Category:

Ireland

Business As (un)Usual

by Diane Duane April 4, 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic spreading itself about, it seemed like a good idea to give people a local status report of what’s going on with us over here. The short version of that is: we’re fine. Peter and I are safe at home, sheltering in place—sort of pre-cocooning (since neither of us is quite old enough to come under that aspect of the present Irish restrictions)—and life for us is going on pretty much as usual.

A little more back story might be useful here for those who don’t know us well. Since we both work from home, and have for many years, our normal lifestyle already looks a whole lot like what a lot of people are now being forced to put up with. We live in a little cottage out in the wilds of West Wicklow, a very rural area—where, unless we actually went out of the house for a walk longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, it’d be rare for us to see so much as a car or truck or tractor. And as for seeing or interacting with other human beings—sure, one might come along once a day or so walking their dogs, but that’d be about the size of it. And our business days look like this: (1) getting up, showering, having breakfast (or whatever passes for that meal, because Peter sometimes works different hours from me: is it really breakfast at 2 in the afternoon?); (2) heading into our separate work spaces—Peter’s is upstairs in what doubles as a guest bedroom, mine’s downstairs in the living room—and (3) getting on with work: writing, and the assorted business that surrounds it.

There’s no travel associated with our work beyond going up and down the stairs. Meals happen at home, the vast majority of them home-cooked. We have only one place anywhere near us where we’d eat out—the local pub, about a mile’s walk away. The next closest would be in our nearby shopping town, Baltinglass, about 8 km away. (This would be where we would send for takeout, assuming we wanted Chinese. That’s all that’s available in terms of being delivered all this way out to us.) …If you’ve noted that the concept of walking places keeps coming up, well, we gave up our car about fifteen years ago because we found that we really just didn’t need it. For six days out of seven, on the average, it was sitting out in the back, literally growing moss, while still needing to have insurance, car tax, and so forth paid on it. (We let the cats sleep in it sometimes; they started thinking it was their flat.) …Finally we said “The heck with this!”, and let the car go in favor of either renting a car when necessary—an option no longer possible since the local rental chain started making that difficult for the self-employed—or using local cab companies to take us to Baltinglass for shopping, or to connect with public transit (Bus Eireann) into Dublin and beyond. And that’s how things have gone… until a month or so ago.

Without needing to get into the entire timeline of the coronavirus as it affects Ireland, early signs of what was going to happen were already beginning to make themselves plain to me around the last time that we actually had to leave the house for anything. That was the end of February, and a week later at the beginning of March, when I needed (first) to have have routine bloods drawn and (second) to go see our GP for a routine checkup. A day or so after the second visit, I started noticing a runny nose and a bit of a cough that I hadn’t had before. Immediately I got concerned, as not once but twice within the past ten days I’d been sitting in a doctor’s waiting room for a good while. For safety’s sake, starting in the first week of March I decided it’d be smart to self-isolate until I was completely clear what was going on. (Those of you who follow me on Tumblr will have seen mention of this.)

Fortunately the concern turned out to be unfounded. By the 20th it became clear that the runny nose was just secondary to a long-standing, on-and-off chronic sinus infection, and a reaction to the usual seasonal pollens. And to say I was relieved would be understating the case. It’s tough to concentrate on managing other universes when you’re sitting there wondering if you’re about to start sickening with something that has a pretty good chance of killing you in this one. (At the age of going-on-68, I’m unquestionably in dodgy territory, and Peter’s not too far behind me.)

Anyway, by the time that Ireland declared its stay-at-home lockdown, I’d already been sitting tight for a couple of weeks, and I just kind of shrugged. So did Peter. For us, staying in the house and being at the desk for hours at a time, or sprawled in the Comfy Chair or on the living-room sofa binging Netflix (which thank God we can actually do now since we finally had real no-shit broadband installed last year to replace the pay-as-you-go cellular that was previously the best we could get in this neck of the woods)—is exactly what life around here usually looks like, for days on end. (Not least because when depending on a taxi service means we must automatically attach an extra €30 or $40 price tag to everything—from the simplest, quickest shopping trip to a night out at the pub—that’s not an option we overuse.) As for being forced to isolate with another person for a week or two (or three) on end… well, that too is what life around here usually looks like. It’s a good thing we really like each other a lot.

The main change/inconvenience at the moment is that the cab service we use closed itself down for the duration as well. (Which frankly makes sense, as in none of their cars would it be possible to enforce physical distancing.) So in the short term, we really are confined to barracks whether we like it or not… except for walking the maximum 2km from home that present restrictions allow for purposes of exercise. But by and large, other life events have been going on pretty much as usual, and immediate needs pretty much get fulfilled.

Food, for example. Our groceries are normally delivered to us by one of the two supermarket chains that serve our area, Tesco and Supervalu, because we don’t always have time or inclination to go out for them. Granted, at the moment this business is more complicated than usual. Way more people in our area (as one might expect) are now availing themselves of the service than would’ve done so before. So instead of being able to get on the computer and order groceries to be delivered tomorrow—or today, if you get the timing right—you now have to watch the stores’ websites like a hawk for delivery slots opening up, and they’re never any closer than a week or two away. (Our next delivery slot is April 14… and I really, really hope we can make the present jug of milk last long enough to keep Peter in milk for his tea until then.) Also, don’t get me started about yeast. For someone who’s routinely baked bread two or three times a week for the last 10 years or more, suddenly having other people buy the available supply of yeast and flour out from under me is a bit of a pain. Especially as I think, knowing human nature, of the many, many, MANY packages of yeast that are almost certainly going to sit in the backs of people’s cupboards and never again see the light of day until someday five years from now, 10 years from now, they’re thrown out. (…Oooh, bitter much?…)

Other life-infrastructure isn’t too much of a problem, as we’ve had lots of time to work out the bugs and workarounds of a non-car-enabled lifestyle in this part of the world. Other household needs besides food can mostly be ordered in; heating oil, for example (paid for over the phone and delivered by the nice guy who comes along, fills the tank and goes away), and firewood (call another nice guy, arrange payment: bags of wood and turf get left for us). Minor pharmaceuticals, if we need them, we order from an online pharmacy down-country. Banking’s all done online since our local branch office closed. So is almost all other bill paying. So’s almost all of our communication. And as far as income goes, at the moment most of it comes from Ebooks Direct—the operation of which is handled from my desktop—and by other means of payment-for-writing that aren’t physical to begin with.

To sum everything up: we’re having things a lot easier than a lot of the people around us… a situation the irony of which isn’t lost on me. Usually it’s more the other way around. I look on with wonder and encouragement at the increasingly creative ways that people around the planet are finding here to get around the limitations imposed on them and still make life work, for themselves and for the people around them… especially at the small business end.

But “easy” is relative. Increasingly the news makes more and more difficult viewing for me. I was taught enough epidemiology in my public-health unit in nursing school to understand the broad strokes of how what’s now happening must play out. What’s happening in Europe and Ireland are bad enough… but I’m deeply frustrated and frightened by what’s going on in New York in particular right now, in hospitals I knew well because I worked in them or knew people who did. I’m distressed by the prospect of what will most likely unfold as the surge of very sick people starts spreading equally aggressively in other parts of the country—places that are even less well prepared or defended against what’s coming because many people living there have been taught to believe that this pandemic isn’t real. And I grieve for my former colleagues at the nursing and medical end who’re dying on the front lines, and ache for those now having to make choices they never should’ve had to make, being forced to work under conditions that they could surely never have imagined.

At this point I suspect no one’s surprised by the notion that we’re all now caught in the midst of a century-changing event, one that’ll be as profound in its influence as the events of any other pandemic or world war. And that said, there’s no escaping the truth that this will be a tough time all around, even for those of us who (out of the sheer luck of the draw) are sitting comfortably at home in our usual circumstances, without having to deal with sudden changes in the way things are on their own turf. We’ve got a roof over our heads, enough money to buy food and ways to get it into the house, work to do and no fear of being laid off or fired… with the certainty that we have not been exposed to coronavirus and are (under present circumstances, anyway, while we keep ourselves battened down) most unlikely to be. What can’t be put aside for either Peter or me, though, is the sense of the sheer luck we’re benefiting from, and the certain knowledge of the level of privilege that’s functioning on our behalf. There are a hundred ways in which things could have been very different—especially had this been one of those years that required us to be on the road in the course of work. The concept’s really unsettling.

And along those lines, our thoughts go constantly to friends who’re facing into this crisis while also saddled with financial trouble—work loss, job loss; friends with family sick with COVID-19 or something else, and unable to be with them; friends struggling to get critical work done despite the circumstances; friends stuck far from home who can’t get back there. Every day’s news, every day’s Twitter, is full of the cruelty and irrationality of people in places of power who should be doing much, much better… as well as of the sacrifice of fellow professionals and of people being gentle with each other.

It’s hard to get on with business under these circumstances… particularly the unending uncertainty about what may come next. Concentration’s far more difficult than usual. Yet making the effort to stay focused and working is part of what I described to someone, some while back, as wanting to “be found at my post” when a crisis came; since this is the job I do, the one thing I’m really suited for, and it matters to keep doing it. …So I’m staying as focused as I can on that.

A number of projects are in progress at the moment. The (LGBTQ) Middle Kingdoms-universe work Tales of the Five #3, The Librarian is well along, and I’m aiming for publication at Ebooks Direct in late April/early May. (No episode of this “prose miniseries” will appear at Amazon until they’re all complete, around the end of Q4 2020.) The new Young Wizards interstitial work Interim Errantry 3: A Day at the Crossings is in progress and scheduled for publication (at both Ebooks Direct and Amazon) in Q3 of 2020. The extremely peculiar first episode of the “Digits of Destiny” series, The Thumb of Zorbo, is also well under way and may be the next thing that comes out from me. And rather to my surprise, I find myself writing Some Watery Tart, in which the Lady of the Lake finally spills the tea on King Arthur’s court. Don’t ask me when to expect that, as I haven’t the slightest idea. …There’s also a TV miniseries being restructured for pitching, and a novel that Peter and I are getting ready to start writing together; and, of course, The Door Into Starlight. But I’m not going to get into more detail about those right now.

Anyway: Peter and I are keeping on “keeping on” through this bizarre time, and will keep doing so unless/until something unexpected happens. I’m on Twitter a lot, in the normal course of things, so if something goes wrong, goes south or gets weird, look for early indications there. Meanwhile, if you feel like encouraging the artist in her labors: feel free to buy a coffee (check the right-hand column here), grab a discounted ebook (we’ve got a 50%-off sale running for the foreseeable future)… or just think good thoughts. Those are always appreciated.

And now back to what I’m binging at the moment (Handsome Siblings on Netflix), and yet another attempt to answer the eternal question: How the hell do these people go out fighting all dressed in white and wind up without so much as a smudge on them? Sure, this is fantasy, but that’s just stretching it too far…

Meanwhile, wherever you may be: take care of yourself.

April 4, 2020

Current events Ebooks Direct Europe Ireland

At the Ebooks Direct store: everything 50% off till Whenever

by Diane Duane March 12, 2020

(Caption: “Be like our hard-working staff! Wash your hands.”)

So last night I looked at the state of the world and thought to myself, “It may be that some people will need something to take their minds off their troubles over the next couple of weeks.” I Tweeted about it at the time, and then set the Ebooks Direct store into Half Off Everything mode until March 30th.

…And wouldn’t you know, today it was announced that Ireland is being put into more-or-less-lockdown (not as severe as Italy’s, as yet, but still…) until — guess when? — March 29th, as the country moves officially into the “delay” stage of handling the COVID-19 pandemic. So this choice seems to have been well timed. (ETA: Lockdown aside, we’ve all got a Continuing Situation here, and the sale will remain in place until Things Get Better. Whenever THAT is.)

Anyway, I just thought I’d leave a note about it here. Most of you know the drill by now. If you’re interested in grabbing an ebook, go over here, have a look at the inventory… see if anything moves you toward a purchase. As always, all our files are DRM-free; and if you lose your ebooks somehow due to a disk crash or whatever, just let us know, quoting your order number, and (unlike some large online booksellers) we’ll replace them for free. (It helps not having a private space program to fund.) If you don’t need ebooks and just feel inclined to buy the writers a coffee, you can do that too. (Or 20% of a package of ibuprofen. I still have to keep taking these things for the Bum Knee until it finishes getting better.)

…One other thing before I close this. Those of you who have been following (on Tumblr or Twitter) the Saga of the Bum Knee will know that I was in to see the doctor a week ago now, and the knee was pronounced Unlikely to Explode (which was a relief) and not in need of a scan. So far, so good. That said: over the last day or so it’s starting to look as if I might possibly have brought more away from my visit to my GP’s surgery, and elsewhere in our “shopping town” afterwards, than just relief about the state of my knee ligaments. Yesterday my nose started running sort of without warning, and I developed some congestion and a bit of a cough. NOT the dry kind that’s symptomatic of COVID-19: a bit of a wet one, nothing severe.

I am treating this aggressively with the usual kind of things I use on an incipient cold/flu to minimize the effects — including the extremely effective Swiss anti-cold drugs we keep on hand — and I am keeping a very close eye on the situation. IT IS VERY LIKELY NOTHING. Certainly not the regular flu — I had my shot in early January. Yet I find the timing a little suspect: usually if I catch a cold when away from home, it sets in faster. Under the circumstances it seems prudent for me to take myself out of public (meaning non-virtual) circulation until the end of the month… especially bearing in mind the context of this article in the Guardian.

So I will be — let’s not call it self-isolating, lest everybody start panicking! Let’s just say I’ll be Sniffling in Place. 🙂 I feel just fine except for the sniffling and congestion. I have no fever. But I am unwilling to risk messing anybody else up because I got too cavalier about this; and since I’m in the over-65 at-risk category, caution seems best. I just thought I’d mention this here so that people won’t see something about it from me on Twitter and freak out unduly. If matters get more serious, believe me, I’ll let everybody know immediately.

Thanks, all. 🙂

March 12, 2020

Home life Inconsequentia Ireland Life Nature

Death in the Afternoon

by Diane Duane December 4, 2019

When you live in the deep countryside in Ireland, you get used to coexisting with the wildlife. This coexistence can take many strange forms: bats in the bedroom, sheep in the garden, bored racehorses hanging over the back fence to try to get the attention of the bousehold’s cats.

Sometimes, of course, what country people would classify as “vermin” are involved: foxes, rats, squirrels, weasels (actually, in this neighborhood, stoats). And mice. Lots of mice.

When you have a houseful of cats, the mice can be less of a problem. But we don’t have a houseful of cats at the moment. And inevitably, as autumn rolls into winter, one morning (or one night) you wake up to faint scratching sounds coming from the roof-space, or the attic, or from between the walls… and you mutter, “Great, we’ve got company.” And you put out traps — usually baited with bacon or a bit of a Mars Bar, but sometimes the situation requires a warfarin-based poison bait — and wait for the noise to stop. Sometimes you resign yourself to things getting locally, temporarily a bit whiffy when something dies in the walls (and sometimes this happens without benefit of poison or any intervention on our part at all). But there’s no alternative: you must take action. If you don’t do something about these critters, they’ll be into the food cupboards, chewing through the packages and ruining the food.

…So anyway, let me briefly veer off in another direction. Like most freelancing writers, we have periods of being flush, and periods of being not very flush at all, and long periods of being somewhere in between. The Flush Periods tend to coincide with the twice-yearly arrival of royalty payments from our traditional publishers. One of these happened a couple of years ago — it was Peter’s turn for the payment — and we were up in Dublin doing some errands and making some purchases we’d been putting off until money arrived. And along the way we happened to pass a clothing store, a cashmere shop in fact, that was having a Moving House sale and letting a lot of its stock go at truly ludicrous prices so that they wouldn’t have to move it all into their new digs.

In the window of this shop was something really quite lovely: a mid-thigh-length heather-blue-grey cashmere hoodie. I have to confess that I fell in love with the thing within about ten seconds of spotting it. Having then spent another ten seconds or so in a spate of tasteful drooling against the shop’s window, I peeled myself off the glass and walked away… because even though theoretically we could have afforded the thing, there were a lot of other more important things to be spending that money on. Such is life: you can’t always have what you want. Never mind, I thought, let’s do the rest of the shopping and then go have lunch.

Which we did. And then my sneaky, underhanded husband — Mr. I Signed The Official Secrets Act Twice And Butter Wouldn’t Melt In My Mouth — pretended to be going off to the restroom. When what he was actually doing was running out of the restaurant, hurrying back to the cashmere place, and buying me the hoodie. (Because it was his royalty money, and he got to say.)

Well, what the hell could I say except THANK YOU SWEETIE YOU CUNNING CONNIVING S.O.B. (Because he spent the next two days mentioning that hoodie every now and then — just to make sure I really liked it — before finally handing it over.)

Needless to say, that piece of clothing has become something of a favorite. It doesn’t get worn lots, because I want it to last a long time. It gets put on to wear at home when cozy-curl-up-in-the-big-chair-near-the-fire-with-some-tea-and-read sessions are going to happen (never for casual chore work around the house, never while cooking or washing dishes). It comes out for conventions, sometimes. (I spent a goodish bit of time in it when we were out in Bristol for BristolCon last month.) The rest of the time it spends carefully folded up on top of all the other folded-up things on my shelf of the clothes closet, because I don’t want it getting creased.

…So. A few days ago we started hearing a bit of scratching up in the attic space. Now, this could have been bats. (Which would be fine with me. I like bats, and wouldn’t hurt them whether I liked them or not, regardless of whether they were protected here under EU law… which they are. Anyway, we normally get some bats in the house over the summertime — young males looking for a nice place to shack up with a lady friend. They’re quite welcome for as long as they stay.)

So the first day we just kind of shrugged at the scratching noises and said “Let’s see what happens.” What happened was that they continued, and got louder. A lot louder. At which point the discussion changed to: “Mice or rats?” “Maybe it’s a pine marten,” I also suggested, as that kind of thing has been known to happen around here.

The noise continued, anyway, so we knew what to do: put out some baited traps and waited to see what materialized.

The first thing we found, while checking the traps the next morning, was this.

If the perpetrator of this was a mouse, it was some mouse. These humane tipping traps are straightforward — mouse goes in after bait, trap tips shut, and then in the morning you take it outside and release the inmate over the big wall of the neighboring estate, where the mouse won’t be able to readily find the way back.

This creature, though, was plainly unwilling to have anything to do with this scenario. The thing, whatever it was, first bit the door off the trap and threw it away, then chewed through the body of it to get at the bait and take it away upstairs into the roof space. Where we heard it again, that night, gnawing on the beams.

“Okay,” Peter said to me the next morning — yesterday morning — “we can’t be having with this.” And down go the traps with the warfarin bait.

Which we find, this morning, knocked about and scattered (though some of it may also have been taken away up into the attic “for later.” And we also find, in the bedroom clothes closet, on top of the other folded-up clothes, where it belongs… this.

My prezzie from Peter, my cashmere hoodie… with some additions to the design. Many additions. Mostly on the back, but also on the sleeves, front and back.

An overview of the hoodie

…Now people who know me know that I am generally a temperate creature, not given to sudden extremes of violent emotion. (Because, among other reasons, when you’re a nurse, they kind of train that sort of response out of you — both for your patients’/clients’ safety and your own.)

But you’d have had a lot of trouble believing that this morning, because — having been handed the hoodie by a very shocked and upset Peter — my immediate response was as follows:

“Get me MOAR POISON. Get me ALL THE RODENT POISON THERE IS. I want that fucking thing shitting out its bleeding innards by sundown.”

So it has been written: so it has been done. Now I wait… and meanwhile, I get to call the nice cashmere people in Dublin and find out where they send customers to have their knitwear mended after vermin have attempted to devour it.

I do not think I will be writing anything life-affirming today. Right now the general mood around here is horns-of-Rohan, death, death, DEATH.

…And in the meantime, I’ll let anyone who’s interested know when we find the corpse.

December 4, 2019

Absent friends Animation Home life Ireland Writing Writing process

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats

by Diane Duane March 24, 2019

I was cleaning out my Gmail account a bit earlier today (because stuff does get piled up in there over time) and came across something… unusual.

Long long ago, before Google developed Google Drive, various people got clever and found ways to store larger-than-officially-permitted files inside Gmail by attaching them to mails using a specific tagging/uploading method. (Forgive me for being vague here but I no longer remember exactly how this particular hack worked; the brain cells once harboring that data are probably now full of Scrivener strategies or Sherlock fanfic.)

I found a bunch of such mails today and proceeded to delete them or empty them out into more modern forms of storage. But one of them brought me up short. It held a text file containing several fragments of a poem.

What really got my attention were the first couple of lines, because as I read them something went twang inside me like a plucked string, and an image sprang out to accompany the twang. If you write at all, you may know this drill. You reread a line, sometimes many years after it was set down, and some sensory cue, visual or auditory or taste- or touch- or smell-based, pops up to accompany it. For example: there are parts of Spock’s World I can’t now read without hearing the sounds pfttt, as of the firing of a pellet-firing air gun, and squawk, which was the sound of one of the pheasants Peter was targeting out the window of the castle-wall cottage we were renting in Scotland. (BTW, “no pheasants were harmed…”, as the saying goes: they could have cared less about the pellets — they just shook their feathers and rolled their eyes at Peter.)

Anyway. I read these two lines at the top of the file —

O, Hell is deep an’ Hell is dark
And Hell is full o’ mice…

…and immediately I was standing in the kitchen of our little cottage, about twenty years ago, and John M. Ford was there. Maybe not in the room: but somewhere in the neighborhood. He and his partner Elise Matthesen (who, as many of you know, goes by @LionessElise on Twitter) were visiting us. And somehow these verses had resulted — either during the visit or right after — and had been tucked away to be completed.

I date them as having been written between 2002 and 2005. It’s hard to be sure, due to the unusual way the file was stored. As for the subject matter? Ghu knows what brought it on. Outside of Mike’s normal superpower — which seemed to involve raising the “talent bar” in local space so that the people packed into that space with him got smarter/more creative than they usually were — the local influences remain obscure. There’s no denying that I’ve written my share of animation, and like other animation writers working during the 1980s, my relationship with what would eventually become the Animators’ Guild was ambivalent. (This is secondary to its originally being an artists’ organization, not a writers’ one. But that’s all a long time ago now.)

All I can be sure of is that something during that visit, something mediated by Mike’s and Elise’s presence, got me thinking about the indignities inflicted on cartoon cats. All that was missing from the poem as it stood were a few lines. I finished them a couple of hours ago.

So now, here’s this. Just doggerel, to be sure. But won’t somebody think of the kitties?…

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats

O, Hell is deep an’ Hell is dark
And Hell is full o’ mice:
They ha’ wee horns and wee barbed tails
An’ eyes o’ cockatrice;
The kitties bad who made them mad
While they were still on life
Now sairly pay by night and day
For contramuscine strife.

Wi’ wee barbed tridents poke they us,
The mousies o’ the damned:
Wi’ mickle anvils dropped on us
Our days and nights are crammed.
Wi’ mallets all they mousies come
An’ bang us i’ the head:
Wi’ ropes an’ rods an’ cattleprods
A sorry chase we’re led.

O, ilka morn and evenin’ too
We wail fra’ mousies’ whacksies,
And aye their sticks o’ dynamite
stuck up our wee poor jacksies.
An’ wha’ sad justice is there here
For a’ the meowin’ dead,
When we poor puss-cats only did
Wha’ some screenwriter said?

O curst be Local 839
o’ the MPSCG*,
Since we must writhe in pain condign
For their naughty sadistry:
May they run whinin’ through some Hell
Where kitties scratch and bite,
And so be paid i’ their own coin
For our own piteous plight.

*The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, Hollywood CA, formerly known as the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists’ Guild.

March 24, 2019

Ireland from space, with happily screaming writers

Home life Ireland Tech The Internet

Tenterhooks

by Diane Duane February 5, 2019

We’ve been living in rural Ireland for a shade more than thirty years now, and the household’s online connectivity has been a bit of a challenge from the very start.

When we first arrived, the only way into online life (then mostly CompuServe and AOL and MCIMail) was dialup, and it was what everyone else here had, so that was all right as far as it went. (Sometimes this could get a bit exciting, and could wind up involving alligator clips. I remember going up to the Telecom Eireann offices in Dame Street — that building houses a Starbucks now — and showing the techs how to finesse this. Remind me sometime to tell the tale of how I almost wound up storyediting an animated series from Scotland, more or less entirely on MCIMail, with those alligator clips hooked into a phone line in a castle wall.)

Then the Internet started to become accessible, and for that too there was dialup, slow and clunky and expensive as it was. If you wanted anything better, for a long time satellite was the only way… and it was insanely pricey. (The equivalent of $250-350 per month wouldn’t have been unusual.) For a long time we struggled with that, looking wistfully forward to a time when local providers would be able to offer something like the faster, cheaper methods that were becoming available in the US and in big cities in Europe.

For a long time the providers here lagged behind, until finally in the very late 1990s and early 2000s they started to catch up. We happily enough gave up the satellite for DSL (at least a bit more reliable: the satellite had tended to get wonky in wet weather) and then ADSL. And then slowly the national phone company started to introduce fiber… though only in big cities.

We moved to our present house in the late 90s and watched other areas of the country gradually get better service and have access to all kinds of goodies that were far beyond what ADSL and its kin could provide us. Then came true hardwired broadband, and the nature of our problem abruptly changed. Our tiny local exchange, home to maybe no more than a few hundred subscribers, was too small ever to be broadband-enabled. And none of the companies that kept buying the national phone company, and passing it from hand to hand like a hot potato, had any particular interest in committing to the infrastructure spending that would pay for (among other things) running fiber out to the likes of us. We heaved a sigh, as it seemed likely that the only way we’d ever get broadband was to move. Then dialup vanished, leaving us with only one option that wasn’t satellite: cellular broadband, running off a router that would only function when placed as high as possible in an upstairs bedroom window, since our local mobile service is so funky and we live in the shadow of a hill that keeps us from getting a signal of any significant strength. And has a tendency to fail out when it rains.

To say that, as people who as part of work need to have an online presence, and who run an online bookstore, this whole situation has been pretty frustrating… would be putting it mildly.

The government here wasn’t insensible to this problem, to their credit, it being shared by hundreds of thousands of other people nationwide. As a result there ensued something called the National Broadband Scheme, intended to get the national government involved as a partner in extending broadband service to Ireland’s most rural users. This proposition started out well enough but then rapidly started going through more plot twists than a George R.R. Martin novel (and nearly as many corporate casualties, as participants fell or were pushed out of the scheme, depending on your point of view). Finally it expired of its (political and other) injuries, to be replaced by the National Broadband Plan. (Which also started to look distinctly peaky after companies began dropping out of it as if they’d drunk out of the wrong bottle at a royal banquet.) Leaving us, like many other people all over the southern part of this island, in a situation where the Moon had better internet than we did.

Yet in the most recent twist in the tale, what remains of what used to be the national phone company — an entity now called Eir — swooped in and creamed off some of the most accessible of the rural routes that the Plan was supposed to see equipped with the very best state-of-the-art, fiber-to-the-door broadband.

And by what can only be considered sheer luck, one of these involves the little rural road we live on! A man in a van came and discussed with us what service we wanted, and gave us a contract to sign, and we signed it. And when he left there was singing and dancing around here that could have been confused with something out of an old Savarin commercial starring their picky coffee expert, known as El Exigente. “And the people are happy!” Cue the mariachi band.

The very thought of at last being able to do the online things other people do — streaming (impossible with our expensive cellular broadband, which has been our last-resort solution for years now), seeing video content from online providers (bwahahahahaha you must be kidding, we’d burn through a 20-gigabyte / $50 cellular topup in a matter of hours), backing up our computers to the cloud… It was heady stuff. So many useful possibilities that other people take for granted would at last become available to us.

Except… maybe that excitement was a little premature.

Yes, people came along with backhoes and ran new cable pipes down the road, and then came the fiber itself. And we actually thought we were going to get hooked up last August until a pre-installation surveyor came around, took one look at our utility pole, and said “Nope.” After a week or so, the pole was pulled up and replaced with a new one. Then a nice gentleman came and ran the fiber up it, and another nice gent came to install the cabinet at the top. But as far as the final stage, actually getting the fiber into the house? Nothing definite. “Maybe before Christmas.” Except… sorry, nope. “Technical difficulties.” The week before Christmas, we called the customer service people and said “WHEN?” And they sighed and said, “February 7th.”

Ooookay. Peter and I looked at each other, and sighed too, and said, “We’ll see.”

And Christmas went by, and New Year’s, and January. And Peter said, “We’ll call them first thing on the week of the 7th.”

And he did. And the nice lad who took his call said, “Yes, you’re still on for the 7th. Morning or afternoon?”

…So now we wait. I’m practically giddy with excitement now. I finally get to SEE American Gods? I finally get to stream the audio from the Romansch-language channels in Switzerland and that terrific bundle of classical channels in France? OMG.

Anyway, since we’re both in celebratory mood, there’s no reason not to spread it around. The Ebooks Direct store will be in 60%-off mode until the installer arrives here on Thursday. So if you’re after cheap ebooks, knock yourself out while you can: the present inventory will load below. (PS — if you’ve seen the Hugo-nomination reader discount offer, please wait till Friday to use it. If we try to run two sets of discounts in the store at the same time, the software has a nervous breakdown.)

And in the meantime… we wait, in hope, to join the rest of the 21st century…

February 5, 2019

Europe Home life Ireland Weather

Ophelia

by Diane Duane October 16, 2017

It’s going to be an interesting day. (I leave aside the local confusion over whether to properly refer to this storm “Hurricane Ophelia” or “Ex-Hurricane Ophelia.” Never mind: here she is, not so much emitting snatches of song as gusts of wind, and strewing leaves all over everything instead of flowers.

This is as much a status report as anything else (and I guess I can update the post over the course of the day if anything interesting happens locally, though mostly I’ll probably be on Twitter, using the #Ophelia hashtag, like a lot of the rest of the country. If I fall silent there it’s more likely to be due to local power loss than anything else, and I’ll let everybody know as soon as possible before the fact — our broadband is cellular and runs on batteries, so even after a power failure I’ll still have network access for a good while.

This is also to reassure people who might routinely follow me and be concerned. Peter and I are not in the direct storm track. The track as presently projected calls for Ophelia to head up the west coast of the country. Peter and I live in one of the easternmost counties, Wicklow, close to where it borders on County Kildare.

Nonetheless the whole country was last night tagged by Met Eireann, the Irish national weather service, as a Red Weather Alert area, the warning being for “Violent and destructive gusts of 120 to 150 km/h countrywide and in excess of these values in some very exposed hilly and coastal areas.” As the storm is big enough to span the entire island, we’ll naturally be feeling its effects over on this side.

As I write this (0950 UTC) the northern fringe of the storm has made landfall in the southwest of the country and nearly 100,000 people have already lost power. In that part of the world, flooding is also going to be a huge issue (as it routinely has in the past with lesser storms), and we’re all watching that situation with a lot of concern. The storm surge is also going to be problematic on both the west and east costs, with a strong south wind coming up the Irish Sea this afternoon and evening, pushing sea levels up by as much as a meter in the storm surge period.

In our own area, the forecasts right now seem to indicate that a fair amount of rain will fall over the course of the day (40-50mm) but most of the trouble is going to be caused by high winds bringing trees down — especially since the trees still have a lot of leaves on them, even here on the high ground — and people losing power. This happens to us at least once every couple of years due to storm/wind damage in this very rural area, and we’re well prepared for it.

Let me reassure everybody who might be concerned that, based on previous experience of long periods of much heavier rain, our house is in no danger from flooding. We are about fifty miles west of the Irish Sea. Our cottage sits on high ground, more than 120m / 400ft above sea level and in an area of quite “sharp” drainage. Slopes here are acute enough so that even in the wildly unlikely case that the ground around us gets saturated, what water can’t sink in will run off downhill.

My main concern at the moment is about the line of very tall and handsome, and old, beech trees in the estate property across the road from us. Every now and then one of them says “That’s it, I’ve had it…” and falls over when the next big storm hits it. Those trees are just tall enough to hit our house if the storm put too much strain on them… and there’s no way to tell when this is going to happen. All the warning you get (as in a previous year when a tree in the neighboring field pulled this stunt and took the nearest power line down) is a loud rushing noise reminiscent of a sound clip from a recording of a large waterfall, and then a dull THUMP. Believe me when I tell you that my ears are going to spend the day being cocked for that waterfall-y “whooooooosh” sound. Additionally, since our broadband is cellular and subject to network overload or interference by bad weather, especially rain, it means checking every now and then to make sure we’re still getting bandwidth.

While all this goes on, my work day will be progressing as originally planned: updating the backups on my main work computer and doing other file-organization-related scutwork. This is actually a perfect day to be doing this kind of thing, as it requires no creativity whatsoever. (Writing isn’t going to be possible for me until this thing passes over: there’s no way I can get settled into serious work while also constantly listening for whoooooshTHUMP.) Anyway, if you want to cheer me up while I’m trapped in this godawful drudgery, feel free to stop in to the Ebooks Direct store and grab yourself some reading material.The store has an app that makes my iPad go “kaching” when someone makes a purchase, and if it does that every now and then I won’t have to keep checking to see if the broadband’s still working.

Meanwhile the national broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann / RTÉ has (on its RTÉ 1 channel) gone over to continuous all-news format to cover the storm, with reports constantly coming in from around the country. Those of you who’re interested may be able to access video and/or streaming coverage at this URL for the RTE Player. Also, RTÉ Radio 1’s daytime shows will (if I’m guessing correctly) be all about Ophelia.

Anyway: everybody who’s tweeted or mailed me with messages of concern — thanks! We’re as ready as we can be: we’ll see what happens next…

October 16, 2017

The Dublin Convention Centre and the River Liffey

Conventions Dublin 2019 Europe Ireland

15-19 August, 2019

by Diane Duane August 12, 2017

I’m ridiculously happy to let everybody know that I’ve been chosen to be one of the Guests of Honour at the 2019 World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

To say that I’m blown away by this—and have been for some months while I sat tight on the news—would be badly understating the case. To be the recipient of an honor that’s been bestowed on some of the people who’ve mattered deeply in my life as an SF fan and a writer is simply mind-boggling. To be asked to fill such a position, not just at a Worldcon based for the very first time in the land of saints and scholars and Nobel laureates for literature, a country known around the world for its love of the written and spoken word, but also on my own home ground… is an Amazing thing. Fantastic, even. …And I’m really enjoying it! So my thanks and gratitude go first to the convention committee, and all the people involved in putting me in this unexpected and extraordinary position.

I’ve participated in a fair number of Worldcons in my time, but even at this end of time it’s obvious to me that (from my point of view anyway) this one’s going to blow them all out of the water. Naturally it’s going to be personally satisfying to take part in the events that routinely come with fulfilling a GoH’s responsibilities. And I seriously look forward to getting to know my fellow Guests of Honour, among whom it’s a privilege to be numbered. But what’s going to make this event most special for me is the opportunity to meet and hang out with the many, many people who’ll come to Dublin for the convention, and who’ll partake along the way of the inimitable, hospitable Irish buzz that I firmly believe will make this Worldcon uniquely memorable for everybody.

People who know me online, or in what we laughably think of as Real Life, will know I’ll have a fair bit more to say about this in the days and weeks to come. In the meantime, though, let me just say Thank you again! And I’m looking forward to seeing as many of you as can possibly make it to Dublin in August of 2019.

Now to start stockpiling my share of those hundreds of thousands of welcomes we keep ready for visitors to Ireland. Let’s see: a hundred thousand per visitor, times… what? Five thousand? Six? More?

I look forward to refining my numbers. 🙂

The Dublin 2019 web page: www.dublin2019.com

Dublin 2019 at Facebook: www.facebook.com/dublin2019

At Twitter: @dublin2019 and #Dublin2019

August 12, 2017

Home life Ireland Nature

The Muddy Bath Sheet Blues

by Diane Duane January 14, 2017

I’m about to have a strange conversation with Peter when he wakes up.

DD: That yellow towel in the bathroom? Put it in the wash.

PM: What? Why? It was just washed yesterday.

DD: Yeah, that was before I had to go out and throw it over a swan.

One of the juvenile swans who hang around the pond behind our house somehow got out of the field and into the road, and was walking up and down trying to figure out how to get back where it belonged. A number of casual drivers had pulled up and parked and were waving other traffic away from it while they tried to figure out how to get it to safety.

All the gates to the field were locked and we don’t have any of the keys, so I wound up dropping one of our bath sheets and a blanket that one of the drivers had brought over the swan, wrapping it up well (the wings were my main concern). We were helped by the swan being a bit young and uncertain: by the time it would have started arguing the point, its head was already covered and it couldn’t see what to do – so it went quiet.

I picked it up and carried it to a spot where the fence into the field was low enough to drop it over. At that point some hissing was beginning from inside the bundle, so the timing was right to lean over the fence and shake the swan out of the wrappings. It landed on its feet, waved its wings around a bit and then headed in the general direction of the pond, looking faintly embarrassed but otherwise none the worse for wear.

So the various drivers and I congratulated one another and went about our business. Just another exciting day in the country…

January 14, 2017

Comics Film Home life Ireland Marvel

“So Earth has wizards now.”

by Diane Duane December 2, 2016

Yes, well, so it does. But all the same, when the line came up in a mid-credits scene, I snorted.

After the madness of the weekend and Tuesday and my naughty eye and everything, I did (yesterday evening) something I don’t do all that often: I said to Peter, “I need a day out.” So we prepared to have one.

And looking at the local cinema schedules, I discovered that yesterday was the last day that I was going to be able to see DOCTOR STRANGE – as the Christmas releases here have pushed it out of all but the very biggest multiplexes up near Dublin: and even there, who knows how much longer it might last? And I declined to miss out on a chance at a big-screen viewing for an old friend whose adventures I’ve been following, on and off, since the early 1960s. (And a very odd and mixed history Stephen Strange’s has been. He started out as a filler and went in all kinds of, well, strange directions after that, many of which I loved.) So: to the movies!

And off we went to our neighbor town, Newbridge, Co Kildare, and had lunch: and then we headed for the multiplex in the Whitewater shopping center. It was, as it happens, the very last showing of the film.

Except for us, the cinema was empty. This was hilarious and delightful, as we got to treat the whole place like our living room. P. even said, “Here, let’s spread out like we do on the plane, with a seat between us so we have somewhere to put the popcorn and the drinks.” And I said, “But what if I want to grab you if I get scared?” and he sort of rolled his eyes and said “You haven’t done that since ALIENS in Philly – ” Which is true enough. We clutched each other all through the guts of that movie and then staggered into the bar at The Commissary across the road, and the barman took one look at us and said, “You’ve been to see that movie, haven’t you?” No arguing with that: we were wrecked after that flick.

I didn’t expect anything of the kind, obviously. Anybody who’s been online and breathing between now and October (and cared to know) has easily known the guts of what happens in this movie. But spoilers fortunately don’t bother me. If learning about some one surprise in advance could completely ruin my appreciation of a piece of art, I’d have revealed myself to be a bit of a delicate flower and I don’t know that I’d have much time for myself.

So anyway. Visually: it’s a delightful piece of work. Ditko’s original vision of fragments of what would eventually become part of the Multiverse was honored again and again, to my intense pleasure. (Disclosure: I have been a Doctor Strange fan since the 1960s.) Just the look and feel of the thing makes this by far the trippiest movie in the MCU so far. The Inceptionesque folding-city bits that made the trailers are some of the least impressive stuff. It’s a pity there won’t be an opportunity for me to see this again in 3D, as parts of it would really benefit.

In terms of the script: Of course I’d have written it differently, but to the best of my recollection they didn’t hire me. 🙂 What I saw wasn’t at all bad. In terms of structure it worked for me, by and large; and in terms of slotting the POV and issues of the Strange-verse into the larger MCU, it did very well. It was also repeatedly funny, and not in simple ways like “the wi-fi password. We’re not savages.” It was also really satisfying in the sense of having an ending that involved not merely Blowing Shit Up (though inevitably we got some of that), but of Outsmarting The Big Bad. Always a pleasure for me, and one I’ve used on occasion. (You Young Wizards fans who’ve noticed this as being thematically similar to something that Darryl McAllister does to a fragment of the Lone Power in A Wizard Alone – well, yes, it is. But this is a moderately familiar trope in both fantasy and SF, and way better writers than I have used it over the years.)

Also, as a connoisseur of such things: I really liked the way they handled the various worldgating effects. Very sharp.

A couple of issues that jumped out for me while watching:

(a) Mads Mikkelsen did a better-than-competent job as Kaecilius, but what really got my attention was how much the makeup they’d put on him was bothering his eyes. I felt for him. He’s obviously a trouper and a consummate professional, but GOD he often looked like he was in pain that had nothing to do with characterization.

(b) Rachel McAdams had such a thankless row to hoe in playing Strange’s past-sometimes-lover, sort of a living continuity bridge between past-arrogant-surgeon and present-Sorceror-Supreme-in-training. She gave the part more and better than it deserved.

And as for Cumberbatch: he’s a good match for the canonical look of the character, right out of the box. That he should be able to get to grips with Strange’s character in his normal manner (and of course he has a manner: no news for those who’ve seen him work more than a few times) is a good thing. God knows enough actors would have taken this job, if offered it, whether they thought they could pull it off or not. He did, though, and he did, to this Strange fan’s tastes anyway.

(The one thing I would tease about, slightly, is his New York accent, which – almost certainly due to the vicissitudes of scenes being shot out of cutting order – kind of gets better and worse and BETTER and HILARIOUSLY worse. In one scene he sounds so over-the-top New York Nasal that I was itching to get him some antihistamines. In other scenes he had at least one Manhattan native completely convinced, and oblivious that he might ever have had any other accent.)

…So we’ll see where it all goes from here. The mid-credits sequence apparently suggests some appearance for Strange in THOR: RAGNAROK (and Thor is seen holding a scrap of paper with the Sanctum Sanctorum’s immemorial Bleecker Street address on it in recent shooting). There’s some resonance to this in that Dr. Strange and Thor have often enough run into one another and worked together in the comics continuity. It’ll be interesting to see how the themes introduced here get developed further in other parts of the MCU, and where (and how) Stephen Strange turns up next.

December 2, 2016

Home life Ireland Medicine, nursing, health things that piss you off

The Adventure of the Dexter Eye

by Diane Duane November 27, 2016

I’d have preferred to call it The Adventure of the Sinister Eye because that sounds a lot cooler, but that eye’s not the problem today. (For a change.) I’ve been reading Arthur Conan Doyle this weekend, so let’s think of this as an Adventure for the time being.

The news is that I may or may not have developed a tear in the retina of my right eye. This being the case, one way or another life around here for the next week is about to get lively.

Some of you will have noted from previous posts over this year that I’ve had an ongoing problem with the retina in my left eye. This kind of thing is no surprise with someone who’s (a) over 60 and (b) very very nearsighted: the shape of the eyeball means the retina’s more likely to have trouble staying in place.

Well, this morning I woke up with a shadow in my right eye that has no business being there. It’s not a floater (of which I have plenty). This thing is holding still. (Cue irate fist-shaking at unresponsive ceiling. “THIS IS THE *GOOD(ish)* EYE, DAMMIT!!”)

Now, this being rural Ireland and relatively late on a Sunday, there is not a damn thing I can do that will do any good until tomorrow. I get to hold still until tomorrow morning and call my retinologist in Dublin first thing.

This is all insanely annoying because I’m presently doing the last work on INTERIM ERRANTRY 2, the completed version of which is supposed to launch tomorrow in the Ebooks Direct store to coincide with #CyberMonday. (And I’m still doing the work: sitting here and twitching isn’t going to help anything.)

We’ll see how that goes. But some folks have said they wish they could help. If you’d like to, then the best thing you can do right now is pop over to Ebooks Direct and buy some ebook that you like the look of… as with one thing and another, this is going to get to be an expensive week.

I think I may also have committed to livetweet the Journey To The Eye Doctor. (rolls eyes at self) (gingerly) My eye lady has an office full of nifty equipment, and I bet I can get her to at least give me a .jpg of the back of my retina to share with everybody.

Anyway, let’s all cross our fingers. It might just be something transient and not so bad as a tear. But if it *is* just a tear, there are ways to mend it that are actually office procedures these days. We’ll see how it goes… Starting tomorrow morning, I’ll update this post as we go along. But for the time being I may as well get back to work.

(Oh, and if you’re interested in buying anything, here’s the store’s sale page’s URL. The entire store inventory will appear at the bottom of it: give it a moment to load and then scroll down. Also, if you know someone you think might be interested in the situation [or the sale!] and care to share this with them, please feel free. The sale will be continuing, at the 50%-off-everything level for a little while more.)

http://ebooksdirect.co/…/our-2016-black-friday-cyber-monday…

ETA: And here’s a copy of the post at Facebook that tells what happened next.)

Part 1: What happened to me was (thank all Gods in the neighbourhood) NOT any kind of retinal detachment, vitreous detachment, or similar traumatic damage to the retina. So today’s teaching moment is: even if you are a health care professional (or former one) and expert at Googling For Symptoms, don’t be so sure you know what’s going on.

This means that I’ve dodged this bullet, only to find I’m standing in front of a bigger, slower one.*

Part 2: What seems to have happened to me is a small transient circulatory blockage in the retina. The signature of this event can be seen as what is called over here a “cotton wool spot”. When I scan the pic from the dye photography and post it here later, you’ll see it quite clearly. (This is why my retinologist was very definite with me that she wanted this test done today: this evidence, she says, would likely have vanished within a few weeks.)

This is a herald of other things that are likely going on elsewhere. So over the next couple of weeks I get to go to my GP here and have a full workup of bloods and various other diagnostic procedures, with an eye to ruling in/out a complex of possibilities: circulatory system problems, heart problems, incipient diabetes, plaque, sunspots, you name it. (There are way too many possible causes for this event…) (OKAY, maybe not sunspots.)

There will also need to be a detailed ultrasound of both eyes. Which I get to pay for. (Notwithstanding that the left eye, aka The Bad Wicked Naughty Eye, has been blissfully quiet through all this and is described by the retinologist as “behaving itself just fine”.)

So I’ll be leaving the Ebooks Direct store running in sale mode (50% off everything) for a little while. Thanks again HUGELY to those who by picking up an ebook or so assisted in the day’s events. I was thinking of you all the time. Well, maybe not when I was eating the scone. It was a REALLY GOOD SCONE.) Those who might like to continue to assist with all the other medical stuff that will need to be paid for over December, please feel to nip over to the store’s sale page, which shows our whole inventory, and grab something that you like the look of.

Part 3: So I’m recovering by eating a double portion of calamari at Gotham Cafe in South Anne Street, and sopping up a glass or two of white Cab Sauv. What I would LIKE to do now? Go over to Chez Max by Dublin Castle and MURDER a *steak frites*. What I am GOING to do now? Run over to Asia Market and buy a jug of soy sauce (seriously, how do we go through this shit so fast? I swear Peter drinks it the way he drinks maple syrup), then take the bus home and hug my honey.

Thank you all for accompanying me on this madness. 🙂 More bulletins from the front line as they become available.

(also: later I’ll tell you about how I missed the bus to the clinic. Not NSFW by any means, but possibly TMI. Never mind: if you read my posts you’ve probably signed up for that. Or should know that you have.)

*If you read my work, you know this anyway. But here I’m not speaking of the Slowest Bullet, which hits us all. …Hmm, what a great anthology title..

November 27, 2016

Baking Europe Ireland

It’s not even Halloween yet but I have to do this

by Diane Duane October 22, 2016

My memory was jogged the other day when I was in the local grocery to pick up a couple of things and went down the baking-products aisle. In passing I noticed that all of a sudden there were a whole lot of bags of raisins and currants and chopped nuts and candied fruits piled up. And suddenly I realized that It’s That Time Of Year already — the time when you make fruitcakes and so forth for Christmas, and set them aside to mellow.

In some parts of Ireland Halloween is nothing compared to this event: the Baking of the Fruitcakes. People get very competitive about it. Some of this is less about the cakes themselves than about what you put in them to, uh, preserve them. Sometimes it’s stout: sometimes it’s whiskey. But you have to do this baking in October or the cake and the added ingredients won’t have time to get properly friendly with one another before the holidays.

For those of you who are into such things, this is just meant to serve as a reminder that this is the right time of year to get busy. There are a few good recipes at the European Cuisines website worth recommending here.

This Porter Cake recipe is one. (That’s it in the photo at the top of the post.) A good solid old recipe. This one you put into a cake tin when it’s finished and keep in the fridge until Christmas. (Look in on it occasionally to make sure it’s okay. You might want to add a little more stout as well if it shows any signs of drying. Also: there’s no rule that says you couldn’t add a good Irish whiskey if you felt so inclined.)

Also worthwhile is the Guinness cake here. This one won’t keep quite as long — it’s rated for a week — but it’s worth making closer to the holiday. (Toasted and buttered, it’s fabulous.)

Finally, check out this recipe for Black Bun, which isn’t Irish but is worth investigating for the holidays. “Black bun” isn’t a bun at all: it’s a Scots invention, a fruitcake that goes pretty heavy on the fruit and is held together by a pastry crust. Our recipe for it comes from a vintage 1950s grocers’ supplement that we also keep available as a PDF download for those who’d like the whole complement of seasonal recipes as seen from the Scottish angle. The recipe is laughably light on the whiskey side, but the source pamphlet was published just after rationing stopped in the UK, and almost certainly more modern recipes get a fair amount more whiskey syringed or turkey-bastered into them between baking and eating. Of the three cakes, this one is the champion in terms of keeping qualities: made now and kept properly sealed up, it would keep until well after Hogmanay.

Anyway, take a look at these and see if any of them sound like you’d enjoy them! (makes note to self: when next down at the SuperValu, buy more raisins…)

October 22, 2016

Europe Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Ireland Random musings

The 5 Warning Signs of Autumn (Rural Ireland Edition)

by Diane Duane October 21, 2016

This is about when it begins to happen.

The first part of October can be surprisingly dulcet in lreland, seeming more like an extension of September than anything else. The weather doesn’t often oblige with prolonged, still, modestly-warm periods of the “Indian summer” type, but at least it tends to settle a bit. Later in the month, though, comes the shift, when you know the true autumn is upon you.

Here are five ways to tell autumn has genuinely (in its sneaky way) arrived in the countryside here.

(5) You start hearing “Sure aren’t the [leaf] colors getting lovely” from the neighbors

I should say “neighbours”, really, in this instance. And “colours”. And you know what? They’re okay. (Meaning the colours. The neighbours are far better than okay: they’re brilliant.) But for those of us who come from places with hard winters, the colors are kind of… meh.

The problem comes in two parts: the local flora and the local climate. Even now, with climate change way too well in progress, Ireland hasn’t historically run to cold winters: the Jet Stream has seen to that. (When it’s been where it’s supposed to be, that is, at least judging in terms of the behavior of the last half a millennium or so. And don’t start with me right now if you’re one of those “The recent climate is a blip” people: just go have that conversation somewhere else if you’d be so kind.)

I say no more than necessary here of the godawful winters of 2011 and 2012, which dumped feet of snow all over everything (our little road never did get plowed in 2011, and thank God for our neighbors who would run us down to the shops or bring heating oil up for us in jerrycans to make sure our central wouldn’t conk out, because the fuel trucks couldn’t make it up the hill through the snow) and killed damn near every palm tree in the country. But those would be the serious exception to the rule, and the rule is: mild wet winters with temperatures that only rarely fall below freezing, even here on the high ground, and even then only for short periods.

Which brings us to the flora. Around here we’re short on the kinds of trees that develop great color. No maples here (though we have quite a lot of sycamore (the species is invasive, and has crowded out some of the trees that used to be more prevalent). Most of the rest of what we’ve got locally is oak and beech — a lot of beech. So the available colors are pretty much brown and yellow, with a bit of soft orange. And since what it takes to trigger the leaf chemistry that develops into dramatic autumn color is relatively cold weather, drama is pretty much what Irish autumn color lacks in a normal year. It’s nothing like the eye-vibrating yellows and reds that you can get on the East Coast of the US in autumn, even in the suburbs.

So our neighbors’ cries of delight leave me a little underwhelmed. After a few decades of practice I now find it possible to not immediately segue into mutters of “Are you kidding, this is nothing on Vermont, or even the Catskills…” and so on. But it’s a trial.

Well, this too will pass. And I’m not speaking figuratively, as in places up here the leaves are already saying “The hell with this, I’m done” and coming off the trees almost before they’re finishing acquiring what modest color they’re going to get. (Peter’s line is that there are only sixty days in a year when the beech trees surrounding us are not dropping their leaves. Sometimes I think he has a point.)

(4) Waking up the central heating

You wake up in the morning to find that too-familiar condensation inside those windows in the house that aren’t double-glazed, and say, “Uh oh. Time to turn it on…” For much of the year (in recent years) it seemed like sort of a game to see how long you could go without needing the central. Then fuel prices dropped and there was just a shade less virtue in gritting your teeth and Not Using Up The Oil. Now, though, you start doing calculations of whether you want to get the guys up for a delivery, or wait a bit longer and pay some other bill instead. The Lesser Calculus of Climate…

(3) Bed socks become a thing

Even with a good heavy duvet and a warm husband/wife/other, feet can get surprisingly cold without warning, these nights (especially when #4 hasn’t yet shifted to “oh go ahead, turn it on for a bit”). Or maybe you just run to cold feet normally, and taking the easy way out and shoving them up against a nice warm bit of your nice warm partner is not, um, particularly appreciated. So: time for the bed socks.

And then you go searching for them. But where the hell are they? You want the good ones, the soft fluffy ones that came from Marks & Spencer. Except they’re black, like an alarming amount of other clothing around this household, and therefore God Herself only knows where they are in a closet that’s full of black things already. And the ones you do find are those crap thermal socks from last year, the ones that were OK until you washed them. And they’re hot pink. Oh God what possessed you. “Where are the Marks ones!” the cry goes up. And Echo answereth not. Maybe you’ll find them by spring. Wait, is this a black one? Oh no, wait, it’s one of those ones with the rubber nonslip ribbing on the soles. And anyway, there’s only one of them; the other is missing. (And the rubber is hot pink. What were you thinking? Another question for the ages.)

Finally you just put on whatever you can find. Because, seriously, no one in their right mind would walk barefoot on the tiles in the kitchen, the way they’re feeling at the moment. And it’s only going to get worse.

(2) The sweaters / jumpers / pullies come out

In the Spring you folded them up and shoved them right to the back of the drawers / closet shelves. But now, especially if the conditions mentioned in #4 remain as yet unaltered, they’re starting to look awfully good. And admit it, when you were in town the other day you looked in the store windows in Grafton Street and began to lust after some of the sweaters you saw there. Not to mention the cashmere in the Hermès boutique in Brown Thomas. Insanity even to think of it at those prices, but it looked so lush. (Never mind. The wannabe-cashmere from Marks is still quite nice. In fact, you have some of that. Go put it on right now and then go on downstairs and make some tea.)

And finally and possibly most diagnostic of all around here:

(1) Microwaving the butter

Summer in Ireland is when you don’t have to microwave the butter after it’s been out on the counter all night.

But summer routinely doesn’t last long. And eventually one morning you realize that the toast would get torn to shreds by butter in the consistency it has at the moment. That’s when you know: Yes, autumn is truly here.

Ten seconds is about right for our present microwave. (Our old fan oven-microwave would let us do five, but alas it hasn’t been replaced as yet.) …At least you know by now how long it needs to hit that magic point between not-quite-enough-to-spread-yet and WHOOPS, okay, I’ll make some pasta con aglio-olio-e-peperoncini and pour this in it.

…And now you can butter your toast, and sit down and have your tea, and think about whether or not you really want to turn on the central.

October 21, 2016

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