C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 68

Recent Reads: The Long Earth

I’ve read the four available books in Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter’s Long Earth series in the past couple weeks, going so far as to break my “no e-books over 9.99″ rule, which appears to have held right up until the point that I wanted something that cost more than that. :)

I’ve found them pretty satisfying, obviously, or I wouldn’t have read four of them in…mostly a week. They’re about the discovery, or rather, the consequences of the discovery, of parallel earths (referred to collective...

pajama day

Yesterday was a pajama day. After all the moving and the party and the pox we were exhausted, and then our silly child got up at 6:20 in the morning. I got up with him and tried to read while he watched tv, but about 9am I fell asleep reading and crawled onto the couch and pulled a pillow over my head and only woke up enough to mumble, “Yes, you can watch that,” every time he asked about something (once it was something I hadn’t let him watch before but I was too tired to argue, and he said,...

a warm house

The housewarming party went really well yesterday. Most people were able to attend despite the poxy child, and in a fortuitous combination of good weather and me just not being up to trying to otherwise entertain said poxy child, basically the adults spent the entire afternoon and evening outside in the vast, beautiful back garden while the kids alternated between watching TV, running around, and reading graphic novels. Normally I wouldn’t let them have the TV on, but…yeah. This time they got...

a comedy of errors

To top it all off, Young Indiana has come down with the chicken pox. @.@

I had been certain he’d been immunized against it, but the HSE website says they don’t habitually use the chicken pox vaccine in Ireland. Ted was getting him ready for a shower this morning and said, “Caaaatie? Indy has spots…” And yes. Yes he did. Ten or fifteen of them. Many just looked like bug bites or something, perhaps, but there was one in particular that looked very chicken poxy. We asked if he was itchy, and he...

insult to injury

You know how in the last blog post I said there was insult added to injury regarding the bookcase?

It got worse.

I thought, well, I can’t possibly finish anything if I don’t put the new bookcase together, so I got ready to do that and I opened the first box and…both the long sides were broken clean through, a foot from the end.

I had noticed when we collected it at the store that one end of the box was floppy, but c’mon, it’s flat-pack. There’s weird packing in flat-pack all the time. I just...

completely defeated

I give up.

So the whole saga is that I’m trying to get boards cut for shelves for the new house. I called a place yesterday to see if they had any, but the ones they had on the website were only available in the UK. “But!” the young woman I spoke to said, “we can cut them for you!”

I said, “You *do* that?” and she said “Yes!” and so last night I made a pattern for the complicated one and got measurements for the others and we all went out to the shop, where a lady looked terribly dismayed and...

getting there

I’m down to about a dozen Moving Guys boxes, which all need to be emptied out so the Moving Guys can come get them again. Actually, we have quite a few left over from the last move, so the goal is now to give them not only the ones they brought this time, but also all the others. Technically I only have to empty 3 more small boxes and we’ve got enough to send back. But dammit, this time I am Unpacking All The Boxes.

I found the PERFECT SHELVES to fit into one of our kitchen closets. Unfortuna...

Kitchen Illusion

So the thing about Irish houses is they mostly have laundry facilities in the kitchen. This is because even up until about five years ago, “all mod cons” — all modern conveniences, including, say, a washing machine (but not a tumble dryer; those are more than Modern Conveniences) — were stil fancy enough to be mentioned in house ads, and most of those Mod Cons ended up in the kitchen because it’s where the running water was.

We spent the first 3 days in this house with our 6′ butcher block a...

The Long Room

Our living room is about 20 feet long, and will contain the dining table when we’re done, so it will henceforth (at least in these hallowed pages) be referred to as the Long Room.

The living room half of the Long Room is pretty well sorted now:

(For the record, Young Indiana’s leg is not strangely deformed, it’s just the photo is a panorama and he moved while I was taking it. :))

It and our bedroom are about the only two spaces that can be considered pretty well sorted thus far. The back ha...

in & out

We are, after a very tiring day of cleaning, out of the Dublin house. It took longer than we hoped, but it’s clean and we’re out, so that’s that. Done and dusted. The woman at the post office, the guy at the corner shop, and various others all expressed surprise and dismay that we were moving away, generally couched in terms of a horrified, “*Drogheda*?” followed by, “Oh, well, that’s not so bad,” when informed that Ted works in Swords which isn’t too bad a drive from Drogheda.

So we’re back...