On 20 January Ireland went metric with speed signs.

After arriving in Dublin two and a half years ago I noticed that pretty much everything was using the metric system, apart from speed signs and sometimes signs giving you the distance to a place. This wasn't much to worry about, and even growing up in a metric country this wasn't much of a challenge to live with as it's pretty easy to convert from one system to the other. The mixed appearance of distance signs was a bit more confusing, but given that the installation of road signs on the Irish roads was always an art in itself as I soon realised, I simply pretty much used them to get a feeling for how far a place was, rather than to know its specific distance in number of miles or kilometres. (more…)

Big boots

Peggy in Frank's new boots.
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Yesterday’s report updated.

By the evening of 8 January our local stream, the Tolka River, had grown quite a bit. This was the result of the storm that hit Northern Europe on the same day and caused several people to die.

We felt most of it during the night from 7 to 8 January, and the wind got so bad that I was fearing our remaining roof tiles would come down. When I went to bed at about 1:30 AM I saw the gusts actually pushing the rain water uphill on the road that leads down to the Tolka River! During the night I woke up several times because of the noise of the gusts (and of course car and house alarms that went off), and at some point I heard something that sounded like roof tiles falling, but not off our house. The next morning I saw that the house opposite lost a number of them, but all other houses in our estate seem to have done all right, including our own one. (more…)

We had a New Year's Eve party and had so much food that we had to invite people back on New Year's Day to finish it. It hadn't helped that we had conned Stanley into making a curry - but it was such an excellent curry that I don't regret that whatsoever!

Hold on, we conned Stanley??? (more…)

We had another storm - for about 15 minutes at 1pm on New Year's Day 2005.

Just like last time, I just happened to be in the kitchen and heard some weird noises. At first I thought it was raining really hard, but when I looked outside the rain had turned into hail which hit our little outdoor oven and of course the sound came from the ice hitting the metal. Within a few seconds the sky had turned quite dark (not that it was very light in the first place at this time of the year, but the difference was noticeable), and the wind started howling around the corner at unseen speeds. Our front door letter box opened, and I thought something loose could hit the front windows easily. At that point the new tile must have come down, but I don't remember seeing it move. (more…)

Believe me it was cold, but the 10 days we spent in Germany were great. We came back with 1.5 times the amount of luggage than we had when we travelled there.