Checking In

A non post really, a timestamp with carelessly selected decorations to hang off the hooks.

Eadie and Dee Dee of Grey Gardens

One of the reasons I'm not posting so much is that my camera is in uberfritz, kaka bang-bang. The dreaded Er99 Shooting Is Not Possible message. Turning out some pretty interesting shots though.

Whats up Chupa Chup!? Whoa Whoa Whoa :)

M is enjoying the final few weeks as a stay at home mother and the girls' diaries are chock a bloc full of back garden activities....

Wa'sholie and Chupa Chup at a recent Members Only Teddy Bear's Picnic

Leisurin'. D Style.

Brunch (not pictured)

D recently had a horrific 7 day bug which completely floored her and from which she's still recovering. And for a developmental check-in with our youngest daughter, S is waving HI! (but oddly not bye bye) , singing along to the raucous in-car family favourites, and while not crawling yet, is perfecting her deterministic directional "rolling" which ain't pretty but is ruthlessly effective. Eventually.


Looking forward to our bank holiday and the family friendly camping trip up at the cabin next weekend. Hope we get the weather and everyone can make it. Started studying again so my minimal reading time will most likely get absorbed by the pages of doorstop textbooks, deadlines, spreadsheets and regular assignments. Here's what I read recently while I had the chance.


Didn't think much of Kavalier and Clay but I'm thinking I'll re-read it on the basis of this. Great writing in nice edible chunks suits me at the moment. And this is a collection of, at times, truly illuminating and always entertaining observations expertly delivered on the male condition.


A novel comprised of multiple short stories, unrelated except for the presence, real or implicit of Olive. Nice.

Dark, precise, random subject matter, leaves you with a bizarre taste in your mouth.

Heavy Bongos.

And now for a bedsit-experimentalist trip down Sallymount Avenue....I bought these two albums together when they came out (in 1996 according to the release dates). I was listening to one of the two recently and kept getting images of the other, both visual and aural. It still amazes me how attentive to and retentive of detail my brain is when it comes to anything related to music while with everything else I'm like a slow learner goldfish. Anyway - 2 great albums, both completely instrumental, different worlds in terms of mood and atmosphere, but with complimentary album covers of similar of baby blue hue, which is probably why they were bought together in the one bout of instant consumer gratification in the one physical record store. I need to go real world record shopping more. Expect a representin' on the Christmas Countdown. Being a parent is nothing like Music For Babies lead me to expect.



We've also this week re-entered the world of feature film viewing, joined a video store and are in the process of playing catchup for the past 7 years of zero discerning visual stimulation..........



One of our very first dates was going to see Three Colors: Red in the old Lighthouse cinema on Abbey Street. And while the Pat Spillane Tan of the boyo above may also provide a literal parallel (more closely to Three Colors: White maybe), youtube was always going to be a pale substitute for quality feature films.

another one of those weekends

Happy Easter

Geology Vs Technology

Strange and busy times. First off, a big congratulations to Louise and Stephen on the recent birth of their daughter Anna.


We took time out to try out our new tent for real this week. We're still struggling to come to terms with many, many aspects of family camping. When is a bathtub floor not a bathtub floor, when exactly is the mesh wall required, how in God's name does a double zipper work? By the time we've perfected it no doubt the girls will have discovered electronic communications with boys and will refuse to accompany us on trips where uneccessary inconveniences like mountains and bodies of water interfere with the efficient functioning of their 1G Personal Telepathy Transmitters (Late Late Toy Show 2015).

Next Generation A-Frame Hotel Astra

We've discovered that D for example swims heats of the ladies 200m freestyle individual medley in her sleep, complete with explosive starts in random directions. And she does not stay in lane. Off the grid, off the path, off the thermarest. It reminded me of years ago in a friend's house when I witnessed an old retired greyhound relive the glory days of his racing career while asleep by the fire in a family sitting room, lying on its side with its tongue hanging out and its legs frenetically stepping out the final yards of a particularly closely fought Greyhound Sweepstakes (televised). That was highly entertaining stuff. D's aquatic somnabulance (call the ambulance!) was slightly less entertaining in a fully occupied, dark and cold tent.

Molly Polly Wa'sholie Dolly Blankie Dodo Mumsy "Bobos" Murchúcú (not shot in the tent)

S, when she finds herself in a gale, in complete darkness with the ambient sounds of the women's 200m freestyle heats taking place in the nearby river (with wild animals calving on the riverbank) tends to panic a wee bit and comfort drinks like a Las Vegas Showgirl - but only when her body temperature goes below a certain critical point. I've heard of adventurers in cold climates requiring the services of sherpas but never wet nurses. I'm not sure if you can buy multi layered feeding thermals or Breast Milk flavoured Power Bars but we're going to investigate online (careful now). I think teeth (plural) may be a pre-requisite to achieving maximum refreshment from Power Bars though.

Boliviana Soybean

We got to about 1am at which point we were all wide awake in a state of advanced Puffy Smushins and retired en masse to the warmth of the cabin where it took us another 2 hours to regain a restful state. But we did it, baby steps and all. We'll be a long time training for Annapurna at this rate.

Family Camping : Fly On The Wall Perspective

My Name's Wa'sholie.... And I'm Your Friend :)

Random Early Rehearsals For The Late Late Toy Show, Cow As Bryan Tubridy

"Come away oh human child to the wilds'a Wickala"

Happy Val Dillon Day

Just after breakfast with the girls on V Day.

Giraffe Hearts for Starters

On this the weekend where S got her Tripp Trapp from the postman and we had to arrange the whole place to accommodate another little human at the dinner table.
So Happy V Day people.

And remember, aside from a good pension.....

From the aforementioned Charting The Beatles Flickr Photostream

This Is Nuts - Danderson Cooper

This is even nutser... CNN is the last place I though I'd see these guys http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/indie.asia/

And finally, from a project called Charting the Beatles this fascinating graphic :

Upsidedown Crown One Second At A Time

The Wait

The Cake Watch

No Touch, One Second At A Time

Finally

D's Déja Vu Face

Upsidedown Crown From The Time Travel

Next!

The Hundredth Post

...and nothing to report. Preparing hard for the Terrible Twos. It's D's 2nd (or sixth - depending on who you ask) birthday this week and preparations are in full swing. We were hoping to go low key with this one but you know how things tend to ......spiral. We've already confirmed the funk band. Throughout the afternoon the cousins will be performing hornpipes in fancy dress on the back of a truck (we're awaiting a callback from the Tulla Céilí band). There'll be coleslaw contests, we've hired 3 bouncy castles, a bouncy semi-D, a marquee, a helium baloon artist, an anti-freeze splashpool, a florist, a face painter and decorator, a dark chap who does things with handkerchiefs, a tightrope walker (specialises in clothes lines), a 22 piece marching band to wander around the estate drawing attention to our invite only little event (neighbours can look but will not be fed or have access to any of the bouncy objects), oh and a full strength Macnas will be mingling with the guests throughout the day taking requests. I hope we get the weather. The chocolate fountain tends to become troublesome in a gale. Speaking of weather related activities, disappointingly "Kilts on Stilts" cancelled once they heard Macnas were coming. We're struggling to think of who to get as a replacement to light the 20ft wicker man at dusk. S is getting into the spirit of things by having her head waxed on Friday as she's a small bit sensitive about the wisps. D and chums will arrive in a pink princess themed limousine. We wanted her to arrive in a hot air balloon but the event management company told us to get fucked - the back garden didn't have the required physical area to make a good landing target.... especially with the marquee, bouncy castles and highly unpredictable sugar buzzed entropic chums. Simply not safe.

I really hope we haven't tried to squeeze too much in. Last thing we want is little Dee Dee getting overwhelmed and becoming aggressive.



Books and Music did rain down from a height for a very long time following my spend-it-all-in-the-one-shop Christmas Voucher splurge. I'm systematically working through loads of new music and a years worth of quality reading awaits.

Read this in 2 train trips. Worth a read, won't change your life.

Very interesting, very accessible but a small bit too cut and dried for my cynical mind.

Really enjoying this. Quality writing and a beautiful edition. I'll let you know how it ends up.

And to mark this momentous 100th post milestone, below is a mindless bit of trivia : verbatim, the top search terms which landed many disoriented randomers on these very pages.

1. hollowsolid
2. thurston jazzmaster
3. hollowsolid + blog
4. hollowsolid.blogspot
5. "i made you a present, you never expected"
6. "rick white album" site:blogspot.com
7. "wait.think.fast
8. "yellow avensis"
9. bariloche "bencina blanca"
10. buenos aires new year obelisca
11. cho cho hey beep beep
12. ernesto djedje 320
13. how to. make pipe bombs from from canada
14. if your gonna be a broke little bunny
15. s doc
16. wipers "i'll be around" blogspot
17. "dee dee" bowerbirds lyrics
EDIT : updated
18. lyric's of song about henery sheflin
19. stephen shore
20. peat muppets
21. site:http://hollowsolid.blogspot.com frozen
22. call,beep bloom possible! slova
23. alo donegan
24. dan boekner up all night
25. geese the national beverly road sampled
26. nearlymeat
EDIT: Further Updated
28. spiderland slint
29. snow leopard beep casuale
30. frog noise riddip
31. ballyfair
32. blogspot first dance song bon iver
33. daniel johnston wallpaper
34. hayden "home by saturday"
35. wet/oily floor pictures
36. isaac brock living in a condemned home
37. midlake sg vox
38. birkenstock buckle clicking noise
39. the barr brothers
40. schmitten outside disco
EDIT : Addendum Sept 2011
41. anne doyle
42. mellon collie and the infinite sadness wallpaper
"43. loosen the dung"
44. andes mt deadly road
45. ben gibbard home
47. josh homme ginger elvis
48. malcolm x camping
49. thing 1 thing 2
50. you are my happy ending


We had a terrible job finding bencina blanca in Bariloche aswell. Yellow Avensis indeed.

Merry New Year

New Year's Eve turned out not quite as we'd planned it. We were due to stay in the cabin up the mountains in the woods by the river. We loaded up the car with a couple of days worth of food, made our way up the mountains assisting several snow bound motorists out of our way and got there (we actually made it) to find the electricty was gone. Electricity should be optional in a cabin up the mountains in the woods by the river in a snowstorm but not when you have a 4 month old and a 22 month old and temperatures were predicted to fall to as low as minus 6. So we had to turn around and travel the same treacherously dicey roads home. Not before our raclette ended up sliding down a hill in the snow (we had to unload the contents of the boot to access the tow hook), I earned a sports injury assisting a fellow motorist out of a snowdrift and we ended up having to be pulled out of a ditch by adrenaline junkies with winches. But we made it safely home in time to celebrate new years with a dinner cooked on the raclette, which was in surprisingly good form considering the abuse it took earlier in the day. Quote of the day "Conor Faughnan has just been on de rayydio sayin' that the Sally Gap is impassable.... fuckin' right it is!" from the guy who pulled us out of the ditch :)

Happy New Year to all. May you all receive liberal sprinkles of 10-10-20 on your 2010, the thing that brings the bringer of things.

In other news, a rare sighting of a Sasquatch was captured on film this New Year's Day...


On that eerie and chilling note, we'll sign off on 2009. Oíche mhaith agus chodladh samh.

Balloons for Dee Dee

From the movie "Up"

Ironing To Fix Latching

We just had a very impromptu get together of old friends, the kind that doesn't happen very often and generally happens more by accident than design. Christmas is always a good time for these gatherings when people are home and their food and wine guards are down a little. There seem to be more and more additions to each of these as they happen in the form of baldy babas. Linda and Siamak also announced they had gotten married recently :) Best news we've heard in a long time so big congratulations to them. Great to see everyone and great to see everyone in such good form. I have some photos but to save the blushes of all involved I won't publish them - let me know if you want to see them and I'll mail them to you directly. A quick plug for Nora's website : http://www.walnutbooks.com/ a great place to go to buy great books. Check it out.

My Grandad

This little lady is really coming into her own. She's gone all solid and sturdy, she smiles at anything that moves and has one of the most pleasant personalities I've ever met. She's recently found her voice, her belly laugh and her hands and has spent most of the Christmas holidays either playing woozy-dextrously with her little grab toy she got from Santa or shoving her fist in her mouth to self soothe. The photo above was taken on the morning of her christening as she awaited the arrival of her gown. Someone said that they have a bajillion photos of their first child and none of their second. I'm trying real hard not to let that happen but it is indeed a struggle. I heard an interesting quote on the wireless over the Christmas break where someone said that while having one child will turn your life upside down, there was no difference between having 2 kids and 9 kids. With 2 children (or 9), while you attend to one, the other(s) tear the place apart. Speaking of tearing the place apart....


Here's D doing a wooden toy | wooden figure mashup on Christmas day. When asked why the 3 kings and Mary had been loaded up onto the back of a truck she said they were going to the shop. What for we enquired - what could be important enough to drag them out on bad roads on the most important day of their little wooden, molded-for-purpose lives.....? To buy milk was the response. Milk and toast. Baby Jesus must have had latching issues. Imagine calling to a modern maternity ward to visit a newborn and mother with the ever practical gifts of gold frankincense and myrrh. You'd probably be sent off immediately to get something more useful like a Hello magazine or ....milk. Yesterday she had her ironing board and little wooden iron and was ironing the tiny wooden Jesus. No idea what was going through her head on that one but I'm liking her take on conventional religion.


Got some really good feedback for the CDs which a lot of you received recently, so thanks for that. I've been grabbing loads of new stuff from the short lived "best of" blogs and I've ordered tonnes of CDs from Amaxon with the kindly received birthday and Christmas vouchers so I'll be busy between places in January filtering out the peanuts from the shit. Can't wait.