The struggle to adjust to the middle of nowhere

"We're from a pretty big city in the desert in the United States." That's how I describe us most of the time. Of course we have lived in the country, when my kids were small, but life moves at a slower pace when you have little children. By the time they're teens it's a manic pace and the middle of the city feels just right for that.

My fold out book "An Caisleán"
So while we're here we're all just focusing on our work and our projects, sometimes we can get a ride to town for shopping.



This is Chloe's pencil drawing, unfortunately it was all smudged up at one point. She tried to fix it. Phoebe painted an oil portrait of me and it fell in the grass. A million tiny pieces of dried grass stuck to it. Three of us spent an hour trying to pull them all off.

The weather has taken an unpleasant turn in the last few days. It's  85ºF and humid and really quite hot and buggy here. I'm covered in bites and there are no screens on these windows. We took a walk at dusk (around 10:00 pm-The sun takes forever to set here!) over to the pond near the castle and the mosquito swarm over the lake was the most massive one I'd ever seen. Thinking about it will keep me up at night for years to come, I'm sure.


Two days ago Phoebe and I took a walk to see the scarecrows in the field. This is the first one we found.


This is the second.  I guess I should remind you now that this farm/castle is run by artists. Anyway I think they scare people more than they scare crows. I saw about 40 crows flying in the field that day.



   On Monday, Elizabeth Cope had an appointment for an hour in the famed medieval town of Kilkenny. She had room for three of us. Desperate to get out of here, Mike, Chloe and I jumped on the opportunity.




Mike and I near the castle.


We all walked along the canal


Hiked up to the castle. This is a stone head near one doorway.


This one was on the other side (they're actually pretty amazing!)


A view from the gift shop.


Probably the best photo taken of the castle. (Chloe and I in front)



Across the castle yard was the Kilkenny Design Center.


This was an interesting installation.

Mike and Chloe on High Street

From there we took a stroll up High Street.


This "Uncle Sam's Pizzeria" looked like an interesting establishment, but we didn't really have time to explore Ireland's take on American cuisine. From here we wandered into a book store (which is something I love about Ireland, bookstores are everywhere!), and then, well, we killed our hour of Kilkenny and had to race back.

Anyway, it's been a challenging week adjusting to this country pace. I'm a bit worried about my kids, who have just started laying in their beds a a lot of the day. With little else to do I've drawn and written my whole book project and I have finished painting more than half of it. We're going to sort out how to travel away from the castle today (I hope). The buses are hard to figure out,  and no one has a car that can hold all five of us, but we have a phone number for a taxi company, though our phones don't work here (of course my crappy phone barely works in the states). We did try the sim card thing in Dublin with no luck (I hate phones), so we'll see how that goes. In the mean time maybe at least the weather will break and we can have some of that amazing Irish gloom we came here for.

Comments

Apparently what we saw were not mosquitos, but midges. People say there are no mosquitos in Ireland, but something is biting me!!

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