Ireland puts forward a turkey

I've always found the Eurovision Song Contest rather hard to swallow. Maybe Ireland have finally got the right idea with this crazy entry (which believe it or not, is actually dividing public opinion over here!)

Dustin the Turkey heads for Eurovision semis...
Dustin the Turkey will be representing Irish hopes at this year's Eurovision Song Contest semi-final after he won the public vote in the national Eurosong 2008 last night. Dustin saw off the challenge of the other finalists Donal Skehan, Mayo, Leona Daly, Liam Geddes and Marc Roberts, with his song 'Ireland Douze Pointe' at the University Concert Hall in Limerick. He will compete in the first Eurovision semi-final on May 20th in an bid to reach the finals on Saturday, May 24th.
© 2008 ireland.com

Almost March...

The Coachmans Tavern had seen better days...

Frosty morning, Annagassan...

Always remember to take your Peugeots out of the freezer

We've had another pretty quiet weekend, making the most of sleeping in before some upcoming travels. Except I've had a cold/flu all week, which seemed to intensify on Saturday morning, so I set up the laptop sideways and did some DVD watching in bed, whilst despatching Clare to Tesco & LIDL for our weekly supplies... The Movies: This Is England, Die Hard 4 & Zodiac (but I didn't get as far as Zodiac). These were all from the "3 for €30 collection" from HMV (the nice people at DHL got me a €30 voucher for the Pavilions Shopping Centre in Swords when I left there in December). Of course when men have a cold/flu, they're obviously dying, so must be taken care of. It was a lazy day, supported by Day & Night and Strepsils, but I felt better by Sunday so it must have worked.
It feels like winter is slowly easing away here - just the usual 4˚c at 5.30pm this afternoon and a little hail... We've had some good fog & frost this week too. Clare has been auditing & training in Ireland this week (no jetsetting), while I've been busy organising meetings and various upcoming projects in Dublin. I worked a little longer on 2 nights this week and came back on the "Belfast Enterprise", which is a very comfortable (luxury) 30 minute non-stop train journey from Dublin to Drogheda. I made the mistake of driving down on Friday. It's all fine until you hit the outskirts of Dublin, then you crawl, and crawl, and crawl... and remind yourself why the train is just so much better, regardless of how much it shakes around or the arts grant worthyness of the vandals who made an interesting creation the other day, centre carriage, from abandoned newspapers and some sort of red creaming soda... or maybe jam? The cleaners were in for a real job there.
Our travel plans for March/April/June could of course easily be thwarted by any number of strike plans over here, from cabin crew to mechanics, hell even the air traffic controllers who are demanding thousands of extra Euros, just for being on call for overtime. You gotta keep up, right? Yes, Aer Lingus staff are unhappy, British Airways staff are unhappy, Ryanair staff can get nicked if they're unhappy (thanks to Michael O'Leary), but nothing will function anyway if the air traffic controllers walk out, which they're threatening to do this Thursday, shutting down the entire country. Cool.
So if everything goes to plan, we'll be in Barcelona for 14-17 March, then Sue & Paul are here for Easter (we're heading for the Giants Causeway & Donegal), then Paris for 28-30 March, then Milan for 25-27 April, then BRISBANE for 13-28 June... Please don't ask about the carbon miles or whatever. We'll just have to act more responsibly in our next life.
Oh, we're also helping out on the Annagassan Viking Festival committee (9th & 10th August). Big things to happen right here in our little village!

Work Tales, Part II

Clare has been jetsetting, as usual... San Francisco one week, Limerick the next! Tonight she's called me from Gatwick Airport, where her Ryanair plane seems to be blocked from the runway by an Aer Lingus plane (the Ryanair pilot would take delight in telling you that, I'm sure!) Such is life in the world of seafood training, etc, etc. So here's a little trip report that Clare sent to me from San Francisco (and I found rather amusing)...
"Had some problems getting onto the net, user issues as you would say! The weather was pouring rain last night - I thought I was in Dublin. Both flights (to San Fran) were empty and I had 3 seats all the way. I did MBA work, read magazines and didn’t get toxins at Newark (this refers to Joe's little food poisoning incident at Newark Airport last October, please don't ask!) The conference oragnisers had sent emails warning about not to walk around here at night and I thought they were being paranoid Americans but they were right. I'm sure I saw 2 homeless people in the lobby at 9pm and a woman straight out of ‘Pretty Woman’ in the lobby and again later in the hall near my room. Hispanic, large, high heels, loads of makeup and very short skirt. Almost laughable really. The hotel is very ‘LA Confidential’. I thought its best days were probably around 1951 or so but I read the hotel blurb and its heyday was around the 1890’s. One of the few buildings to survive the earthquake intact and became the City Hall for a few years after 1906 or whenever the big earthquake was. Whilst eating ‘breakfast’ at Starbucks, in the hotel lobby, I watched the homeless go thru the bins at 10am this morning. The hotel blurb in the rooms has 2 pages on security, 1 page on fire safety and 2 pages on earthquake safety - during and after...
I caught the BART to Sunita’s place (ex flat mate from Brisbane). It was the train to ‘Dublin’, would you believe? Sunita lives in a ‘transition’ neighbourhood in Oakland - loads of Central American families going to Mass, artists taking over factories and making real loft apartments - not a developers version of loft apartments... mosaics where graffiti used to be. Her husband was the architect on the apartment block where they live, so they got it cheaper. But the mortage on one wage is still tough, so Sunita was back at work 3 weeks ago and her Aussie mother-in-law is here for 9 months looking after their baby son. But they'll make a fortune in a few years when the neighbourhood turns white and professional. That said, M-I-L, Chris, says the drug deals regularly go down at the train station. We had breakfast - all healthy and no eggs benedict. Chris says I have a hint of an Irish accent. Hmmm, I doubt it! Chris lived in Cork for a while 4 years ago. So we swapped Irish stories...
Sunita says that San Fran & Manhattan are the only 2 places in the USA that don’t expect a recession and house prices are not collapsing. But her husbands company (architects) sacked a bunch of people last Friday and he's working Sunday and regularly doing 90 hour weeks. The TV here has ads for 1000 houses being auctioned next week in Modesto/Fresno, etc. (well outside San Fran), and all those places behind LA that are repo houses...
Reading the papers - there is more support here for Obama than Hillary. No one cares about the Republicans, but this is San Fran! It's Tet today, the Vietnamese New Year. So I'm off to find some Pho in a few minutes. I could go to a Superbowl party with the fish types, but I can’t miss Tet when it's about 2 blocks from the hotel. Bugger the homeless. etc...

And later...

I found the Law & Order channel on TV. This area is definitely the homeless epicenter. They're everywhere - lying on all the streets, sitting everywhere and there is diversity there as well. Men, women, black, white & Asian. Can you believe homeless Asian women? I don’t think I've ever seen that before. And I can now see why people thought I was homeless in 1999 - the homeless here have backpacks and sleeping bags and when you see them from a distance they do look like a group of backpackers. Some are quite young...
Tet was very interesting - very few food stalls. Only those weird jelly things, a few red bean buns and one Hawaiian kebab stall. Mostly stalls selling: dodgy Viet DVDs, plastic & glass things from a plastics factory in the Mekong delta, Viet charities, Uni scholarship programs, newspapers, nail places and florists. There was a big concert of some Viet band that was fairly huge. But the weirdest thing was the audience was 99 % Viet. A few hispanics and a few white men with their Viet girlfriends/wives. Only saw 2 other white women. And around the corner was a big YHA hostel. But it would seem no one from the YHA went to Tet ????? Found the Pho shops. Little Saigon is about as big as Darra - that’s all. I popped into a couple of shops - one selling loads of weird jellies and other meat products - not in refrigeration! Gave them a miss. Then to the little supermarket on the corner. Found a rack of Kettle Chips. Loads of different flavours. Bought 3 types of chilli chips - Spicy Thai, Island Jerk & Buffalo Bleu. Found a farmers market on the way back...
On Monday night we saw the Deadheads For Obama - the Grateful Dead got back together for a concert for Obama and all their supporters were walking around with signs, etc. No stickers for sale though :( Bill was down at the seafront in a building doing a live telecast to Hillary - in another state - for supporters to have a chat. We went to a fish factory for drinks & crab, then off in a cable car to Chinatown with the conference organiser, who grew up there. Nice enough dinner of Cantonese & Szechuan cuisine. Most others thought it was exotic...
Tuesday arvo I escaped and did tourist stuff - seals, aquarium and Fisherman's Wharf. That night was the conference dinner - okay food, terrible speaker. A few of us went to the bar and told our own after dinner auditor stories. Up again at 4am to go to the ‘seafood markets’ that didn’t exist. I did see some trawlers, seals, giant seagulls & rats. Then did my talk and dashed for the airport...
(Sorry, no photos from San Fran, didn't take the camera)

Work Tales, Part I

I'm never quite sure how to start these blog entries. The concept of all this (back in 2006) was to be about our travel experiences, but then, of course, there is work (unless you're lucky enough that work is optional, or a mere afterthought)... So here I am again on the 6.59am to Dublin, where my Hewlett Packard office is located in a suburb called Clonskeagh, south of the city centre. The commuter trains, so far, have been pretty good (and very much on time), apart from the week a derailment happened between Drogheda & Dublin.
I absolutely love my new job. I loved my 11 years with DHL too, but this a brand new environment for me, where the team leaders self manage the workforce (of about 90 people) to a far greater extent than DHL. The building has rather good amenities with a cafeteria, coffee shop and gym, etc. I spend my days involved with: ensuring we meet our service levels, stats & performance management, learning the technical aspects of what we do (in our immediate area), organising & attending meetings, recruitment (from start to end of process), looking at morale & motivation, etc. There's always plenty to do, and of course HP is a huge global organisation in regards to future prospects. At 5pm, I literally run for the mini-bus, back to the station, where I get the 5.18pm back to Drogheda, then back home. So, that's a day for me right now.
I don't know if I'll ever get used to a 6am rise... but it happens, and as I drive down the lanes in the dark every morning (with my 4th new tyre on), there's nothing like knowing that train will leave the platform at 6.59am, whether you're on it or not...

.....f...o...g.....

Amazing fog this morning... freezing, thick and no flavour (like a Mr Whippy)... Check out the pic at the top... That's in the middle of Dublin City, and even the webcam is "fogged out"... Looks like something from Dickens London. Temp is currently 1°c.

Slice of Ireland, No. # 77

One of my tyres kept going flat. I think they call it a 'slow leaker'. Kind of inconvenient when I have to drive down to Drogheda Station at 6.30 every morning in the dark, be it raining, or frozen as it often is at the moment... Swerving along the country lanes, avoiding as many pot holes as possible, dashing through the middle of town avoiding the garbage trucks and milk deliveries, making it to the station in time for the 6.59am to Dublin, then rumbling along in the darkness listening to my Ipod, where conversations are kept low and most people try to get more shut eye. The same thing happens in reverse in the evening (dark again!) Everyone dashing for the exit at the station, trying to get home before their fellow commuters. And the same flat tyre is flatter still, so I creep the Peugeot the short distance from the train station to the service station to use the air machine, sometimes needing gloves, sometimes not (have you ever tried to get the screw cap off a tyre valve with gloves on?) So it was well and truly time to get a new tyre (or 2)...
Last Saturday afternoon whilst out shopping I discovered a place called First Stop Tyres... Very friendly, looked efficient, all good. I left the car with them and went off to look at some shops. They called me on my mobile. "You should consider 2 new ones on the front, and the one on the back..." Sure, I said yes to the 3, and thought nothing more of it. Back to collect the car a while later, and all was fine. Drove away thinking how good the service was. Roll forward a couple of mornings, raining again, slick roads, flat tyre... But the tyre shop had replaced 3 tyres on the car, right? Yes, 3 tyres out of 4, but not the 'slow leaker' which of course was the reason I went there in the first place. So much like many other unexplained mysteries here, I'll just have to go back and buy the 4th tyre too...
Clare went to San Francisco this morning on Continental. In fact, she's in the air right now as I write this, somewhere over Ohio, or Idaho, etc. You get the picture. I was hardly awake when she left this morning, much like she too is hardly awake when I leave for the station each morning in my car with the flat tyre. My morning commute is well worth it though, because I really love my new job at HP Dublin. Commuting to central Dublin by train is definitely the way to go when you hear the traffic reports on the radio every morning. Especially the days when the city grinds to a standstill (almost every day) thanks to some great motorway planning in the 1980's, when some of the pollies in Ireland were more concerned with collecting bags of money than ever believing that people would actually consider something like commuting (shock, horror), so the road (and rail) infrastructure in many parts is rather lacking. We're actually very lucky at Annagassan/Louth that we're in one one of the best served transport corridors around Dublin.
So Clare is back in Dubs on Thursday. I went up to Newry this evening to see the brilliant, if slightly baffling Coen Brothers "No Country For Old Men"... Thought about making it a double bill, but when confronted by the choice of "Cloverfield", "I Am Legend" and similar fodder, I decided to call it quits and head home. Now there would have been a time once when I might have happily sat through one of those movies, but perhaps my taste has matured and I couldn't stand the thought of another crap film. Tomorrow I'm off to Dubs for a Hash run. Bye for now.