic-type snacks.
Given that we had several hours to kill before the Main Event, we took another pass through the carnival rides. On "Family Fun Day", the ride operators were ready to be a little lax about the height requirements for most of the rides -- Charlotte got to ride on the bumper cars, which she was too short for, and a kiddie ride she was too tall for -- but on Monday night the place was crawling with teenagers and cops, and so there was no leeway on the rides. She got to go on ONE ride and then spent the rest of her ride tickets playing in a bouncy house and some other climbing contraption.
Personally, I was a bit sick and tired of the carnival, so I was glad to hoof it back to our strategically-placed chairs, and stayed put when Bridget and Charlotte went for one more try at sneaking on to some rides. Somewhere along the way, everybody in America seems to have given up on the traditional aluminum beach chairs with the woven plastic seats and bought themselves a folding "camp chair". The camp chairs don't recline, but you sit at normal chair height, and, most importantly, they have cup holders in the arms. All of our American ingenuity can be boiled down to this one innovation: more cup holders.
As we were walking around in the crowd, we ran across a guy who had one of those camp chairs with a canopy that you see in the picture. I had instant canopy camp chair envy! Not only did this guy have cupholders, he had his own personal roof! Well, I gotta have one of those, lemmetellya. As it turns out, the next day I even read this Slate article that rated various camp chairs and rated this chair (made by a company called Rennetto) the best. They're not cheap, but you pay a price for luxury.
As the summer sky slowly began to darken, hundreds of townspeople began showing up for the fireworks. We even got to feel extra super special every time we overheard a group complaining about not being able to find a good spot. Silly fools, they should have staked their claim in the morning like us! Once it got dark and the fireworks actually began, it turned out that we could have chosen our spot a little better -- there was a tree directly across the street blocking our view. Charlotte, who had been very excited about the fireworks up until the moment they began, suddenly announced that she was terrified of them and spent most of the time of the show curled up in Bridget's lap, hands over her ears, shrieking and crying. She finally calmed down in time for the big finale, but she really did not like the show.
We had taken a shuttle bus from Charlotte's school over to the town green so as not to have to deal with parking, but the traffic leaving the green was bad enough that it took us nearly an hour to get back to the school (ordinarily a 30-second ride). It's just a little bit farther than we would want to walk, especially in the dark with a child exhausted from 45 minutes of non-stop terror, so we put up with the long ride home.
I don't know if we'll go back again next year. A couple of years ago we went to the Museum of Science's big do on the top of their parking garage and I liked that a lot more. Wherever we end up, though, I *will* have a camp chair with a canopy. And cupholders.
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Hey, local-area readers -- is it me or has Channel 7's 11:00 p.m. newscast turned into a live version of FARK?
I know that it was Channel 7 who dumbed down local news in general when Ed Ansin bought the station back in the early 1990s with their "if it bleeds, it leads" approach to news, but since he bought Channel 56 a few months ago and rolled the newscast into both stations (56 at 10:00, 7 at 11:00), it's like they just threw out any semblance of a "newsroom" and just cherry-pick stories off of goofy Internet news sites. Especially if there's video. Some nights the LEAD STORY will be some lame-ass piece of satellite video of something that happened in Ohio or Alabama or some other place thousands of miles away. For me, though, I think they crossed a line on Wednesday night when they ran JibJab's "Star Spangled Banner" video as news.
Lately, I also notice that they're trying to have the anchors and reporters shtick it up with dialog and little bits of stage business. Last night they tried it with their "story" about the study that showed that women don't really talk that much more than men by trying to get Randy Price, the male anchor, to say he's interested in talking about "sports and carburetors" with other guys. Unfortunately, a) Randy is totally unable to ad-lib and 2) he's gay, so the whole thing went over like a lead balloon (that's not to say that gay men can't be interested in sports and carburetors, but ol' Randy ain't fooling anybody).
I can't really explain why we watch Channel 7 except that I have some deep-seated thing about watching NBC News (even when I was very little I was a big fan of the Huntley-Brinkley Report), and it has carried over to usually watching the local NBC station newscast. Of course, years ago that meant watching WBZ, who still have the best news programming in this market (perhaps even one of the best in the country), and there's no reason we couldn't switch except that we're middle-aged and set in our ways about these sorts of things. But, sheesh! When I can predict the order of news stories on their program based on the most number of comments on FARK, it's getting a little out of hand.
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Speaking of my daughter and gender bias...
Her tee-ball team did baseball cards. By season's end, Charlotte was the only girl on her team. The other two girls quit the very first week, one without ever even playing a single time. Most of the other teams she played against were similar -- one girl or two at most, with the clear appreciation that the girls are only there temporarily. Once the kids move on to more serious baseball, the girls are just not included until they get to the age where girls' softball is available.
By comparison, the soccer organization does a much better job of encouraging girls to play. The teams are sex-segregated right from the beginning, and remain so all the way, but the turnout for the girls' teams is just as big as the boys' teams.
I wonder why there's still such a gender breakdown with baseball, but not soccer. With football there is eventually the strength difference and the fear-of-injury factor that ultimately discourages girls, but baseball in particular doesn't have either of those gender walls. Charlotte was just as good at standing around in the outfield and doing nothing as the next kid. It's odd, because one of our overall observations with Charlotte and her peers is that there's not nearly as much "boys vs girls" self-segregation at this age as Bridget or I recall from our own childhoods.
I don't expect her to continue with baseball for very long, but mostly because she seemed to have very little interest in it compared to soccer. I also suspect she won't be a soccer player for the long haul either, but right now I'd say it's better than even money that she won't want to do baseball next year.
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Speaking of limited perimeters...I think I need to get out a bit more myself.
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This week is our fifth anniversary of moving to the (Real) Big Red House.
That means that I have now lived there longer than anywhere else in my entire adult life. The previous record was held by our first house, The Little Blue House, where we lived for four years and seven months. The all-time record still belongs to my mother's house, sometimes known as El Segundo among the family, where I lived from the age of 8 to the age of 18, and off and on again a couple of times for various periods in my early adulthood.
When we bought the house, I entertained dreams of living there for twenty years. Charlotte had just turned one, and I let myself fantasize about it being her home for her entire childhood. Uprooting from Massachusetts to Maine when I was 8 made me an outsider for those entire ten years, and has defined how I see myself in relation to the rest of the world to this very day. Always on the outside, never at home anywhere, never welcome anywhere. I did not want that for my little girl.
Charlotte will be finished with kindergarten this week, and as such will have completed her entry into the wider world of the community where The (Real) Big Red House is located. For the first four years, her world was very tightly circumscribed -- she was part of a tiny community of tiny people at her day care, where the children came from many different towns. The kids in her day care shared no physical community except the day care itself, and when the "school day" was over, they commuted home to whatever suburbs their parents lived in. Attending a birthday party might mean having to take her almost anywhere in the Greater Boston metropolis. Play dates with her day care pals were rare and always informed with the understanding that these kids would not become lifelong friends once the gravitational pull of their separate hometowns kicked in.
That gravitational pull has begun. Her birthday party this year was attended almost exclusively by the other kids from her kindergarten class. Her connections to her town exploded this spring with her first forays into organized sports, and were reinforced with a number of school-based social events. Each place we would go, she would be greeted by lots of familiar faces -- children and parents alike -- and warmly welcomed by them. She is part of their world, and they hers.
Every time we go over to the soccer field, swarming with dozens upon dozens of kids, parents, coaches, siblings, grandparents, and so on I am instantly reminded of the scene in (of all things) "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer", where the young reindeer are first introduced to one another, organized into their "reindeer games", and surreptitiously watched by Santa Claus to see which ones might have promise for the future. Charlotte fits right in as if she belongs right there. Which, of course, she does. Which is so alien to me, having spent my entire life being the misfit elf (not to overextend the metaphor).
The friction comes from the contrast in our experiences. For Charlotte, she is becoming part of something bigger and finding her place in it. For me, the house represents a series of changes that have left me even more unsure of who I am and where I belong than ever. If I could, I would run as far away from it as possible to try to undo all of those changes. Now I almost cannot bear the thought of living there a dozen more years until she is ready to take leave of it herself.
Nothing is certain in life. I am a fool for allowing myself to be seduced by my own fantasies, but I also recognize that Charlotte deserves her own place and her own opportunities. The bittersweet nature of life simply cannot be denied.
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Charlotte doesn't know this yet because I just read about it at BoingBoing, but we are SO doing this sometime this weekend: making homemade ice cream in a Ziploc bag.
Have you ever done this (with or without your kids)?
Permalink | Comments (4)The Summer Solstice is creeping up on us, soon to start stealing precious minutes of daylight away once again. For the moment, though, we are truly in the high point of the year, luxuriating in days that last till nearly 9:00. With the end of the school year in sight, we've started to let Charlotte's bedtime slip a bit later so she can engage in tee-ball games that don't even begin until 6:45 some evenings, and live a little more than what usually gets squeezed in to our overly-scheduled life.
Last night, in fact, marked the final game of the tee-ball season. Our weather has been a bit bipolar lately, going from extremely warm and humid to downright chilly and raw from one day to the next. Yesterday was bright and sunny, but cool and a bit too breezy to feel like a summer day. All three of us have enjoyed the opportunity to be outside for these evenings, and last night was no exception. Charlotte even hit the ball on a live pitch from her coach on her final at-bat after using a tee for most of the brief season. The game pretty much ended the moment the ice cream truck pulled into the school parking lot and every kid on the field lost total interest in playing baseball.
We got back to The (Real) Big Red House just a little before 7:00. On our way out in the morning, Charlotte had apparently forgotten to close the front door, so the house had been wide open all day. We live in a very quiet neighborhood, so I wasn't especially worried to see the door open. Things aren't totally idyllic in our town, but I never feel the need to batten down the hatches for fear that The Bad Guys will barge in at any moment.
Because the door was open, though, our cats had the ability to let themselves in and out all day long as they saw fit. They like this element of freedom. It appeals to their very cat-nature to be able to choose which side of a door to be on whenever the mood strikes them. Harry is the sort of cat who likes to go out early in the morning and will stay out until long after dark. Maynard prefers to remain indoors, only occasionally sauntering outside, and usually only at night. When the door is left ajar for them, as I usually left it during my home days the past two summers, they come and go throughout the day.
All of which is a very long lead up to say that as we were getting ourselves ready to be in for the remainder of the evening, Charlotte informed me that there was a dead chipmunk in the living room.
Well, we've been there before. Harry managed to get inside the house with a half-dead chipmunk between his teeth one time last year (BRH folks will remember this story). I was somehow able to coax him into giving it over to me and took it to the door to throw it out, only to have the critter spring back to life and make a mad dash for cover, with Harry in hot pursuit. This time, though, it looked like Harry had finished the kill. The chippie was cold and stiff, with a few telltale bloody toothmarks. I grabbed a paper towel, picked it up, and threw it outside, where it landed with a very dead thud.
But I guess we did have at least one visitor invite himself in. This morning I got up and plodded into the bathroom to take my morning shower, and when I returned to the bedroom there on the bed, where I had been sleeping only minutes before, was a freshly-dead mouse. Maynard was trying to look innocent, sitting on the floor, but he was the only cat in the house at the time of the murder, so I know he;s the culprit. The mouse was so freshly dead that it was still warm and it had bled profusely all over the fitted sheet. I am rarely squicked out by stuff like this, but II guess I was still asleep enough that it startled me quite a bit. Still naked and slightly moist from my shower, I picked it up, wrapped it in a tissue, set it aside, and proceeded to remove the sheet from the bed. Sure enough, the blood soaked right through the sheet, so now my side of the mattress is stained with a large spot of mouse blood.
Once I was dressed and a bit more composed, I managed to carry the departed to the front door and give him a flying send off. The boys don't eat what they kill, more's the pity, so now I've got decomposing rodents all over my front yard.
I'll just let that image sink in with you for a while. Be glad I didn't take pictures this time.
Permalink | Comments (6)I don't know if it was the heat or the humidity or holiday hangovers or what, but it seemed like I had a significant Asshole Encounter every single day last week. At home, at work, online, even in the parking lot of the supermarket, there was no let up from it. The jerk meter was up to 11 and I never knew where the next one might materialize.
It finally reached the point where I had to ask myself if *I* was the asshole. You know how sometimes you just don't recognize your own unpleasantness until you just can't escape the reality of it any more? I sat in my den last night, watching the torrents of the "This American Life" TV series I'd downloaded, and one of the episodes was about people behaving extremely badly at a hot dog stand in Chicago, and that's when the moment struck me.
(more after the jump)
Sadly, the Showtime site doesn't have a video clip of the hot dog stand segment I can link for you, but you can probably search your favorite torrent site for it (or send me an e-mail and I'll help you out). Because if you could see this for yourself, you would start to question your own degree of assholish behavior, too.
It doesn't help that I live in eastern Massachusetts, which has such a high density of assholes in the general population that the official state symbol is a jumbo tube of Preparation H. We cultivate obnoxious behavior here and burnish it to a high sheen. As a consequence, even people who are not assholes by nature have the ability to switch it on in a moment's notice, because you never know when you're going to have to deal with someone who lives that way 24-7-365, and you have no choice but to fight fire with fire.
After I was finished watching the show, I was just surfing around online and pondering all of this when I just happened to stumble onto this online quiz: Are You An Asshole? No, really. Strictly coincidence. It was like a sign. If you believe in signs.
The quiz is actually part of a website plugging a book about assholes in the workplace and how they impact organizations. To that end, the quiz followed the precepts of the book and the questions were mostly about how you interact with people in the office, but some of it is very generalizable to whether or not you're a jerk in the rest of your life, too.
Is this what you see when you look in the mirror?
I scored an 8 on a scale of 0-15. Leaning towards being an asshole, but not totally unbearable. I suppose if you lived somewhere where people were basically nice (wherever that might be), an 8 would seem pretty bad. But since I live in a state where the residents pride themselves on being called "Massholes", I was actually encouraged by that score. I'd be willing to wager that if you could get everyone in Massachusetts to take this quiz that the overall average would be more like a 10. Maybe a 12 in places like Newton.
While that was reassuring, I'm still left scratching my head a little bit and feeling not a small amount of dread at the week ahead. It's more than a little exhausting to have to view every possible interaction with someone as an angry confrontation, and I am a very confrontation-avoidant person. I have been thinking about going out for my lunch today and finding myself almost physically uncomfortable about going over to the plaza where the supermarket is; the guy who wanted to beat me up because I took "his" parking place probably won't be there again, but there's a better-than-even-money bet that there will be some other asshole on site.
I wouldn't last a minute and a half at that hot dog stand in Chicago.
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Next year my wife and I will both turn 45. We're already thinking about taking another trip somewhere overseas to celebrate, just as we did in 2003 when we went to Paris and London for our 40th birthdays.
One destination we're thinking about is Barcelona, Spain. In fact, Bridget has already gone ahead and e-mailed the famous El Bulli restaurant for a reservation for their 2008 season -- they only accept reservations for a brief period each year in advance of the season but accept requests in advance.
Since our chances of getting in at El Bulli probably aren't very good, it's worth looking around for other possible destinations as well. I'd really like to go to Iceland; "The Amazing Race" has sent its contestants to Iceland a couple of times, and it looks like a gorgeous place. It's not a long flight from Boston, and they always have package deals.
But yesterday I stumbled across this website for a guest house in Morocco. It's in the city of Fez, which was the traditional capital of Morocco for centuries. The photos make the hotel look simply beautiful, but in addition to the exotic locale and luxurious setting, the guest house is owned and operated by a Moroccan chef and you can do a day-long cooking program with him as part of the stay. He takes you shopping in the souk for fresh ingredients, and then you go back to the kitchen for a hands-on lesson in Moroccan cuisine.
Of course, if you go to Iceland you can eat some fermented shark, but I gotta think it would be enormous fun to have an authentic Moroccan cooking experience. If I can't get to try some molecular cuisine in Spain, that is.
Permalink | Comments (3)And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game -- "The Circle Game", by Joni Mitchell
Keep looking forward, Charlotte. I will always be right behind you.
Happy Birthday!
(Sorry, webserver keeps barfing trying to load the pictures, so I took them out of the post. Go here instead)
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It's the collective shriek of millions of gamers reacting to the story that Electronic Arts is pushing off the release of Wil Wright's new game, Spore, to late 2008.
I am one of the shriekers. We've been reading about this game and getting the occasional glimpse at it for several years now, and at the electronic games shows last year, Wright and EA were saying it would be released in time for Christmas 2007. But EA's latest financial report indicates that now they're not anticipating releasing the game for a full year beyond that.
These kind of deeply immersive games are few and far between. Civilization IV has been out for a couple of years now and there is another expansion pack for it coming soon, but adding a few new scenarios to a well-established game like Civ is usually not worth the asking price. And, honestly, I am tired of Civ IV and want to move on to something else. If Spore is only half the game Wil Wright has promised it will be, it will still be groundbreaking. But I guess we won't know that for sure until AFTER Hillary beats Rudy next year.
Permalink |More from our continuing stooooory about migrating to Ubuntu
Well, it seems pretty clear that the CD drive in the old PC is not working properly for some reason.
Thinking about my various options, along with some helpful comments in the first update post from a FOAF who's a Linux guy, I was pretty sure my next move was going to be trying to run the installer from a USB flash memory stick.
I have a couple of 2GB sticks and find them incredibly useful for all sorts of PC support tasks. I even did an installation of USBUbuntu on one of them not too long ago just for fun. So it seemed that it would not be too unreasonable to try putting the ISO image on one and giving it a whirl.
Then, I read a post at Lifehacker yesterday extolling the virtues of some beta software called Wubi. Wubi is a Windows installer for Ubuntu. Wubi itself is a very small app (5-6MB, I think) which fetches the alternate-install CD (NOTE: not the Live CD) and then begins the install while Windows is still running, just the way most Windows software installs work.
This is a brilliant idea, not just for people having difficulties with other installation methods, but for the 95% of Windows users who aren't terribly technical and might be intimidated by the process. UNIX geekery be damned, you have to stick to the KISS mentality to get people to use technology.
It took about an hour for the whole thing to run. I don't know if I believe the claim that you can run the Live CD and be up and running in under half an hour, although I do think that the relative pokey speed of this old PC is a factor. It wants 3GB of disk space, most of which is for swap. That could have been a problem for me; the C drive only had just under 2GB free even after I had done some savage trashing of files. But the installer was smart enough to see that there were multiple hard drives in the machine and simply set itself up in the largest (and emptiest) one. It also sets up the computer as a dual-boot, leaving your entire Windows installation intact and available to use whenever you restart the machine. Another very smart idea for the technically challenged who might need to go back to their Windows ways now and again.
Since it was nearly 11:00 by the time the installer was done, I only poked at it for a few minutes. Ubuntu seemed to recognize and configure all of the hardware. I've read a lot of people saying that they've had particular trouble with wireless network adapters especially. It recognized the one on this PC, and the driver seems to work, in the sense that it initializes the adapter and sees my wireless network. I wasn't able to get it to authenticate, though, so no Internet connection yet. I don't think that's the fault of Ubuntu, honestly. I have always had a hard time getting my Linksys router to play nice.
Next task, then, is getting the wireless adapter to connect to the router. Once that's accomplished, I'll give everything a more thorough shake-down cruise.
Permalink |Last week I told you about my decision to bail out on Vonage and switch over to Comcast for our home telephone service. Subsequently, I've come across a couple of things here and there that illuminate the subject, so I thought I'd share them with you.
Over the weekend, Slashdot had a link to this forum thread at Broadband Reports, wherein people are complaining about AT&T's VoIP service. Apparently, AT&T has decided to dump its VoIP service and summarily informed thousands of their customers that the service was being cancelled. However, AT&T is blocking those customers from transferring their phone service to another provider, and they are unwilling to provide a forwarding message for those customers who have abandoned their VoIP phone numbers to sign up with other providers. In essence, AT&T is holding all of their VoIP subscribers hostage.
Meanwhile...today Comcast has announced that they're rolling out a service called SmartZone that will integrate their e-mail and voicemail services. Ooh. Straight out of 1999, you guys. This is a standard feature with most VoIP services. The announcement also goes on to tell us that they won't be charging any extra for this...well, that's mighty kind of you guys. Of course, they always say that at first and then a year or two down the road discover the sudden need to start charging a fee...which then goes up every year.
Meanwhile, telco expert David Isenberg has a post this morning considering this announcement. Isenberg's take is that this is Comcast's lame attempt to re-imagine themselves into a competitor for the likes of Google in the realm of offering value-added services rather than just as the "series of tubes" that gets the services to you.
Isenberg's assessment is that tying services to the tubes is exactly the wrong thing to do. Google, Yahoo, et.al. are not limiting themselves to subscription-only customers and to a single method of distribution. As he says, why limit yourself to 12.5 million customers (Comcast's present install base) when you can market to "1,000 million" customers.
On Thursday, I have to spend my entire afternoon at home waiting for a Comcast tech to show up to connect their VoIP device. I suspect it's just a router, just like Vonage's, but the CSR on the phone who got me to sign up had no clue. When I signed up for Vonage, they just mailed me the router and told me to plug it in. I have no idea why they need to make me miss half a day of work for something I can do by myself in three minutes.
Still no warm-and-fuzzies for me.
Permalink | Comments (2)I did say I'd keep you apprised of the developments in switching Charlotte's PC from Windows to Ubuntu, so here's the first update.
Bridget offered to take Charlotte to her dance lesson on Saturday morning, even though it was my turn. So it seemed like the perfect time to sit down and have a crack at it.
I had already downloaded the Live CD ISO and burned it to a CD. The Ubuntu website promised me that the CD would do all the work of cataloguing files and settings and so on, and the whole thing would only take 25 minutes.
Except that the computer wouldn't boot from the CD. Even when I set up the boot order in BIOS to ignore everything but the CD drive, no soap. It would display a line on the screen that said something like ISOBOOT blahblah Debian blahblah and a blinking cursor, then reboot automatically after about 30 second of going nowhere.
If I booted into Windows, the CD would spin up and launch a browser with links to install software, but not to install Ubuntu itself.
So I went to the Ubuntu site and read their page about troubleshooting the Live CD, which suggested that I should try the "alternate install CD". That download took about 20 minutes, so I went and washed some dishes while it ran. Using my own PC, I burned that CD and started all over again.
Still nada. Okay, I thought, this is one of those cases where the CD drive in the old computer won't read CDs burned in my computer. That's not unusual. So I copied the ISO image from my computer to the old computer. Ready to burn to another CD...except the Windows built-in CD burning software doesn't extract ISO images, and there was no other CD-burning tool installed on the machine. Time to go look for a free CD burning tool that isn't loaded down with all sorts of spyware and crap. Not as easy to find as you might think, but eventually I did.
While that software was downloading, I took a pile of laundry upstairs and put it away. By the time I got back, the download was done. Another few minutes spent extracting/installing the software and burning the CD, change the boot order again and......nothing. Not even the ISOLINUX blahblah thing.
At this point, I decided to try another tack -- if the CDs weren't going to boot, maybe I should try burning the installer to a DVD. Except I was all out of blank DVDs. I had to go to CVS anyway to pick up some prescriptions, so off I went. Once there, I could not remember which type of DVD format my DVD burner uses, DVD+R or DVD-R, so I bought a package of each.
(Oh, at this point it's about noon. I had started at 9:30.)
Get home, re-burn the Live CD to a DVD, take it downstairs, restart the old PC...bupkis.
Unlike Georgie-Boy, I know when I need to cut my losses, so I gave up. Three hours into a 25-minute install with absolutely no progress. On the upside, I did get all my Saturday morning errands accomplished, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Next step: tonight I'll see if there's a BIOS update for the old PC that addresses the "won't boot from CD" option. If that fails, then Plan C will be to build the Live CD on a USB memory stick and try that method. Plan D involves drop-kicking the PC and buying the Mini Mac after all. Stay Tuned.
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Charlotte is less than three weeks away from her sixth birthday. To say that this past year of her life has flown by would be like saying that the sun is kind of warm -- it just can't begin to convey all that has happened.
It's also an understatement to say that the three of us have a VERY hectic schedule. With my return to full-time work at the beginning of the year, we have found ourselves juggling three competing sets of priorities. But, with the arrival of spring things have gone to the next level because Charlotte is participating in not one but two sport activities -- soccer and tee-ball.
Charlotte played indoor soccer two years ago, but this is the first year she's old enough to play outdoor soccer. From what I can tell, every single child in our town from the age of five up plays in the soccer program, no exceptions. It certainly seems that way when we get to the field and have to find a place to park behind the elementary school.
The soccer program is basically an all-Saturday affair. The earliest groups start at 7:30 in the morning and the last groups finish up around 7:30 in the evening. Charlotte's team plays later in the day, from 4:45 to 6:00. In the space of that time, the children spend about a half an hour warming up and practicing, then they play a game against one of the other teams that consists of two 20-minute halves.
Because this is the first year for these kids, the program only involves teaching them basic skills. They do a few typical soccer drills during practice; for the games, there are no goalies, the kids don't play proper positions, and they don't keep score. Everybody just runs after the ball. I imagine this exact same scenario is played out by literally millions of five-year-olds all over the United States every Saturday in April and May.
Charlotte's coach is a little too gung-ho. He's trying to get the kids to play position, to pass, and to pay a little too much attention to the rules given the "everyone's a winner" nature of the program. He hasn't pushed that too far yet. His own daughter is on the team, and you can tell that he's already drilled her into a miniature Mia Hamm, while the rest of the kids (including Charlotte) are happy to chase the ball.
This week the tee-ball program began and the differences are very noticeable. For starters, it seems like there are substantially fewer kids involved. Especially girls. The soccer program separates the boys and girls, but there are enough girls to fill up all the girls' teams. The tee-ball program has them playing together, but the boy-girl ratio is totally skewed. Charlotte's team began with 3 girls and 6 boys, but the other girls have already quit the program and so she is now the ONLY girl on her team. The team they played against last night had two girls at the beginning of the game and one of those girls gave up and sat out the rest of the game after the first inning.
From the approach side, the idea is the same: everybody plays, everybody gets an at-bat every inning, everybody bats until they get a hit, everybody scores a run, and so on. The coaches are only teaching the three main skills: hitting, catching and throwing. So every time the ball is hit, nine kids run after the ball regardless of where it went.
Because baseball involves a lot more standing around and waiting, the coaches spend a lot more time shepherding the kids than the soccer coaches do. Five and six year olds are not known for their ability to wait patiently. Even when they're in the field, the kids are not always paying strict attention to the game. Charlotte spent a fair amount of time last night SITTING in left field, picking grass.
Until her first practice Monday evening, Charlotte had never even so much as seen a baseball game, let alone know how to do anything. She is a complete baseball noob. Some of the kids on her team, though, obviously play baseball at home because they can hit long fly balls, know how to run the bases, and are chafing to play "real" baseball with strikes and outs and so on. Her coaches seem to recognize this and (as you can see in the picture at the top of this post) take the time with the less-experienced kids to help them begin to understand what to do.
Bridget allowed herself to be corralled into being a parent-coach for the soccer program. She was smart to make sure that she and Charlotte are on different teams so that Charlotte can pay attention to what her actual coach is trying to do. Being one of the parent-coaches doesn't involve a lot more than helping set up the fields and making sure the kids are safe. That's luck for Bridget, because she doesn't know Thing One about soccer.
My job is to show up and sit on the sidelines. That's about all I'm good for, so I don't have a problem with that. I never played any sports due to a combination of some physical limitations and a total lack of interest. I could probably handle the limited duties of being a parent-coach at this level, but I see that as a slippery slope and don't want to create the expectation on anybody's part that I might be actively involved beyond being a spectator.
For her part, Charlotte is simply loving being involved. I don't know if she'll develop a real interest in playing sports or not. I suspect that once these kids move up a level and start sifting out the kids who are good at the sports from the kids who aren't, she'll be in the latter group and those kids usually drift away. For the moment, the fun is outweighing everything else, even the overloaded schedule, so we'll just ride it all out and see how it goes.
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I think the lolcatz are funny. Or should I say TEH funnay.
You may heap scorn and disdain on me as you see fit.
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When I bought my current tower PC a couple of years ago, I took my old PC, a Dell Dimension 4100, and moved it to the library room so that we could have a second desktop primarily for Charlotte. As little as she was at the time, she was still able to learn how to use the mouse, which let her play some simple games. Now that she's learning how to read and write, she's able to do more and enjoys playing games and visiting a few websites. She's not glued to the computer; it's just some other thing to play with once in a while.
Like the rest of us, though, the computer isn't getting any younger. While it seemed zippy when I bought it in 2000, it chugs along at an interminable pace now, particularly at boot time, and the demands of more recent software AND the media-rich websites kids like are outpacing older machines' specs. My thinking has been to consider buying a new computer for her use, and until recently I'd been pretty sure that I was going to buy a Mac Mini. Now, however, I'm about to go off into a different direction: I'm going to install Ubuntu on the PC she already has.
If you follow computer news at all, you probably know that the latest version of Ubuntu was released just a few days ago, and there's been quite a lot of excitement in the geek world about it. Of the myriad versions of Linux available in the marketplace, Ubuntu definitely has the "flavor of the day" buzz going for it, especially among the crowd who are promoting making Linux easy to use and accessible to the average computer user so that it might have some crumb of a chance to chip away at Windows' dominance of the PC desktop market.
So Ubuntu, along with many other Linux OSes, puts a nice graphical user interface on top of the arcane, command-line driven business of UNIX. It also has gone a long way toward making the installation and configuration of the operating system simpler and less aggravating than most Linux installs have been in the past, which makes technical users like me more likely to brave the process.
Most importantly, though, I have come to the belief that there's no longer any need to be shackled to Windows any more. Even though Linux has been around for a decade or so, and the Mac is even older than Windows, the simple reality of the PC world since the early 1990s has been the need to use Windows because of its dominant position. You simply could not expect to be able to use a non-Mac PC unless you ran Windows. I also think this continued to be true until a couple of years ago. Despite the evangelizing of the pro-Linux/anti-Microsoft crowd, Linux was not really suitable for widespread use by the garden variety user, nor was the universe of Open Source software. Now, I think we have reached the "tipping point" (to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell). Just this morning I read that Dell is going to start selling PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, and that's on top of the recent news that they were going to bring back Windows XP pre-installs rather than force people to buy machines with Vista.
Having read quite a few "tricks-and-tips" websites, I don't expect the conversion to Ubuntu to be as simple as "follow the bouncing ball", but I remember all too well the struggles I used to face installing older verisons of Windows, and expect a similar degree of difficulty. That's okay, it's part of the challenge. The other challenge I know I'll face is the need to install WINE for the one or two software titles Charlotte has that will need a Windows environment to work.
If things go well, then I will probably take the leap myself and change my own machine over. My current PC is still quite adequate, and has enough horsepower to even get a little experimental and try running Beryl as my desktop.
I will probably post a bit about all of this as I start to undertake these projects. Stay tuned.
Permalink |I've been following the developments in the Verizon vs. Vonage patent infringement lawsuit with a great deal of interest. We've been Vonage customers for almost exactly two years, and, even though there are Vonage-bashers everywhere you turn, we have had very good luck with them. Consequently, I have been unhappy with each new development in the case, since they all seem to point to the inescapable end of Vonage. Most recently I read that Sprint might be interested in buying out Vonage as part of a deal that would resolve a different patent infringement dispute between those two companies, but it's unclear if Sprint would actually offer the same service or just use the deal to squash Vonage.
With none of the news being terribly positive, I've been mulling over the need to change phone service providers as a pre-emptive action, lest we find ourselves with no local phone service one morning. One thing has been absolutely certain in my mind from the outset: there's no way in hell that I would ever go back to being a Verizon landline customer. How anyone can let themselves be ass-raped month after month for the outrageous amount of money Verizon extorts for basic telephone service is beyond me. We were paying an average of $75/month to Verizon before including long-distance or any other services. After going with the unlimited calling package from Vonage for six months, I downgraded our service to the 500-minute package and only paid $14.99/month AND got all the services Verizon charges you extra for.
There are many other VoIP providers now, though none as well-established as Vonage. I've been sort of half-heartedly perusing the different "rate VOiP provider" websites like this one and this one, but some of these sites are bought and paid for by the VoIP providers themselves and aren't necessarily as objective as they could be. And some of the providers themselves remind me waaaay too much of the shifty businesses that flooded the market when AT&T was broken up all those years ago. Amusingly enough, even Verizon now offers a VoIP service that undercuts its own landline business.
I've been nowhere near making a decision, but then out of the blue on Saturday morning a Comcast telemarketer called pitching their recent promotional bundle to add VoIP to your broadband package for $18/month for a year. Comcast isn't exactly my favorite service provider either, I have to say, but given that they're less likely to wink out of existence than Vonage or any of the other minor providers in the next twelve months, and given that the promo price is close enough to Vonage's pricing, I bit.
At the end of the promotion, the price jumps from $18/month to $39/month, so you can bet that next May I'll be looking for another provider, but now I have that time to watch the shakeout from the Verizon vs. Vonage case and see if anyone really comes out on top.
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Carol Burnett is 74 today!
That makes her EXACTLY thirty years older than the adult in the above picture.
(tugs ear)
Permalink | Comments (3)If you are not yet sick and tired of hearing about my recent trip to Ireland, you will no doubt enjoy some of the photographic highlights of the trip, which I've posted to flickr.
I have tried to include some meaningful comment with each one, and they are grouped according to location, though not in chronological order of the trip itself.
Enjoy.
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It's a good time to be Charlotte these days, let me tell you.
She was the recipient of three overloaded Easter baskets this past weekend, one from each grandmother and one that Bridget made up. My mother is a legendary filler of Christmas stockings and Easter baskets, and so not only did Charlotte score her body weight in chocolate, she also picked up a wide selection of dollar-store junk. Above and beyond the baskets, though, it seems like everywhere she went this weekend someone was handing her a goodie bag full of candy.
In the picture at the top of the post, Charlotte is posing with the "wabbit twacks" that lead to her hidden Easter basket. Here's a better view of the wabbit twacks:
Apparently, one of Charlotte's classmates told her that the Easter Bunny leaves footprints in your house, so she was expecting this to happen at our house. Bridget complied by spreading a trail of flour in the foyer and making the tracks with her thumb and fingers. Somehow the cats managed to not track the flour everywhere, and Charlotte was convinced, so it was all good.
For the last several weeks the three of us have been monitoring the progress of several of Charlotte's baby teeth as they have been getting looser and looser. One of her upper front teeth went from loose to outright wobbly yesterday, and came out during breakfast this morning. Unlike the first two teeth, which got swallowed, Charlotte felt this one come out and was able to hang on to it.
The Tooth Fairy will have to pay a visit this evening, it would seem. I think I still have a Sacajawea dollar coin from the handful I got when I bought a Charlie Card for the T. I have read that some kids get as much as five dollars per tooth, but that's out of control if you ask me. I think we used to get a quarter when I was little. There are two or three other teeth we expect to drop in short order, so I suppose I should go buy another Charlie Card.
As if doubloons and mountains of candy aren't enough (and, believe me, they are more than enough), on Friday Bridget and Charlotte are going to New York City for a 4-day weekend adventure with Charlotte's buddy Camille and her mom. The four of them are staying in a nice hotel in mid-town Manhattan and seeing the sights (Camille and her mother have never been to New York). On Sunday, the girls are being treated to an all-day Experience at the American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue -- breakfast with an "American Girl", their own Bitty Baby dolls and a gift certificate for each to outfit the dolls, then attending a live American Girl stage show.
Spoiled rotten? Whatever do you mean?
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Overall, I would give our trip a B+. We encountered a few travel glitches, but nothing insurmountable, and the meltdown on Friday afternoon was really the only time that tempers flared, so from that angle things went just fine. I'll know not to bother with one of those prepaid debit cards again -- that could have been a bit more aggravation if the others hadn't had their regular debit cards with them. It was awkward to have to rely on someone else for cash, especially after our confrontation, but he got his money back when we got back to The Big Red House.
Were I to plan another trip to Ireland, I wouldn't bother with County Clare again. It was fine for a drive-through around the Burren, but otherwise that part of the west coast is still quite remote and under-serviced. By contrast, I think none of us were prepared for just how beautiful County Kerry would be, and, while some places might be a bit overburdened with tourists in the height of the season, it's easy to see why so many American tourists choose that region to visit. The drive from Tralee to Dingle, and then around the Slea Head Road was unquestionably the absolute highlight of the trip.
The food was a pleasant surprise. Despite Tim's complaints from his last two trips, every meal we ate was good, with the exception of the banquet at Bunratty Castle. Traditional Irish food isn't terribly imaginative -- it comes from a culture of entrenched poverty and deprivation -- but wherever we had it I thought it was well-prepared. It was nice to get a night off from Irish food at the Chinese place, to be sure, but I ate better than I thought I would.
The biggest disappointment, for me anyway, was the pubs. Being off-season and mostly in tiny rural towns, we outnumbered the locals almost everywhere we went (and there were only the three of us). We had some conversation with the old woman and her daughter in Annascaul, but overall the pub scene did not match my expectations at all. On the plus side, though, we got our own private traditional Irish music performance on the very last night.
Though it isn't at the top of my list of places to visit (and wasn't beforehand, either), I would go back another time and see Dublin and the east coast. I'm sure Bridget would be even worse to drive with than my nervous-nellie brothers, so I'd just be sure to plan a route that avoided any 1000-foot cliffs. There didn't seem to be much that would appeal to children at all, so I think if we do go back we'd either wait until Charlotte was much older, or farm her out to her grandparents and go alone.
I think I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand photographs to go through, so that is about the only business left from the trip. Once I've culled out some highlights, I'll upload them to flickr and post a link for anyone who's interested.
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I really didn't know what to expect for our last day. I knew that I was still pretty pissed off, and I assumed that my brothers would be, too. Not much was said as we ate breakfast in the cottage.
The plan for the day was to drive through the Burren. The Burren is a 300-sq.km. area that consists basically of a pair of mountains with vast areas of exposed limestone. The limestone outcroppings run from the tops of the mountains all the way to the ocean, creating a nearly surreal landscape as far as the eye can see. On his trip last year, Tim had been absolutely captivated by the scenery, and this was, in his mind, the highlight of the entire trip.
I considered not going along. I considered staying put in the cottage all day. I even considered calling a cab, going to the airport, and going home on my own. In the end, I decided to make the best of a bad situation. It seemed that my brothers had come to the same decision as well, and so we got in the car -- with Dan driving -- to see the Burren.
Before we even left Liscannor we made a couple of local stops -- one at a local rock shop that promised "the story of Liscannor stone", and the next at a local shrine to Saint Brigid, one of the major Irish saints. The rock shop was nice and all, but we were disappointed to find that all the rocks came from America, not Ireland. You could buy a polished egg of "fossilized dinosaur dung" from Ohio, but no actual Liscannor limestone. The shrine (pictured above) featured a cheesy glass-enclosed statue and a small flower garden in front, and the actual grotto with the "well" that supposedly cures the sick.
Visitors to the shrine leave assorted tokens of remembrance ranging from photos of dead family members to statues of Jesus to Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toys. The "well", such as it is, is actually a small stream that runs down some rocks from the hills above it. Except for the cheesy statue, the shrine is actually quite authentic in its sincerity.
Next, we drove on to the Aillwee Cave in Doolin. You get a brief guided tour into the cave for about half a kilometer. The cave was discovered in 1940 and almost immediately turned into a tourist attraction, so there's really not a lot to see compared to other caves. At 12 euros a head to get in, it's not exactly a must-see, but it was entertaining enough.
Atop one of the larger hills sits the Poulnabrone Dolmen, a man-made marker that is believed to be the familial burial site for one of the clans who lived in the region (an archaeological dig there in the 1980s found the remains of about 35 people). The whole Burren area is dotted with assorted "megolithic" tombs, mostly cairns and large boulders, but the dolmen is somewhat unique. Though photographs tend to make a very dramatic presentation of the dolmen, it's maybe only five or six feet high and about ten or twelve feet long. though it is an interesting artifact to look at, I could not help but be reminded of the tiny Stonehenge that gets built in the movie "This Is Spinal Tap".
As we were pulling up along the side of the road to walk up to the dolmen, Dan sideswiped the ancient rock wall, knocking loose a couple of small boulders, which fell to the ground. "I guess this means my driving privileges are revoked, huh?" he said. Tim didn't say a word.
It served to break the tension. Now the playing field was a bit more equal, and Tim couldn't get on his high horse about any of it. Of course, no one jumped out from behind a rock and demanded 120 euros, but, by the same token, the rock walls that line the roads in the Burren are hundreds of years old, if not older. From that point on, the rest of the afternoon was a much more enjoyable experience, even if lingering ill will remained below the surface.
This photo shows what the limestone outcroppings look like up close. This was taken at the dolmen site but is representative of the entire Burren. The channels down to the topsoil are called "grakes" and the edges of the limestone are called "clints".
We spent a good while just driving around the hillsides, but eventually turned down a road to a perfumery. We bought a few more souvenirs for the wives and our mother, had an up-close encounter with a very friendly cat (we saw lots of dogs in Ireland, but only a few cats, and all of them in the Burren), and I chatted briefly with an American woman who had been living in Galway since September and was just getting her first chance to see the Irish countryside. We ended up bumping into her a couple of other times that day, as well.
Given the harshness of the land, you wouldn't think people would have settled there, but the ruins we kept encountering proved that people had been living there for centuries, and the cows and sheep grazing on the little patches of grass are testament to the people who continue to farm in that area today.
Amid the graves that surround the ruins of the Corcomroe Abbey near Ballyvaughan, I found this simple crypt marker. My father's grandmother, who came from "somewhere near Galway", was a Hynes. My great-grandmother came to America in the 1890s and met my great-grandfather on the boat (he was from Cork). I can't prove it, of course, but I feel fairly certain that this crypt marks one of the resting places of my ancestors.
We drove through most of the towns that border the Burren - Ballyvaughan, Lisdoonvarna, Kilfenora, Kinvara, and finally back to Doolin. We hadn't been able to get up close to this tower in Doolin at the beginning of the week, but the GPS sent us up a cow path of a road that took us right past it to finish off the day's adventure.
By the end of the day, we were all getting along almost back to normal, yakking away in our fake brogues. For our last dinner in Ireland, we drove back to Lahinch and I had a nice steak -- many people complain about the taste of the grass-fed beef in Ireland, but I enjoyed all the beef I ate all week long, and the steak was excellent.
We'd had very bad luck with the pubs all week, but it was evident as we drove into Lahinch on Saturday that the tourists were beginning to arrive, and places that had seemed empty all week were now busy and offering more entertainment. We made the short ride back over to Lahinch later in the evening and spent a couple of hours at a hotel pub where some locals play traditional Irish music every Saturday night. Finally, we got to have our "good" pub experience, and with that our adventure had truly come to an end.
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The "Full Irish" breakfast generally consists of a fried egg, sausage, rashers of Irish bacon, a grilled tomato half, sauteed mushrooms, blood sausage (white or black, your choice), and brown soda bread. It is traditional to the point of self-parody, but as with the p'tit dejeuner Bridget and I had in Paris one morning, it was impossible to resist having it just once to say that I did. The woman who runs the B&B has tinkered with the menu just a smidge, no doubt to make up for the culinary sensibilities of American tourists -- we didn't get any blood sausage, and we had white and whole-grain toast to choose from instead of the ubiquitous brown soda bread. Dan, whose stomach had been a bit queasy all week after eating some fish-and-chips in Lahinch, was a little unsure about indulging in such a greasy breakfast, but he left very little on his plate. Me, I was a member of the Clean Plate Club, Annascaul Chapter.
We didn't have much of a game plan for Day Two of our Kerry Adventure. Tim wanted to drive through a mountain pass called Connor Pass because he'd read about it in a book. It was quite nearby, so even with the limited visibility we headed for it, with me at the wheel.
Like Slea Head Road, the Connor Pass is basically a drive up a mountain on a cliff road, just without the ocean to hit when you plummet off the side. The clouds did cover the mountain tops, but the drive was still very dramatic and occasionally terrifying, especially when the odd car or truck decided to come from the other direction on a hairpin turn.
The ride through the pass only took about an hour, so there was a bit of a "now what?" when we got to the end of the road. The night before, the daughter of the old lady publican had been quite insistent that we should go to see Killarney, even though we'd been a little reluctant to do so. Now, faced with no firm destination in mind, we agreed to give it a go anyway.
Killarney is a bit more upscale than most of the places we visited during the week. Long a major tourist hub, it has a selection of more expensive shops, nicer restaurants, top-notch tourist amenities, and so on. Quite a difference from hardscrabble Tralee or tacky-beach-town Dingle.
We parked right next to the Franciscan Friary which was open to the public, so we had a look in. Missing from our trip in general was the usual European vacation business of seeing a bajillion cathedrals, but we'd have been remiss if we hadn't gone inside at least one church. The chapel is beautifully done in wood, with an elaborate painted altar scene featuring Saint Patrick.
From the friary, we walked a couple of blocks to the main street. By this point, we'd all had just about our fill of Irish Crap, but there were still one or two things to be had. All over the city were banners and signs wishing luck to the local Gaelic football team, the Dr. Crokes, in the All-Ireland championship. Tim decided he'd like to buy a Crokes baseball hat, and we spent a little time questing for one, only to come up short.
Our walk through Killarney took us into the middle of the afternoon, so we needed to head back to catch the ferry before it stopped running at 5:00. This meant backtracking to Tralee, which we hit just as afternoon traffic was starting to get busy. In the process of trying to drive in thick traffic on the narrow streets, with cars parked half into the road, I managed to swipe the sideview mirror on somebody's van. It only pushed our mirror in on its hinge, but apparently it broke the glass on the other car's mirror. We had no idea about that until quite a few minutes later when the van appeared behind us honking and flashing his lights.
The guy was quite steamed and was demanding a large sum of cash. We argued with him for a few minutes, but he was quite persistent. He kept threatening to call the Garda (the national police), and in retrospect I should have let him do just that. The Garda would have made us fill out regular accident reports and such, and he would have been forced to file an insurance claim rather than demanding cash from three tourists on the side of the road. But it was just startling enough that we eventually handed him the cash and he left.
The incident dampened our moods significantly. Hitting a mirror is not exactly a big deal, as anybody who drives in an urban area well knows, but the confrontation was unsettling. Even my brothers, who talk a mighty tough game, were rather subdued. We drove back to Tarbert mostly not speaking. As I pulled the car into line to board the ferry, Tim informed me that "my driving privileges were revoked", and demanded the keys.
Last time I looked, my younger brother was not my boss, my parent, my superior, or even my spouse, so I told him to fuck off. I also unloaded on him pretty hard about his tendency to boss everybody around despite his own inadequacies. An argument ensued, and I shoved him into a wall. He started to pull a knife on me. Dan stepped in to break it up and we retreated to separate corners, with me cementing my ass to the driver's seat.
The mood now truly in the shit, we proceeeded back to Kilrush on the Clare side and walked around a bit; I needed more than a little space from them at that moment, so they headed in one direction and I headed in another.
On the way through Kilrush on Thursday, it had seemed like it was a town worth investigating. Now it didn't seem quite as interesting as it had, but I suspect that my savagely bad mood had much to do with that. I got the requisite picture of the village monument, though.
I didn't go out to dinner with them that evening -- I was nowhere near calm and did not want to spend any time with them. I stayed in the cottage when we got back to Liscannor and spent the evening alone, letting some of the steam out through my ears. With a day still left, it seemed like the trip was already over, at least for me.
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Thursday morning we set out to drive down to County Kerry. Unlike our short day trip to Galway the day before, the idea was to drive all the way down to the town of Dingle, stay overnight, and drive back the next day, giving us a chance to see more than just a single town.
The day got off to a rocky start for me. Buying the claddagh ring in Galway used up the balance on that Visa travel money card I'd bought at AAA, but the AAA people had assured me it was very easy to reload the card. Well, not so much. The website said it would take up to 7 days to transfer money from my checking account. SEVEN. FECKIN'. DAYS. Tell me where the utility is in that, will you? So we were about to head out on a side-trip and I was stuck without any cash. I even tried calling AAA from an Internet cafe, but could never get through because of the differences in the phone systems. Tim spotted me some cash, so the immediate issue was resolved, but it was quite frustrating to discover that I would not have any money for the remainder of the week.
Our drive took us through the southern half of County Clare to Kilrush on the River Shannon. From there, we drove onto a car ferry to cross over to Tarbert in Kerry. It's only about 15-20 minutes across, and decidedly ordinary, not a tourist attraction in the slightest. There's a large power plant on either side of the river and little else to see except a small ligthouse on the Kerry side. But it's an enormous time saver compared to the long way around.
As soon as we crossed the river and headed down the road, we noticed the marked difference in the landscape. Where Clare is a bit weather-beaten and sparse, Kerry is the absolute archetypal Irish landscape, lush and green, with lots of mountains and deep, deep valleys. As we made our way to the interim destination of Tralee, it seemed that with each passing kilometer the countryside got more and more beautiful.
We reached Tralee by lunchtime; Tim seemed to think that it was going to take a lot longer to get there, so we were all quite glad of the arrival. As we drove along, Dan and I kept a nearly constant banter going on in our somewhat cheesy Irish accents. Tim seemed to think that someone was going to take offense and beat the crap out of us for doing so, but we were pretty good about not talking that way in any actual conversations with the locals...although Dan came pretty close to slipping into it in a sporting goods shop in Ennis.
Tralee is NOT a tourist destination. It's a working-class city with a decidedly rough feel. Not necessarily a dangerous place, but the sort of place that never seems to benefit from the good times, not unlike our own home town in Maine. Since Tralee wasn't really our ultimate destination, we ate a quick but excellent lunch in a pub, I stopped in an Internet cafe one more time to try to get my travel cash situation resolved, and then we were back on our way.
Our lodgings for the night were in a small town called Annascaul, a few miles from Dingle. Tim had booked us in a little B&B that also had its own pub. The village was as uninspiring as Liscannor, unfortunately, but the B&B itself was very nice. We checked in and continued on to Dingle Town itself.
Dingle is a tourist mecca, charming and inviting in every possible way, but exactly like (insert your favorite New England coastal town here). There were shops, pubs and restaurants in much greater concentration than we found in other towns, speaking to the travel destination quality of the place. Indeed, some of the Irish Crap stores had the exact same nautical-themed souvenir items you can buy in Maine or Cape Cod, just with a different name painted on the lighthouse, lobster trap, seashell, or salty fisherman figurine. As I said to the boys, there should be a sort of barter plan in effect where any tourist from New England can bring a ten-pound box of New England Tourist Crap and simply exchange it free of charge for ten pounds of Irish Tourist Crap.
Once we'd seen Dingle Town to our satisfaction and I had given one more Internet cafe a go, we had a pint and then set off to drive down to the end of the Dingle Peninsula, following a road called the Slea Head Road. The road takes you up and around the edge of a mountain, looping back to Dingle. Most of the way up, the left edge is sheer cliff, which is quite unnerving given the narrowness of the roads, the lack of shoulder, and the propensity of the Irish to drive very fast. We encountered more than a few hairpin turns with a thousand-foot straight drop and absolutely NO guardrails or retaining fences.
We probably should have saved that pint for AFTER the drive down the Slea Head Road, because we kinda needed it. We caught a somewhat early dinner in Dingle, then headed back for Annascaul. Tim didn't quite get his wish of hanging out and getting hammered in the B&B's attached pub. The B&B's pub was devoid of customers and really run-down. We had a couple of drinks at the pub next door, where we had a conversation with the old woman who was tending bar and met a couple of farmer fellows named Mossy and Connor, who spoke some unintelligible dialect that wasn't Gaelic but wasn't quite English either. Then we finished off the evening at the third pub in the village, where a group of older men at the bar were definitely speaking Gaelic and occasionally eyeballing us suspiciously. Every time Tim and Dan stepped out to smoke, they started speaking in English, so I know they were doing it deliberately.
Sleep came easily in the comfortable beds -- I am usually a very poor sleeper in an unfamiliar place, but I slept well all week. The morning promised more adventures and the Full Irish.
Permalink |First, we did indeed arrive back in Boston safe and sound Sunday afternoon, just in case you were wondering.
We saw plenty of Internet cafes, I just didn't get the chance to stop at any of them. So even though the trip is over, I thought I'd still post some photos and tell you about the rest of the trip day-by-day. That should fill up the blog for this entire week, so look for the usual stuff to return next week.
Wednesday was yet another gorgeous day weather-wise. The forecast called for afternoon showers, but the closest we ever got to rain was a momentary sprinkle and seeing some small showers off in the distance. Indeed, we did not have any rain at all for the whole week and only one genuinely cloudy day (Friday).
Since I was not allowed to have input on the itinerary, I was informed that we would be going to Galway on Wednesday. (I had originally thought I'd been told Saturday, but, again, I apparently had no real input into any of this) So we set out for Galway, which is about an hour north of Liscannor. The decision on how to get to Galway, which also did not include me, was that we should first drive half an hour south all the way back to Ennis to pick up the N18 highway rather than take one of the smaller roads east that would have joined us up to the N18 as well. So our journey took about two hours because my brothers were so nervous about driving on the smaller roads. Add another half an hour to that because we ran into some road construction traffic.
It was thus about noontime when we arrived in Galway. Galway is the third largest city in Ireland, but it's still quite small by American standards, with about 71,000. By comparison (for you New Englanders), that makes it just a little bigger than Portland, ME (63,000). In fact, in many respects Galway seemed to be very much like Portland.
Eyre Square is the center of the city. The GPS guided us easily to the square and a parking garage a short walk away. Since it was such a nice, sunny spring day, we decided to buy some take-away for lunch instead of eating in a dark and dismal pub, and eat it in the park. I spotted a kebab place on one corner and cajoled the boys into trying it with me. Dan and I each had doner kebab, which is indistinguishable from gyros or shawarma. I also ordered some curry fries, which were fabulous. Tim had a burger.
Once we'd eaten, we walked around the immediate vicinity of the park. The flags in the picture above represent the 14 ruling clans that controlled Galway in the Middle Ages. We also got a more contemporary Irish sight -- a drunken old man urinating in a bus stop shelter. After a quick reconnaissance of the area, we headed down Shop Street, the main shopping area.
Shop Street is a pedestrian mall, and at lunchtime on a nice day it was totally packed with people on their lunch hour, teenagers out of school at midday, and tourists. The shops themselves are the usual assortment of places, the bulk of which cater to the tourist crowd. Galwegians themselves can shop at a galleria-style mall in Eyre Square or a larger mall in another part of the city. Unlike some of the other places we visited, the most notable difference was the presence of a number of jewelry stores, all claiming to be the ORIGINAL maker of the famous claddagh ring.
The claddagh ring does indeed originate form Galway; it is named for the Claddagh fishing village that ran along the harbor for hundreds of years (now gone, though still within living memory). But the jewelers of Galway have been making the rings since the 18th century, and nobody really knows which one got into the business first. Not that it really matters, I guess.
I had promised Bridget that I would buy her a genuine claddagh ring when we went to Galway, so I simply went into the shop that seemed to be the nicest. You can buy cheap souvenir-grade claddagh rings just about everywhere Irish Crap is sold, but the store I visited sold quality jewelry of all sorts, including the rings. I found one that had a light blue stone in the center and asked the salesgirl for it. I've made a tradition of buying blue topaz stones for Bridget over the years, and this stone looked just like it, but the salesgirl said it was blue amethyst.
We popped in and out of many different places as we walked. There were street musicians all over the place: a fellow playing the uillian pipes in an alleyway (for the acoustics), a fiddler, and three young guys playing some rock-and-roll. We didn't see any other buskers, though there were one or two unfortunate people working as sign-holders for various businesses. We took a stroll down one side street called Kirwan's Lane that calls itself the "Heart of Medieval Galway" and stopped for a coffee and a pastry at a bakery/cafe.
We took the same route home as we'd taken up in the morning, so we found ourselves back in Liscannor late in the afternoon. For dinner that evening, we decided to go to one of the two Chinese restaurants we'd found in Lahinch, just for the laugh of saying we'd gone out for Chinese in Ireland. Turns out it was the absolute best meal we had all week, far and away. Everything was absolutely top-notch. Tim was buying, and we opted for the "Dinner For Three", which the menu said was priced at 31 Euros. Seemed like a good deal, especially considering the quality of the food. Then, about halfway through dinner we realized that they meant 31 Euros per person. Sure enough, the total bill was just over €100. At least it was worth the price.
After dinner we strolled over to one of the pubs and watched the second half of a soccer...excuse me, football match between Ireland and Slovakia. Yes, even Irish pubs have big-screen HDTV these days. Ireland won, the locals in the pub cleared out, and so did we.
Permalink | Comments (4)We've had spectacular luck with the weather so far. Despite the typical Irish cold, grey and damp, we have had sunny days right along, with temperatures in the 50s.
Our day in Ennis was very enjoyable. Ennis is about half an hour from Liscannor and is a rapidly growing large town -- everywhere we drove we saw new construction of roads, condos, offices, retail, and so on. In fact, our little GPS got terribly confused because it didn't know about the new spur of the N18 that goes all the way to Ennis. Twice we found ourselves on the highway unintentionally because the GPS thought there should be a local road there instead.
After we got off the highway and got pointed back toward Bunratty, we got off track again thanks to Tim's faulty memory and had to beat back, but we did finally get to Bunratty Castle. The present castle dates from the 1500s, but earlier castles stood on the same site all the way back to the 1200s. Along with the castle there's a "theme park" -- a re-creation of a 19th century Irish village complete with a church, a manor house, and false storefronts with assorted gift shops inside. The warm and sunny day was perfect for walking around the grounds. Farm animals were in abundance as well; there was a competition for who could make the most noise, the roosters or the dozens of crows who nest around the castle. Like every other place we've been in Ireland so far, Bunratty had its own unique stink, too. Every building seemed to have a peat fire in the hearth. The Irish think of the peat as a charming, homey smell from their rural past, but in reality it's feckin' nasty.
The castle itself is about par for the course with historical buildings. Some rooms are open to the public, some are not, with assorted period bits of furniture and other objects. Interesting enough but not compelling. The climb up the winding stone stairway to the top of one of the towers did a job on my knees, but the view was definitely worth it.
With time to kill before the medieval banquet, we drove down the road to the Bunratty Winery for some mead. They also make poitin, the traditional Irish moonshine, which can now be sold legally. We got a sample of the poitin and then a chaser of mead. The mead is wonderfully sweet and the poitin is fiery and harsh. I actually really liked the poitin and bought a bottle to bring home.
Our GPS sent us off on a wild goose chase looking for another nearby castle, which we never did find. It sent us down a side road that got narrower and narrower (which is saying quite a lot in a country where all the roads are very narrow to begin with) until it was barely wide enough for one car. We dubbed it the "Leprechaun Highway" because only the Little People could have made a road that tiny.
Eventually we found our way back to the castle just in time for the banquet. As cheesy as any ren-faire you've ever seen, but the wenches were all very pretty and they gave us more mead to drink. Tim says that the shtick they did during the meal was identical to last year's banquet but with different performers. The food was nothing special -- some very salty spareribs and a chicken breast with mead sauce. We agreed that it was fine given that we didn't have to pay for it, but it was definitely not worth the 65 euro/person cost.
The GPS got quite frustrated trying to get us home because of the new N18, but we just followed the road signs. As we drove back into Liscannor and turned up the road to the cottage, the GPS gave an annoyed sigh and told us "take a U-turn now". It was just like having the wives with us.
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Greetings from the heart of County Clare!
We had a remarkably uneventful flight on Sunday and arrived at Shannon Airport at dawn on Monday morning. The morning fog made the countryside both charming and inscrutable as we drove the hour or so to the coast, but the sky was clear and by mid-morning the fog had lifted and we were treated to a very pleasant first day for our adventure.
We were supposed to meet the woman who manages the rental cottages at 9:00 a.m., but she didn't show until about 10:00, and only after Tim beat the village payphone into submission to call her. Her excuse: "Oi toght you mint noine in t'evenin'." (yes, they really do talk like that, particularly the older folks)
The lady was a bit on the crazy side (or, this being Ireland, perhaps a bit on the tipply side). We had our pick of cottages, since it's the off-season here and most places are either still closed or totally devoid of tourists. We changed our minds once or twice, and each time she assured us "Dis one is the noicest one of them all." So we assuredly have the nicest cottage in all of Liscannor, if not the entire island of Eire.
It is adequate. Nothing fancy, but also fairly well-kept and comfortable. Tim says the place where he and my mother stayed last year in Ballyvaughan was nicer, but not according to the rental lady. I might not stay there again if I were choosing for myself, but it suits our purposes just fine.
Once we squared away our luggage, bought a few provisions at the town grocery, and sat around a bit in the cottage, trying to recoup from the jet lag, we set out to see what we could see.
Liscannor is pretty much a one-street village with two pubs, a restaurant, a grocery, and a gas station/convenience store. Like much of the west of Ireland, though, there is development everywhere you turn, predominantly in the form of holiday homes, vacation hotels, and other tourist amenities. Five years from now Liscannor, Doolin, and the other coastal villages will be just like Cape Cod, but with different accents. For now, there is still some charm in the traditional Irish buildings, farms, the narrow and winding roads lined with stone walls, and the occasional ruin.
The road from Liscannor to Doolin takes you directly up the hills that form the Cliffs of Moher and then back down very steeply to the shore. New Englanders will probably know what I mean when I say the ride is much like driving the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire. It is only a couple of miles, so it wasn't a huge jaunt, just a little hairy in some spots.
Doolin has a few more shops than Liscannor, but is otherwise no more than a couple of roads and a handful of shops. There was a septic truck in the road, pumping out a couple of overfilled septic tanks next to the stream in the photo above, which made the whole village stink of rotten sewage...just the appealing aroma we were looking for at lunchtime.
We ate lunch at Gus O'Connor's, a pub well-known for its live music performances in the evenings. We got in just ahead of a crowd of bus-tourists, who filled the joint. Beef stew for me and beef-and-Guinness with mash for the boys.
We did a little gift shopping and proceeded down to the shore. The rocks have a weird cratered surface to them, and the surf pounds madly, with huge waves. The cliffs are visible from there, as well as the smallest of the Aran Islands, which is only about 10km offshore. Once I saw the shacks offering ferry rides, I suddenly understood why Tim was doubtful about taking one. They didn't instill a lot of confidence in me, either.
From Doolin, we backtracked to the Cliffs of Moher. They're building a visitor's center, and it's about 90% done, so it's open to the public now, but not completely ready for loads of tourists.
The climb up the hill is long and steep, but wide steps have been installed, with strategic camera lookouts marked with signs, so we stopped evert couple of levels and took pictures. The view is remarkable. It's a hike up the hill, and we were already jet-lagged, so by the time we got to the top to see the tower (the first picture in this post), we were beat. We schlumped back down the hill, rode back to the cottage, and had a nap until dinner.
Right now we're in Ennis, but I'll save tales of today's adventure for the next visit to an Internet cafe.
Cheers!
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Travel day is here. Tim and Dan will be on their way down shortly, and our flight leaves at 7:15 this evening.
This week I've tried to make sure I had a solid prep list and I tried to do as many little tasks as possible throughout the week so that I would not be slammed with a lot of last-minute details. Nevertheless, we ended up spending most of yesterday morning wrapping it all up.
I had decided to get a pre-loaded ATM/debit card so as not to risk losing my regular card or having the card be compromised during the trip. Visa and American Express both sell them. It's sort of an intermediate step between a regular ATM/debit card and traveler's checks, which have gotten to be rather obsolete. Some travel sites suggest that they're not a good deal because of the assorted fees you get dinged with. Since I plan to visit places like cybercafes, which are notorious for credit card phishing, I thought it would be wiser to eat the fees and use a card that's not tied to my bank account.
So we toddled over to our nearby AAA office to buy one, and while we were there they told us that I would need an international driver's permit to rent and operate a car. It's not strictly required, apparently, but the State Department recommends it. On our Paris-London trip in 2003, we didn't do any driving ourselves, so it wasn't an issue. The permit only costs $15 (plus $8 for the required photos), and the AAA people were able to do it on the spot.
I also wanted to have a small amount