Irish Weather

Interesting factoids about Ireland:

1.) For four days here in Cottage 10 it was warmer inside the refrigerator than in the living room.

2.) The shipyards in Belfast produced 22,000 ships in the four years of WWII.

3.) There are a lot of Savages in County Down. A lot. Most of them are dead.

4.) I've come up with a rather plausible epitataph for my gravestone: "He was widely tolerated by many and barely tolerated by those who knew him well."

5.) Ireland's surface area is smaller than Lake Superior, not by much, but certifiably fewer hectares in Ireland than on the Big Lake.

6.) Ireland's water table is predominantly above ground, residing mostly above ground and between the low gray clouds scudding past off the ocean at 600 feet.

7.) Irish pastries are damn near worth moving here. Not grossly sweet, delicate, deserving.

IRISH LIVESTOCK EYES ARE SHINING

It's that time of year again when plans for the annual Ireland trip are being made. It looks like the end of Feb. first two weeks of March again. Planning on visiting my Irish livestock happily living on the edge of the Burren near Corofin, in the shadow of famed Burren mountain Mulloughmor. The brown donkey in the middle, with the white nose and blaze, is Daisy. I'm half owner of this fine, fantastic, funky, female, four-footer, whose sole purpose in life is supposed to be producing offspring for the profit of her human "owners." The "venture" has yet to produce a foal. This...of course...makes me a "Half-Assed Irish Businessman." It'll be fun to get back to the Burren and all my Irish livestock.

It looks like I might be a doing a Q&A session at next year's Ennis Book Club Festival. Check out this year's schedule: http://www.ennisbookclubfestival.com/. It's a fun event with tons of great author/reader interaction, tours of Ennis, coffee & scones, some Guinness consumption, (well, maybe lots of Guinness consumption) and lots of book talk.

It'll be fun to be back in Clare and do some more work on the Dave Davecki novel "DIERland" where Davecki gets involved in tracking down a band of irritating druid-wannabes who are murdering folks and selling pre-Christian Irish artifacts to the highest bidders in Russia.