winter winds

Wow, what a howl. The winter winds were howling like some scene from a cheesy horror flick, and they went on and on all night long. Low howls from the wind curling around the walls, high-pitched whistles as it blows past the window sill cracks, whorls blowing over the chimney playing it like a beer bottle, and more. I'd never heard anything like it before moving here, but it's becoming fairly routine now. This time it persisted for about four days. It keeps Xan awake at night, but i just feel even more secure, all snuggled and protected from the elements. It can huff and puff all it wants, it isn't going to blow my house down, being made of brick and stone.

The occasional patches of rain sounded like sand hitting the windows. I haven't tried walking in that yet, but i'm pretty sure it won't crack my top ten list of favourite types of rain...

I have, however, had to walk against the wind on some mornings. It isn't too bad, really, provided you have solid footing, and put your shoulder into it. Of course, that makes it trickier to dodge the flying debris from construction sites. [You might think i'm exaggerating -- unless you're from here, in which case you might think i'm using understatement just to be funny.]

driving in a parallel universe

Yesterday and today i drove on the left side of the road. That was both not as bad and far worse than i ever imagined.

It isn't that everything is backwards. No no, nothing as simple as that. It's that exactly *half* of everything is backwards. For example, at an uncontrolled intersection you still yield to the guy on the right, not the left. The gas pedal is on the right of the brake pedal, but the signal light is on the right side of the steering column instead of the left. If i told you how many times i turned on the windshield wipers by mistake, you'd giggle.

Today we drove to the near-by town of Bray to do some grocery shopping. I soon realized that i'd made a huge mistake. Two days before Xmas is not the best time to be learning how to drive on overly-congested narrow streets.

So i'm trying to deal with all of these flipped variables, but on top of it there are all the brand new events -- things i've _never_ seen before in my life! Like, i'm already getting totally stressed out coping with 62 randomly jumbled variables, when a guy coming the other way veers across the road to grab an empty parking spot on my side. [Somehow, i had failed to grok the significance of the fact that 52% of all parked cars are facing in the wrong direction. I guess i naively assumed they were doing that when the road was clear!] He proceeds to do some hybrid front-in ass-rotate parallel parking maneuver right in front of me, forcing me to brake to avoid a head-on collision, while hoping the guy behind me is one the 17% of drivers who are actually paying attention to the road. The doofus merrily shimmies and shammies into his spot, not caring a whit how long i have to wait. And i can't go around him, because oncoming traffic has instinctively read this as a premium opportunity to *go much faster*.

Little did i know how much worse it was going to get... I could write several pages on this hair-raising experience, if only i had hair. Suffice it to say that we aborted our plan, and i was thrilled and relieved to get back home with my feet back onto good 'ole terra firma.

While walking to the local grocery store, still a bit frazzled, i had to be wary of more crazy drivers flinging themselves around the round-a-bouts with completely indiscernible angles of exit. Xan mentioned the signalling rules that i'd learned the day before, but i just laughed -- as if *anyone* here would actually follow those conventions.

One thing is certain, however: if you see a car coming your way with its windshield wipers on, duck for cover!

on big numbers

A friend at work pointed me to this terrific essay on big numbers, and why they are not trivial.

It's a pretty good summary of introductory theoretical computer science, but it has even more value for those who generally eschew mathematics. If you think math is unimportant, have a glimpse at how much larger that universe is than yours, puny human! :-)

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

green

Winter? Not so much.

It's really more like cool autumn weather, at worst, and some days are still in the mid-teens. Having spent every winter of my life in Alberta, it looks like this will be my first year of winterlessness.

Everything is still lush and green, burgeoning with life and health. Kinda like Vancouver in the summer, or Alberta roughly never. Maybe 30% of the trees and bushes are leafless, but the grass is still greener than the lawns in my experience have ever been.

Ireland is green -- that is not a myth.

Christmas Party

Finally, it is Sunday. The girls had been planning all details for at least one week. They spent a small fortune on new gowns, shoes, accessories, hair dressers and manicures. The boys spent about half an hour to remember how to tie their bows. And here they are, sparkling in the crystal chandelier light, sipping from their glasses, making conversation while waiting to be noticed how good they look. From time to time, camera flashes add more brilliance to the scene and save memories about the event.
Cocktails, conversation and poker games are the keywords for a couple of hours. They help to build the necessity of the coming perfectly balanced gourmet dinner. Everything is so well coordinated, like an orchestra playing a symphony of tastes. The wine is poured in bounteous glasses - you drink, but the glass never gets empty.
Then, a DJ takes control of the scene. The room is flooded with colors reflected in the hundreds of glasses on the tables: blue, purple, yellow, red…All these colors come only in a set with… dancing club music. Talking becomes obsolete. It’s SCREAMING TIME!!! After a few hours of bouncing, men and women look for more comfortable attire. Jackets, ties and high heels shoes are little by little abandoned.
This is a story without an ending. We can infer that they still dance and drink and have fun because we didn’t see the end. But then, what we can’t see doesn’t exist, does it?

songbirds

When i leave the house in the morning, i'm usually greeted by a passel of songbirds.

These little balls of fluff are no bigger than a walnut, but they have an amazing array of songs. In the space of a dozen paces, i hear a dozen melodious phrases. Since there are many types of birds, which elude my rhino eyes, it sounds like the trees are singing all around me. The overlapping trills sound like something Aphex Twin might have created, if his genius extends that far.

I'm not cynical about songbirds.

Life is good.

Our new place

After seeing a few places and walking in selected neighborhoods, we decided that maybe it is better to give up some convenience in order to find a nice place. Darse accepted taking the bus to work each day, instead of being close to the shuttle. I remember Darse’s first trip to the University by bus after so many years of walking or driving. He came home pouting because he didn’t get a seat on the bus!!! I compare that to the time when I was traveling by bus in Romania and you could consider yourself lucky that you managed to get into the bus and you still had your wallet after the trip (I am exaggerating a little but there was a high probability of such things happening).

Coming back to the subject, our house is in an absolutely charming district, full of stone architecture, lush green grass, trees, hedges, bushes, and chirping birds of all descriptions. There are still bloomed flowers here and there and we saw a bloomed cherry tree too. We are close to the sea, away from the chaos of the city, and only about 15 minutes from Darse’s work (half by bus, half by a short walk through a park, very healthy for so many hours spent in front of the computer). “An awesome find by Xan” says Darse, but I guess we were lucky too because I browsed the rental availability a few months before coming here and there weren’t many detached houses in nice areas or in our rent limit.

It is a good-sized two-level three bedroom house made of brick. I took a few pictures in the area to give a better image of the surroundings. I am especially thrilled with having the small back yard with lots of plants to take care of, and big windows very suitable for potted plants. But I guess I should start by decorating the house a little to feel more at home before I think about gardening. Plus, it's still winter -- not that you can really tell!

When you rent an older place you find a lot of things in the cupboard like pots, dishes, glasses, and cutlery left by previous tenants. They are quite useful before you assess what you need to buy and find something that you like. The selection is not as vast as it is in North America; stores are very small in comparison, and they cannot hold too many types of the same item.

And wow, I have to walk to the stores! First because we don’t have a car yet, second, the parking is limited. There are a couple of grocery stores, a post office, a hardware store, two restaurants and a few take-out places within a 10 min. walk. There is also a good bus link (the Quality Bus Corridor) to the nearby shopping centers and downtown. One day we went downtown, and coming home, Darse reaffirmed his joy and relief that we live so far away from the noise.

Last weekend we went to the local Irish pub. It has an absolutely lovely old-style décor and has good food. The atmosphere is very different from the city center -- or maybe the warmer environment makes people act differently.

I am very glad that we found this location. It is much friendlier than other places I’ve seen, and people even say hello to you on the street. Well, at least some.

View from front door


View from the bedroom

My garden from the dinning room

The Cubes

Have you seen the movie The Cube? If you didn’t, it is about a bunch of people trapped in a cube-like construction made of cubical rooms and square doors. The trick was that the rooms would move, and some had various deadly traps. Hard to escape.

Anyway, The Cubes and The Edges are apartment buildings in the Sandyford area where the shuttle from Darse’s office comes. It is in the same area as the Beacon hotel so we started to look for an apartment there first. We walked around to see how it feels, and I wasn’t very convinced that the place is hospitable to life. There were enough pluses (close to stores, LUAS (LRT), work shuttle, and all brand new) to at least have a look at the inside. Well, I think the architect who designed those apartments hates humans. He might be looking toward the future when those apartments will be inhabited by cyborgs. Even Darse’s worst-case scenario of hard, cold surfaces was surpassed.

The other thing is that you could get lost so easily. The buildings were all the same, and because of the surrounding construction sites the paths were sometimes closed. Many times we found ourselves in with no known way to get out. We were joking about the movie when we were wondering what The Cubes would be like, but it turned out to be no joke!
REJECTED!

The Beacon

We stayed nine days at the Beacon hotel in Sandyford. The style is trendy, almost extreme, with hard surfaces and weird decorations. The lobby and the restaurant are fancily decorated but not especially functional. There are things that can bother you every day but it seems to be a sacrifice for the sake of style. [Darse was driven insane every minute.] Example: every time you want to reach the elevators from the entrance, you have to either jump over the armchairs or make a big detour. Another one: the elevators are upholstered but constantly smell like fried fish; and in front of the mirror there is a frilly lamp that blocks seeing your reflection.

The rooms are very edgy, both figuratively and literally. They have many sharp edges and corners that assault you. The bathroom walls are made of glass (!), the desk chair is sharp and totally transparent, the garbage can is made of sparse wires (no bag, of course, to not spoil the decoration), no clock at all (!!), and many other details that in the long run drive you batty. Plus, there is a bush at the back entrance that will knock you down if you aren’t watching. I’m serious, it happened to me and I got big bruises on my knees!

The only place that looks human is... the underground parking! It is extremely clean, quiet, has some soft music and it is not windy. After some walking in the windy, rainy weather and noisy traffic and construction sites in the neighborhood Darse said “At last, the warmth and cozy comfort of the underground parkade.”

The business class

We flew business class with British Airways from Calgary to London and then Aer Lingus to Dublin. Uneventful flights, but some long delays due to high winds. What I want to describe is the business class feeling. As a first class traveler you get priority in boarding and luggage check in, you spend your waiting time in nice shiny clean lounges with all kinds of facilities, you have a lot of room in the plane, the meals are almost restaurant quality, and other unimportant details. I don’t know if these extra comforts are worth five times the price of an economy class ticket though.

Anyway, I was sitting in the lounge in Calgary airport, sheltered from all the chaos happening outside, in a perfect controlled environment – temperature, noise level, food, beverage, technology - and I was thinking “Hey, I could get used to this!”. Everything was almost perfect, even the view was great, towards Calgary downtown. Then, something struck me. People who use first class -- usually wealthy people who make decisions that affect everyone -- can lose perspective very easily. They live in a cocoon where everything is comfortable. It doesn’t take much to forget that the majority of people live in a totally different world, hence they think and act differently. My question is: how can someone who lives in one world decide for someone in another? It is like someone from another country making the laws for yours. I think one of the main enhancements in decision-making is to use everyone’s voice -- and it is so easy to achieve, now that the Internet is becoming more and more accessible.

Engage!

OK. I guess it’s time to start the blog. I promised everyone, but it seems that the first article is the hardest. So, here it goes. I am writing it.

First of all, I hope you’ll excuse my left-handedness (;-) in written English. You already know the cause and also you know that I do my best to overcome it. Darse’s supervision is not easy to get and I'd rather publish our adventures while they’re “hot” than to wait forever for him to have some free time. This is another reason why I postponed the issue of the blog and why some posts are a little outdated.

Secondly, this blog is intended to substitute multiple e-mailing and to allow us practice writing down our thoughts. The comments are not enabled; whoever wants to say something about our posts is welcome to write us to the known e-mail addresses. We’ll be happy to hear from you.
[Edit: okay, maybe we'll try it with comments for a while.]

Now that we are all set - we have rules and framework – we have left only one thing to do: “Engage!”