Ar Wahan's home office water cooler

(taken by spouse)

The icon, by the way, is a warning sign there to tell people to keep away from the edge...

            We were greeted at the door of our Corofin B&B (http://www.familyhomes.ie/view_more.php?id=141 ) by Paula, a warm and welcoming woman who showed us our rooms, and apologized for having to leave us to run an errand.

            In our room, I gratefully pulled off my still-sloshing riding shoes (from the crossing of Lough Graney) and changed into dry clothing. As I poked my head out the door, I heard a man greeting new arrivals. “I’m Patrick,” he said.

I went toward him down the hall. “I have a Patrick, too!

I gave myself the day off today, even though that means I'll need to work some this weekend. Physically I wasn't feeling all that great, and shopping for things needful and unneedful was a nice, mindless alternative.

I picked up the diploma my great-grandfather received in 1880 from medical school. It had been rolled up for who knows how long (before I inherited it, certainly). Michael's had a 50% off coupon for framing a few weeks ago, and I took it in then. They did a nice job. Preservation glass and finish, 3/16 acid free fitting, etc. The framer apologized for the fact that the sheepskin (? I think it may be sheepskin, not paper) was not quite square within the frame, but I reminded him that I'd told him it wasn't square to start with!

Then I went to Barnes & Noble (in the same mall) and picked up Let's Go: Ireland on a Budget and Fodor's Ireland 2007. I used the Let's Go book for the United Kingdom when I went over in 1986, and it was wonderful. But the Fodor's will have more current information. (Our trip is getting real, folks -- I sent in the deposit today, too!)

Then off to Staples, for file folders. I'd run out, which made clearing out my piles of stuff in my office and putting them into my file cabinet kind of difficult impossible.

Now it is snowing (not much accumulation expected), and spouse has a fire going in the wood stove. I'm going to make tostadas tonight, using the bits of turkey that were frozen after Thanksgiving.

Last night I went to a Stained Glass Windows committee meeting. I'd been in touch with a fellow I met at the UU Northeast Leadership School in 2003 -- he's a minister in Watertown who taught the UU History/Theology segment. He is a delight. He's been helping me try to ID the people that  the Tiffany and La Farge windows are dedicated to, and I thought he might be a great speaker for our public lecture series. Just emailed him with some dates, to see if he is available for one of them (he'd said he might be interested). So we are making some progress.

And finally, I got flamed by a stranger (to me) for a comment I made in someone else's journal. That hasn't happened to me before, and it was startling. I realized afterward that the person was probably assuming that I was a generation younger than I am. It is a fact of life for people my age that their grandparents are most likely dead, unless they are the odd 114-year-old, and that parents may well be. When I mentioned that my biological family was dead, I was accused of seeking pity and "OMFG BBQ!" All I was saying was, to assert that a person's inlaws are not "really" your family is silly.

Ah, well. The flamer was born the year I graduated from high school. He is seeing life from a very different vantage. If he thought I was a contemporary, I can see how he may have thought I was looking for a pity party.

Nope. Just stating the facts, sir.

Then again, having blabbed all that, maybe I was taking a tongue-in-cheek comment too seriously. The whole post was about an overheard cell phone conversation in which an obnoxious bus rider was saying that her roommate was just trying to get people to feel sorry for her because her fiance's grandmother had died, and clearly, that didn't make the grandmother family.

*sigh*

We're going to