Jaysis Jaffa Cakes

....and I was doing so well.

Shakers Quakers and Cookie Makers

One

Well that year flew. Yesterday was D's first birthday. After a hectic schedule which involved her being awoken at 630 to the sound of her deranged parents singing Happy Birthday, her first over 1's disco (early doors, no bar, no boys and no skulling Calpol down the back), a quick kip and a valet, and an afternoon spent entertaining all of her aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and God parents, D can be said to have officially arrived on the busy toddler's social circuit. We sang her happy birthday repeatedly during the day - as she seemed to enjoy it so much. We eventually got a happy birthday text from next door who must have thought we were sending them subtle reminders.

The quick once over before her guests arrive

M went all out as usual and made not just one, but 2! amazing chocolate birthday cakes. She also fed an army of 25 of the above mentioned relatives with tasty parp parp.

Fireside Story Telling

D was the perfect hostess despite the madness going on all around her. She did very well on the present front aswell. Her grandad John M got her a beautiful corduroy rocking horse which she knocked great sport out of. We had an impromptu under 3s gymkhana in the sitting room as all of the kids tried to outdo each other on the horse. A and N got her a gorgeous Shaker doll's house. Doll house making is an interesting line of work for a religious organisation but I suppose they have to occupy themselves somehow while the wait for the "second appearing". We got her a colourful wooden bumbling tower, her own shopping basket and a cow on wheels.......gifts which I've just realised dont look nearly as good on paper as quaker doll houses and corduroy ponies. But D is definitely pretending to love them.

The stark realisation....


Conor on the prowl "Any spare chocolate stuff.....Or kisses?"

The wind down

Thanks to all for coming and making little D's first birthday really special. And thanks on D's behalf for all the amazing and extremely thoughtful gifts. She doesn't know it yet but she has enough books, toys and clothes to last her til her next birthday so she won't be seeing the inside of a toyshop until 2010 :)

Peat Muppets

Looking forward to this. Nice poster too.

Couldn't find a decent poster for the Wolf Parade gig on Saturday night but this'll do.

Solid Halloween

Maeve went all out for D's first Halloween. Pumpkin Pie, Pumpkin Soup, Pumpkin Muffins, Spooky Plates, Cobwebs...... even blood after she nearly cut her hand off carving a Jack-O-Lantern (Shamone!).

She also built D a really impressive and unbelievably scary honeybee outfit from scratch.....





So happy halloween to all souls, disembodied and disguised.

Hans Vans Shannon

Van's Shannons

Got a visit from Madame Linane Shannon last week. Great to see her and great to see her in such good form. And there's congratulations afoot aswell - Linda and Siamak are expecting! Or Linda is having a baby for Siamak. Or with Siamak. Or by Siamak. Hans, by Siamak

--> -->® So we spent hours talking about what to expect while expecting. But it's pretty pointless when you consider that we could never in out wildest dreams have expected....... this :


or........this:



We've discovered that I have a photographic memory..... in that I need photographs to remember anything. My memory is deeply dysfunctional. I never remember dreams, I can watch a movie a month after seeing it for the first time and still be surprised by the plot twists. I meet people I went to school with and don't remember their names. M asked me recently what were the favourite bits from my primary school years and I couldn't remember....... anything. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I went to national school in Caragh. I'm pretty good with music though, setlists, lyrics, what kind of guitar the guy from that band was playing for that song in Whelans etc. But it's interesting living with someone who remembers her childhood in such extraordinarily vivid detail and can relate stories about 100 acre fields and going picking mushrooms as a five or six year old and the way one of her teachers used to pick his headscabs and flick them across the classroom. Whereas I need flash cards to remind me where I went to school and who was in my class. Google can't help you restore memories. Speaking of Google and memories - be very afraid of the cloud. I recently lost a huge and very detailed To Do list stored on Google Notebook. I depend on lists because my memory is so deficient so when I dump my brain into the cloud and the cloud swallows it without trace or excuse, it's a very bad thing. After the feeling of utter panic - what do i do next? what am i supposed to be doing now? the profound stillness in my brain engulfed me and I was simultaneously terrified and relieved. I was on a PM course recently and the guy was talking about time management and more specifically about keeping your inbox clean and he suggested a method for freeing up a lot of your time which he called "Extreme Time Management". Pick out what you consider to be the 10 most important emails in your inbox and delete everything else. Anything that was important will come back to you. An interesting approach. Well I never got the chance to bargain with the cloud. Remember this: you cannot bargain with the cloud. The cloud does not have a conscience. The cloud does not have a complaints commission or an Arthur Murphy's Mailbag. You cannot "talk to Joe" if the cloud fucks you over. Jesus Saves. Nimbus does not. A big part of the reason why I semi-maintain this blog is not for the edification of the hordes of avid readers (including no doubt all of my old school friends). It's primarily a words and picture tool for me to remember stuff. Remind me to remember to back it up aswell so the if the cloud does eat my homework, I wont get in trouble with that teacher with the headscabs.

A photographic memory

We all spent last weekend in the lovely Gaillimh with Gill Graham and Ava. I've heard of mate dates and double dates. But not until my very own family came along would I ever have considered a family date. We hung out in the city, got rained on, ate all around us, went to the beach, had some surf'n'turf' and turf'n'turf, killed the music industry by swapping loads of music, went proper drinking (well, the lads did anyways) with Martini (more than 2 beers is proper drinking for me these days), met people called Gugai, Elton and Smithy and heard all about the Camino de Santiago. Then we topped it all off with the shortest ever walk on the prom in Salthill where Ava told a G4 type lady with a very obviously adopted son that her dog's tongue looked like ham. The woman asked her what age she was and Ava promptly replied, very sincerely, "A-V-A". So great crack. Preparations are well under way for the wedding of the year in Siena. I'm reliably informed that the squat test has been done on both the suit and the dress and we all cant wait to get down to the business of a week long wedding.

Work has kicked off in a big way. Loads of overtime and working weekends, the only positive being the Summer we're having weatherwise. Hence the reason why I haven't been around much. We've been given an impossible to hit deadline after over a year of doing not very much. The most bizarre project I've ever been on from a planning perspective. The current analogy of our task doing the rounds in the team is that we're building an aeroplane while we're flying from plans that are constantly changing. My catchphrase has become "My indecision is final". Not pleasant. But all experience is good experience and I'm sure we'll deliver something usable. Problem is the launch date has been set/pulled out of the air for the week we're away at Gill and Graham and Ava's wedding in Italia :| I'll really need to ensure that the squat test is also performed on the system prior to my departure.

A reminder to go walking more, when the weather clears up and when things calm down

And finally I was listening to John Walshe being interviewed and he mentioned something about one of his relatives, an old dear who listened to Val Dounican's radio show religiously and hatched a plan to knit Val a sweater with his initials on it......... Bless.

D and Aunty Linda

Malcolm X goes to Mecca

...and the Ks go camping.

So I'm reading Malcolm X's autobiography and it's pretty fascinating for the insight it offers into the background and reasoning of one of the great American anti heros. I was sitting waiting for the train to pull out of Heuston the other evening, leafing through the pages, trying to find where I'd left off - the book has the following image on its cover :


....when 3 burly Nigerians from Portlaoise hopped in beside me. What do you do? Malcolm Little (for that is his less than intimidating real name) throughout the book refers to all white people as "the white devil" and holds an incredibly unflattering candle up to 400 years of relations between white and black Americans and preached separation, neither segregation nor integration, of blacks from whites. What the parallels were between me, these fellas (who had apparently distributed equally a half moxy measure of talc between them prior to boarding the train) and black power is unclear but I know I felt slightly uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to place the book on its cover with the spine facing me and to press pause on the Beastie Boys soundtrack on my earphones. The original white devils.

There's some strange passages in the book one of which describes Malcolm and some muslims congregating in a cockpit of a plane bound for Mecca. I find it funny in a quaint it-could-never-happen-today kind of a way.......

"The captain of the plane came back to meet me. He was an Egyptian, his complexion was darker than mine; he could have walked in Harlem and no one would have given him a second glance. He was delighted to meet an American Muslim. When he invited me to visit the cockpit I jumped at the chance. The co pilot was darker than he was. I can't tell you the feeling it gave me. I had never seen a black man flying a jet. The instrument panel : no one ever could know what all of those dials meant! Both of the pilots were smiling at me, treating me with the same honour and respect that I had received ever since I left America. I stood there looking through the glass at the sky ahead of us. In America I had ridden in more planes than probably any other negro, and I never had been up into the cockpit. And there I was with two Muslim seatmates, one from Egypt, the other from Arabia, all of us bound for Mecca with me in the pilots' cabin. Brother I knew Allah was with me."

And in the long introduction where it describes how his home is burned to the ground and its devestating effects on his family, it ends with the standalone "Malcolm X did not have fire insurance"........a warning to all of us but kind of jarring in the context of an assasinated 60s political historical figure who preached black power.

But an excellent read for all it's bizarreness.

On a completely unrelated note and much closer to home, (literally in our back yard) we went camping last weekend and baba took to it like a duck to water.


So now we know she's able for it we just need the weather to improve and we'll be on the road again :)

good to see that In-Tent Orange Glow back on the blog :)

Skangers'n'Everythin

Radiohead recently ran an online remix contest. People like Thomas Dolby and Holy Fuck submitted entries but THIS is far and away the most interesting - press play on the video in the link and be patient, it only kicks in after about a minute. Some guy sampled a load of old noises from obsolete hardware - dot matrix printers, hard disks, a specrum computer and a scanner on bass and ingeniously pulled them together and came up with something very tasty. And he made a video for it.

All The Pretty Horses

Just finished reading the Border Trilogy, 3 novels for the price of two and a half from Cormac McCarthy. 1100 pages in less than 2 weeks - a record for this slow learner. Anyways. It's an absolutely amazing read. One of the most eloquently written and touching and desperately sad and beautiful books I have never put down. Buy it, read it, get blown away.

"Baba Power!" A gorgeous photo of a sleeping D taken by M.

And in other news, baba is well on her way to becoming a civilized member of society. Last week she took delivery of a new high chair and now dines on all manner of puréed exotic fruit from her position at the head of the table. Her throughput has increased exponentially however so until she learns how to properly use the Water Closet, civilized society can wait.

D It Is Then

Baby D

Mammy and Baby having their first tiff


and 1 final baby photo (with the eyes open)

I'm In Love With A Girl.....

Honestly the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. Born 31st January 2008, 20:18, 8lb 12 oz, 10 days late but that's OK cos she's perfect.

We're still working on a name that'll do her justice..... "Busby" probably won't do :)