"Check Your Camera When You Get Home"

Was a text message I got from my husband while I was working at the hospital.



When I turned on my camera I learned that a certain furry someone had been lounging on the couch sipping my seltzer water. I like to imagine that he fell asleep watching soaps.

A Taste of Dublin

So as not to smother anyone with the amount of Ireland photos I took, I'll try to share them in small bites, scattered over a period of time.

The best scones I've ever had.





Kilmainham Gaol, an important part of Irish history.





Trinity College



A bustling (though touristy) city





The Duke of Wellington monument, the second tallest obelisk in the world.



Odd things spotted from the window of a bus near the Guinness factory.



Whiskey tasting at the Jameson Distillery.



Seals at Howth.



Castles in unlikely places.



And secret gardens.

Zen Habits

For the new academic year, please remind me when I forget...

less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more walking
less noise, more solitude
less focus on the future, more on the present
less work, more play
less worry, more smiles
breathe

For more, click here.

Breakfast is...

Irish steel cut oats; unsweetened, non-dairy, vegan almond milk; spoonful of dark brown sugar; fresh blueberries.

The Best Thing

The best thing about our trip was not the major attractions (e.g. The Cliffs of Moher, though they were beautiful), but the unexpected little things that popped up along the roads.

Back From Ireland

Failure is...

Meticulously packing a gift, and then realizing you won't be able to carry it that way on a plane.

Life is Hard

Don't you just feel sorry for him?







He's got it rough*!

*Yes, I refrained from making a witty pun there.

View From My Window

It's dusk. And I'm giddy to see that the two fawns I first spotted early last month are still living and grazing happily in our yard.

Ray's Trip Down Disappointment Lane!

Yesterday was a surprisingly dreary and chilly day in Charlottesville. A friend of ours stopped by for dinner on his way back to Maryland. He went to UVA for his undergraduate degree and masters, so now that he's moving to Colorado in a week we thought we'd do a goodbye tour of grounds/campus.



Our first stop was his old first year dorm, Dobie. Unfortunately, Dobie had been demolished and a new dorm was in the process of being built in its place. Sorry, Ray. I did find an exciting youtube video of the dorm being razed to the ground, though!



The pilgrimage wasn't a total bust, because I did see this cool tricycle with a big basket on the back.



And some chalk graffiti..



And an advertisement for some concerts coming to the area. We have tickets for the Muse show, and we're pretty excited.



Note excitement!



Next was the Mechanical Engineering building, where Ray spent much of his time as a studious undergraduate and graduate student. As you can see, there were some changes... so no luck getting inside.



But I hadn't known before that this cute courtyard was nearby.



If you're walking around UVA, you have to pay homage to the lawn area as well, the center of Thomas Jefferson's "academical village" vision.

For Thomas Jefferson, learning was an integral part of life. The "academical village" is based on the assumption that the life of the mind is a pursuit for all participants in the University, that learning is a lifelong and shared process, and that interaction between scholars and students enlivens the pursuit of knowledge.

But no one brought a shovel, so we couldn't dig for Ray's time capsule that was buried years ago somewhere near the statue of Homer.



As we walked away from the lawn, we had time for one more insult.



We caught a glimpse of part of UVA's restoration project - an initiative to restore the academical village to it's original Jeffersonian structure and repaint the pristine white columns and trim to a beige color.



Bon voyage, Ray! :-)

Painting Bookshelves

A few months ago my husband and I realized that we were once again out of room for books. We thought about buying a new bookshelf, but so many of them are too skinny, with too few shelves and all the wrong color. I had a bookshelf still waiting for me at my parents' house, but it needed to be scraped of my preteen doodles, primed and painted.



Yeah... you see what I mean?



The scraping and sanding took awhile, and I probably put more into it than I really needed to. But at the end it looked crisp white and lovely! I was almost sad to paint it again.



I chose a faux finish, sandstone textured paint. I wanted something that wouldn't clash with the browns in the room, but that didn't necessarily match perfectly either. I was slightly worried about the texture making it a little more difficult to slide out books, but since the books pretty much stay in the same place I figured we'd be okay.



I really like how it turned out, and once again we're full! I don't think I'd use the textured paint again, but I think it works well for this one piece of furniture. The sandstone paint needs to be applied with a roller to get the texture right, which makes it especially difficult to sneak into crevices and corners. Also, once you use a textured paint that's it - there's no painting over it or removing it!