Ireland

I've got a little downtime so time for an update. But first, the comment section isn't working for me on Robyn's post but I was going to say podcasts are good at passing time, they cover any subject you could imagine, you might like "How stuff works." It's two dudes covering various topics with humor and information, pretty entertaining.

I'm currently in Glendalough, pronounced Glendaloch, Ireland about an hour and a half south of Dublin. Its very quaint and peaceful. It was founded as a small village in the 6th century by a guy named St Kevin. He built a house, he walked around, he probably talked to animals. It grew a little bit, but not much, I'd guess the population is still pretty low. The kind of place where sheep outnumber people. But it's nice. There's a lot of hiking trails, a few waterfalls, creeks, rivers and lakes. Very pretty, great photo opportunities. Yesterday I visited the cliffs of Moher which was pretty freaking cool. Massive cliffs rising out of the Atlantic, I'll post pics but they don't do justice to the scale. Then the tour went up the west coast of Ireland into Galway. I liked Galway, it reminded me a little of Seattle in that it's right on the water and has a big fishing and tech economy. I'm headed back to Dublin tomorrow where I've got a tour of the Guinness factory, a trip to the book of Kells and Trinity college, maybe a stop at Epic Ireland which is a newer place designed to help people trace their roots. Everyone from the passport guy to the tour guide has commented on my last name, so Epic Ireland sounds like an interesting stop. After that it's back to London for a day and a half to catch my flight out of Heathrow back to Seattle. It's been a lot of fun, but it's probably almost time to get back to work, maybe, I guess.

Ideas

Hey guys!! So, I'm preparing for 8 weeks in my bed or on the couch or in my chair or in my bed next month! 😐🤣 In order to keep me from going stir crazy, I'd love to start collecting ideas of cool stuff I could do! Movies? TV shows? Books? Games? Hit me with your favorites and I'll start collecting them! Here's what I don't like, just in case: no blood, horror, guns, lots of language or anything gross! Other than that, I'm open! Old, new, it doesn't matter!! I'm still watching macgyver and I think it came out when I was 6, so lay it on me!!

Love

Robs

Ghosts and Golfers

Yesterday I walked down the royal mile in Edinburgh then up to this hiking park called Arthur's Seat. I never found out who Arthur was but his seat is pretty high up. It took about an hour to get to a good spot to take a picture and if you want to there's an extra little bit you can go up but not many people did because it was so windy. I've seen Long Beach, WA get windy but this was taking it up a bit. It was blow you off the trail windy. But the view was great and the weather in the morning was sunny. After that my feet were sore again so I figured I'd take a short nap then figure the night out after that. The thing about Edinburgh is there's a lot of dark history, everything from torture, serial killers, sketchy doctors and the plague. The cool thing is the streets haven't hardly changed since the 16th & 17th century so its easy to picture how it was back then. So the thing to do here is take a ghost tour. I signed up for a tour that takes you not only around the city pointing out the streets where grisly situations took place but it also takes you down into the vaults. The vaults used to be the foundation of an old bridge, but the rock they used leaked so eventually they just built over it. When they did a lot of the poor people and the criminals moved in. So you've got this labyrinth of subterranean rooms, pitch dark and silent with a history of criminal behavior. It's supposedly haunted but I didn't see any ghosts. It was definitely creepy though and I think the whole group was ready to go.

Then today I took a trip up to St Andrews with stops at little fishing villages along the way. Very quint, maybe a thousand or so people lived in them. It was a fun lighthearted trip, the guide told stories about Scottish history and played music to set the mood. Then we made it to the golf course. It was pretty cool to see it in person after so many times watching on TV. I walked around a few holes when there weren't any golfers and got my picture taken on the Swilcan bridge. That was fun. Every pro golfer has most likely crossed that bridge at some point, plus uncle Rick! What a group. After that we drove around the country side some more, it was very green, a lot of sheep and potato farms. Rolling hills, the whole thing. I think that's about it for now, we'll see what tomorrow brings, its kind of weather dependent around here. Talk to ya later.

London to Edinburgh

This is probably gonna be a short post. I'm at a new place and its a little smaller and were all sharing a surge protector to charge phones and do internet stuff and I'm kind of hunched in an awkward position to not pull my charger out of the wall. Maybe similar to how you might hunch over to carry buckets of rocks? Nah, my thing is easier. Anyway I'm in Scotland now. You know you're in Scotland when you get off the bus and look up at a castle and hear bagpipes echoing through the streets. It's really pretty and the weather is good. Fingers crossed it stays for a few days. I got settled in and took a walk around. Now its almost time for dinner and planning tomorrow. I'll update later when I have more to report, in the meantime here's a few pictures.

Brain Damage?

Today was a good day in getting things done. Just a bit more than I thought.

Started off this morning with both Mom and I having essentially no plans. A quiet weekend day with a gloomy day outside. Than I had an idea. (Dum-de-dum)

Maybe I said, since it looked dry for a bit, we could get a trailer and get a load of mulch for the garden. Mom was looking for an opportunity to do that, so why not?  Sounded easy enough.

Uh Oh. I asked Mom for the directions to the place where we get mulch, and dirt for the yard. Turned out they aren't open (this time of year) on Sunday. So we stopped beside the road to figure out plan B.  Eureka, there was another place in Lynnwood. Off we go, Got 2 big scoops of mulch (well, sorta mulch, really it was a sawdust and horse manure mix) and back home we go.

There are a lot of shovel fulls of wet mulch in a cubic yard. We staged the material in the car port. As an aside, when Henry was barking, and I wanted to semi startle him out of that, my range of the flying 'mixture' was a little long, but yes, I did indeed startle him, and things were quieter. (Sorry H.W.) At least he had his sweater on. . .

Oh, what's that I hear, one load just won't be enough. Ok, I guess, lets go down to Lynnwood and we'll do this all again. Got back and the shoveling, and piling were a bit slower, really slower as that yard of stuff is really a lot of stuff. Finally get the trailer emptied. We're tired, but that stuff isn't too heavy, so no real sweat, just a lot of repetitive work.

What's that dear? We now need ROCKS? Even a half yard of ROCKS are a LOT of pounds of ROCKS. (Now you're seeing the tie in to my title?). Down again to Lynnwood, get a front loader scoop of gravel. How bad can it be?

First though, and my darling wife does get some points for this, a quick lunch at Dick's. And than off we go to home.

Now in case you ever wondered, and I see no reason why this would rise to your top thoughts as you go about your day, but here is the salient fact. Pay attention now, ROCKS are HEAVY!. It came down to filling two alternating buckets with just 2 shovel scoops of rocks at a time. I scooped, mom delivered. Two scoops filling just the bottom of the buckets was all the weight that could be managed. I didn't count, (too busy breathing you know),  but that was a lot of buckets.

So, in recap, what was imagined to be a quick load of ground cover, turned into 2 loads, and a load of ROCKS!  All I can think was I had a brain fault, and somehow this got out of hand. And it was my idea. (Again, refer to the title).

Now just to be clear, Mom did a ton of work here. (Actually several Tons). It was a true joint effort. She carted, and carried and scooped "til who laid the chunk". She was a real trooper!

And she of course was responsible for turning one load into three, just saying.

How was your weekend?

Dad

London day five

Hey there, here are a few other things I've been doing since the last post. On Wednesday I went up north to check out that part of the city. I found a nice park with people walking their dogs and playing around. There were these enormous Victorian style buildings lining the park. I'm not sure if they're for working or living or schools but they looked expensive. Then I headed over to Abbey Road to see the music studio and the famous sidewalk the Beatles used for their album cover. It was a popular place for picture taking which was tricky cause its a pretty busy road. You have to be fast. It would've been cool to see the inside but its a working studio so there's no tours. Nonetheless it was cool to see the place where not just the Beatles recorded but numerous other famous musicians and a whole lot of film scores. It would take too long to name them all but if you're interested Wikipedia has a listing.

Then I took a red bus down to kings cross and st pancras station to see the British library, but first I was getting hungry and luckily there was a little farmers market outside the station. I had a scotch egg which is kind if a medium cooked egg wrapped in sausage and breading and some smoked chorizo. It was pretty good, might be tough to find back home though. At least the egg. Moving on, the point of going to the library was mostly to see the rare treasures room. And rare it was, they had hand written music from Mozart, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, The Beatles and others. They also had original copies of Shakespeare plays, letters from authors and heads of state. Early religious and foundation for government scrolls, like thousand year old kind of early. So it was pretty neat. Yesterday I walked around the government part of town where big Ben, parliament and Westminster abbey are located. The buildings are a little intimidating as far as the scale goes and I found it a little over the top. It reminded me that I prefer living in a country where we don't have royal overlords flaunting their wealth, although that could be debated in regards to the income disparity in our country. Hard to explain, but the wealth here is not hidden one bit. Anyway, enough politics, I also went up to Trafalgar square that kind of is a hangout for locals and tourists. I'll have to go back because they have a statue of George Washington placed on a column made out of stone and soil imported from Virginia to respect his decision to never step foot on British soil. I'll have to get a picture of that. I also went down to the imperial war museum which I found very interesting. They have all sorts of military equipment, a WW1 replica trench you can walk through, all kinds of spy equipment like James Bond kind of things. Its a normal looking pipe, oh wait, it's a gun. They have a section for each major war the Brits were involved in which is most of them. On the way back from that I passed by a few private schools for boys. The craziest part was they were built like prisons. High walls, razor wire, very bizarre. I met a teacher back at the hostel that said boys try to make a run for it all the time so that explains the security. Today is kind of low key, my dogs are barking pretty good from all the walking and I have laundry to do. Talk to ya later!

Hi There!

Remember Me! I'm Mom! Haven't been on the blog for awhile other than to read about everyone else's adventures. Not that I didn't want to contribute but for some reason I wasn't invited or something and I was cut off! Oh well, I'm back now and part of the fun! I may have to go back a year and post my comments on what others have said since I've been missing out!

Have a good day everyone and keep writing!!

Love, Mom

London Day Two

Cheerio, my phone needed a charge and it's raining a bit so I figured it'd be a good time to blog. So, today I went over to Saint Pauls Cathedral to check that out. There's no photography allowed except for one staircase off to the side so I'll try to describe it the best I can. First off, it is a massive building. I'd guess it would take up an entire city block if London used city blocks which they do not. It's like the city planner took a big bowl of noodles, dropped it on the floor and said make it look like that. Nevertheless, its huge. It took me ten minutes of walking around it just to find the door. But eventually I did. So I go inside, get my ticket and an older fella came over and started chatting me up. His name was Thomas, he was giving an 11 o' clock tour. Tom the tour guide. I had twenty minutes to wander so I strolled around and took it all in. Everywhere you looked was highly detailed, intricate and symmetrical. It was an obsessive compulsers dream come true. Nothing was off center. There are sculptures of people, paintings on the ceiling, which felt like it was a mile up and all kinds of columns and engravings.

11 eventually came around so I found Tom and about twenty others waiting for the tour. Since Tom was older and because its a working church we had these closed circuit headsets so everyone could hear. First we went to a little side section of pews that has had a church on site in one form or another since the year 604. 604, Tom repeated that so I will too. In that particular section they have little hangouts with the queen and other fancy pants Brits from time to time. Next we went to a staircase where he explained how the architect Christopher Wren was really into math. You can definitely tell because of how symmetrical everything looked. He explained that the stairs only go into the wall a few inches and that each stair supports all the rest, and if one was taken out the whole thing would become unstable. Here's a picture.

Next we headed over to look at the choir section. He talked about the organ and the seven and a half thousand pipes that are located all around the cathedral. He told us about the boys choir and how they are highly trained at reading, writing, arithmetic and obviously music. It sounded like a strict upbringing. A lot of clapping erasers and being hit with rulers. He didn't say that exactly, that's just what it sounded like to me. But at the end of the day they get into the best colleges and have those special privileges that very few people have. It was pretty cool to AIT in these intricately carved wooden pews that people have sat in since 1675 or so. Next he talked about the ceiling mosaics. There was a certain style they followed that I can't remember right now but basically they take pieces of glass no bigger than a fingernail and smush it into plaster. Then they leave it uneven on purpose. They don't smooth it out, so that way it sparkles when the light hits it. Next we went over how the Germans dropped an explosive during the blitzkrieg that landed right where the alter would be. Sounds like it caused a good bit of damage so they had to repair that part. When they did repair it they thought of a few improvements. One addition that Tom made a point of mentioning was a memorial to the 28,000 U.S. military personnel that were stationed in Britain during WW2 who lost their lives. They had a big inscription as well as a book under glass with everyone's name. I thought that was a classy move to honor them in what is arguably one of London's most revered and respected landmarks. Its good to have allies like that in the world and it made me feel good too.

Alright, I'm almost done, there's a lot to cover. Next we went over the dome itself and the paintings that show scenes of the life of Saint Paul. Think of the Sistine chapel, it was kind of similar. Finally the tour went to its last stop, for some quite literally. The crypt underneath the building. Down there are a few smaller chapels for ceremonies like knighthood, weddings and of course funerals. There are a lot of dead bodies down there. All of which are famous people. The Duke of Wellington is down there, Admiral Nelson is there, Sir Christopher Wren, who built it is down there with some of his family members. It was interesting to say the least. The only one missing was Winston Churchill. He's buried on his families land somewhere in the country. Instead they put up this cool looking gate in his honor that I wished I could've taken a picture of. That concluded the tour. After that I grabbed lunch in the Crypt Cafe just a few dozen yards from the crypt itself. Have you ever had lunch in a room full of dead bodies? Well now I can say that I have. Overall it was an interesting tour and I'm glad I did it, highly recommended, ask for Tom. Cheers!