It is a random kind of day.

• Our first guests from NY are here visiting us this week. It’s been great to catch up, show them around the city, and just hang out. Heading up t the Giant’s Causeway tomorrow if all goes according to plan.
• Got a library card today. And while I wasn’t planning on getting anything today (reading has been a bit of a trudge the past few months), I decided to look for a few books talking about the culture/climate currently in Ireland.  I started reading one, Was It For This? Why Ireland Lost the Plot, this afternoon. While I picked up the book more as a sociological/research exercise, sentences such as this one have jumped out: [here the author, John Waters, refers to the visit of the Queen of England, and President Obama in 2011.]

It is interesting to reflect that the main themes of both visits  were qualities – hope and forgiveness – that were not long ago recognisable as religious ones. And yet, for the duration of both visits, as in pretty much all public events in Ireland nowadays, there was not sense of a religious/spiritual dimension in any of the discussion or coverage of the visits. It is not I would say, that religion has been supplanted by sentimentality. Rather, it is that the secular discussion which hijacks and interprets everything in our culture now is tapping into the religious sense in human beings and appropriating it for ideological purposes, building a new language on top so as to imply that such qualities as hope and forgiveness are self-generating, self-standing, and self-sustaining. (emphasis mine)

Not sure where the rest of the book is going, but with what I’ve read so far, my interest has definitely been piqued.

• I also learned a new Irish phrase by reading the book. He talks about someone showing up with “both arms the same length.” While you might think, that’d be a good thing…when you show up at someone’s home, you come bearing a gift, and one arm will be shorter because it is carrying something. So, you don’t want to be described as someone who shows up with both arms the same length.
• I hear the baseball season is ending soon. How are the Red Sox doing? Ugh.
• The job hunt is moving forward. At this point I’m limiting my applications to jobs where I can say I think I’d actually like to do this on a regular basis. Not sure the people reading my applications/resumes/CVs will see a fit…we’ll see.
• Fresher’s week has started at Trinity and Hannah is officially a university student. She has joined a number of societies at trinity including the Phil.
• It took 3 weeks, but I figured out how to open the sliding door in our dining room.
• We’ve been moving our websites (bobwilson.me & dublinchurchplant.com) to new hosting sites. Also trying to figure out our subscription services with them as they got very messed up over the past several months with some of the transitions at Feedburner. Hopefully we’ll get all that figured out soon.
• I could use some dvd suggestions…seems like nothing good has come out for a long time.
• I sat down and figured out how much petrol (gas) costs here…right now it is about €1.70 per litre which comes out to €6.43 per gallon. Add in the current currency exchange rate of 1.31, and you have a gallon of gas costing $8.43.  At this point, we’re finding food to cost about 2 times as much as is did back in Ithaca too.
• Water is still free for now!

Guess I should either go hang out with our guests or help my wife with dinner.