I’m sitting listening to Paolo Nutini, needed something mellow and romantic to suit my mood. I’m not sure where my head is at this evening. Been taking a little break from the Sligo prep. As you do when you’ve got something like that hanging over your head, duck & cover.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about me and Benny back at the start. It’s partly brought on by the knowledge that we’re leaving work, the place that brought us together. If it hadn’t, I’ve a feeling something would have. The ridiculous amount of magical little coincidences at the start of our relationship, the strange things that have happened since, they give me a very strong feeling that the course was plotted out a long time ago.

One in particular that’s been twinkling in and out of my mind’s eye this past few weeks happened one evening in the 12th Lock (the pub where we had our first night out about a week before we started going out). I’m sure it was back at the very start, very very start, possibly the first or second Tuesday we went out prior to us realising what was going on between us. A train, on the Sligo line, hurtled past as we were sitting out enjoying our drinks in the evening sun by the canal. I had just started reading Anna Karenina, which has a strong train theme, and obviously, it’s a Russian book. I’ve had a thing about trains for a long time, it was always in my vision of seeing Russia, a train across Siberia had always seemed such a romantic thought growing up. My favourite book has a very strong train theme too. The book, and my dissertation on it, dealt partly with the author’s use of coincidence as a technique for involving the reader in a personal, intuitive, pit of your stomach kind of way.

I got a sudden shudder when the train passed, the rumbling and the roaring of its engine and the tracks went right into me, my mind flooded with images, racing, flashing, firing neurons, “there’s something in that, something there, about the train, it means something. When you know me better you’ll know what I mean when something like this happens to me, this weird thing that happens when a whole lot of connections suddenly flash in my mind, I know there’s something in it, but I don’t know what yet. It’s just a very strong feeling.”

And then we found ourselves drawn to use the train line that we had sat beside for so many nights in the first couple of months of our relationship. Our first trip to Sligo. The same train line that had run past the bottom of the garden in the house that I lived in with my first long term boyfriend. The same train that woke me in the night so many times, so many years before. I thought at the time that this might have been why I got the feeling.

And then I found myself in St. Petersburg a few weeks back, the two of us working out our future together, making the plans for Sligo and I see what I see on a train in Russia – the pictures I was painting and drawing throughout all of my teenage years in art class at school. The image you see at the top of this screen. The twisting line of the elevated motorway, the sky scrapers, the endless flowing street lights fading into the distance. And further down the track, the telegraph lines, the snow on tracks photographs I had taken on the Sligo line years ago in art college, just before I moved into the house with the train line in the back garden. The flat landscape, the city in the distance, the sky, the lines, the endless symmetry and all of the St. Petersburg hinterland’s markers of perspective. All of the images that populated every picture I created back in school, only I had crammed them all into each picture back then. I couldn’t have seen them in films, I know I didn’t. Right down to the smoking stacks on the sky line. A little bit more of my soul was unchained that day, a little more of my heart sang out, up into the snowy skies.

Reading back through that another image did occur back in my teenage paintings, a seaside image, one also very much concerned with perspective. When I saw it in real life I wasn’t overly surprised, touched and slightly unnerved, but not blown away like in Russia, this image I actually had seen as a child. The curve of the lane and it’s fence down onto the beach at Ross’s Point, Sligo.

At the time I fancied it as a strange sort of coincidence, a good omen. I had spent some time on one of Benny’s first visits to my parent’s house routing out my old artwork to show him. I was glad I did because he immediately recognised the scene when I reminded him. It felt right that we had discovered the inspiration for the picture together, particularly because he had been so drawn to my interpretation of it that night in my parents.

Just some thoughts, a jumble I know, but it was good to let them flow. Nighty nite all x

Today has been a day for reading other people’s writing. There have been laughs and tears and a whole lot of I know what you means. It left me high as a kite, truth be told. I get very overwhelmed by other people’s emotions, their aspirations, achievements. It stirred up so much silt, that as the day draws to a close, I can hardly see through the water anymore.

It’s a nice feeling all the same, being reminded of how we are all wading through the same problems, all rejoicing over the same joys. A timely reminder, and there’s never a bad time to be reminded, that each and every face you see on the street, or faceless name on an email, has this entire massive back-story that you are most likely extremely familiar with on your own terms. It is something I always try to remind myself of when I find myself making snap decisions over what I perceive to be someone else’s thoughtlessness or selfishness. It could be me having that bad day, doing my best, but acting stupidly or neglectfully and screwing up someone else’s day as a result, try as I may to never let that happen. If I always attempt to think of others in a more holistic and forgiving way then perhaps I will be repaid in kind by someone in the future. And even if I’m not, it’s my own little contribution to world harmony and it helps me get over the crap that’s slung in my face on a daily basis.

Today was not a day of crap slinging, and I’m thankful for it. Today was a day to reflect and be thankful for the wonderful things in my life, and in those of the people that I am truly lucky to have had the good fortune to know.

One of the first times I began to think about other people in that way was on a retreat in school many years ago. We were only 13 or 14, I’m not sure exactly. We had to fill out these questionnaires, prompting us to share, in a very comfortable and non-demanding way, our fears and problems – whichever we thought fit to share – with the rest of the group. I always remember one girl’s story, it comes back to me every time I think on the theme of ‘what you don’t know about others and how it might change your perspective if you did’.

She was one of the most popular, outgoing, intelligent and friendly people in school. Everybody loved her, she was the captain of the hockey team, debate team, you name it. This of course made me a little jealous. I was not loved by everyone. I wasn’t happy enough or confident enough to be the centre of attention and I was a bit of a neurotic little shit to boot. Not for me the dizzy heights of debate team captain, I was kicked off for shouting across the classroom at an unfortunate (if genuinely irritating) schoolmate that if she didn’t know what a word meant, let alone how to spell it she should sit the f**k down and shut up. Ouch.

Anyway, this girl, who seemed so perfectly happy, so grown up and so enviable, was having the shitiest possible time in her home life. The girl who I thought had it all, had in fact, so much more cause to be a sulky little arse than me, that it made my sufferings seem acutely shallow and childish. It was a lesson I learnt fast and one I have thought about to this day. Assumptions are dangerous. Be patient and forgiving, you have no idea what has made this person the way they are.

The day’s thoughts were rounded off nicely by the video John (click the old grey poet link in my blogroll) posted today. Basically a whole lot of people hugging. If that makes your teeth hurt at the mere thought just go look at it, if you’re not smiling by the end of it then you have my sympathies – you’re having a really shit day indeed.

My mother’s friend from Cavan has an utterly wonderful phrase for summing up my current state: ‘boiled shit on a stick’.

The early night didn’t work I’m afraid. Nor has the vitamin C, the saline rinsing or the mind over matter method. I have cultivated the mother of all head colds, a steaming, streaming, sticky gleaming, icky gicky, mushy slushy, flushy gushy hairy who’er of a head cold. If bacteria were awarded little bacteria shaped gongs for outstanding achievements in the field of infectious excellence mine would be weeping and thanking Jesus by now.

Sniff. I did however, sniff, get some work done today, sniff. That’s going to get old pretty quickly isn’t it? Anyway, my achievements for the day: writing half of my shiny new C.V. and picking up the driver theory test book. And making it through work. Which to be fair wasn’t too awful because my manager took pity on me and had me off the phones doing the exception queue.

Darren got home in one piece from his five day drinkathon in Spain. Good for him. Even better for Kai, who has whinged incessantly about Daddy’s absence for the entire length of his being away. Most strenuosly at three in the morning bless her furry little heart. Padmae was characteristically non-plussed. She’s a cool character is little Pad.

Benny moved seats today in work and is now right beside me. It rocks. The only thing I’m worried about in relation to it (and no, it’s not, as you may be forgiven for thinking, that we’ll be seeing too much of each other) is that it’s going to make it all the harder when we move up to Sligo and get separate jobs. We’ve always been together in work and it is hard to imagine it being any other way. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it though. It may even provide an even stronger incentive for us to push forward on the research for starting a business together, a plan we’ve been keen on for a long time now.

I think that is the news for the day. I shall leave you with a picture from our last trip to St. Petersburg – two freezing cold pints of Golden Pheasant on the bar in the Shamrock. Mmmmm…

The sinus infection/cold jobby that’s been threatening for days finally broke today. I could power a small town with the ferocity of my sneezes should someone come up with the appropriate technology to utilise their force. It’s not awful, I’ve mastered the art of rinsing my sinuses out with saline and it seems to be keeping everything in check. Bleh. I’ll live.

I just saw Richard Hammond’s crash on Top Gear. I’ve been sitting here for around ten minutes trying to think of a word to describe how it made me feel seeing it. I was really effected by the news when it first filtered through in work four months ago and actually seeing it tonight and seeing him alive and okay and back to normal is obviously something which makes me very happy. But there’s something irking me about it and I’ll have to let it settle before I can formulate a theory. It’s just some little intuitive wriggle in my stomach at the moment, I’m sure it will reveal itself in due course.

Anyway, today. Lovely day actually, cold aside. Cliched Sunday, read the Times top to bottom, drank too much coffee and orange juice, pottled around in bagpussesque dressing gown. Benny made me his mince stew (insert Homer drooling noise), it was, as always, sublime. Just what I needed with the cold.

I got the driver theory test book sorted, a good friend is lending us hers so I shall be picking it up tomorrow evening. And we went through all the signatures and pomp needed for the credit card. That’s a load off, I have to say. The more things get ticked off the list the more I can indulge in a little fantasising about what things will be like. We were discussing having people up to stay for the weekend this afternoon and I was filled with pleasant thoughts about decorating guest bedrooms and making nice dinners and the like.

Anyway my friends, my forehead and throat are burning, my eyes are weary, and the promise of a day of talking my voice into non-existence tomorrow at work are all conspiring to make me consider the dreaded ‘early night’. I always feel like an early night is a waste of valuable time I could be doing something else more enjoyable/productive with, but on occasions like this I know I’m in fact booking extra time for future days by taking care of this flaming cold now. Oh dear, I’m boring myself, nighty nite so xxx

The smell of anti-tobacco orangey-headache flavour plug-in, feebly trying to cover up last nights nicotine and vino excesses made me feel panicky when I came into the a.v. room this morning. I have since discovered that playing Madonna’s ‘hung up’ extremely loudly on my surround sound speakers is an amazingly effective and efficient antidote. It’s very hard to feel shit when listening to such ridiculously uplifting music. Top tip for the day that.

I am one of those people (and I only recently discovered that not everyone experiences this) whose smell centre is very strongly linked to the memory centre in their brain. I know those aren’t really very sound medical terms but you get my jist. The smell of anti-tobacco plug-in is one I associate with hangovers. It is the smell of second year in college, the end of a long-term relationship, of Munster Street, of Pinehurst and the past few years of Dingle Road. It is a smell of excess and dealing with the revelations of that excess, of the healing ritual of effervescent Vitamin C tablets, toast and coffee. It is the smell of the can of worms opened, the emotions still at the surface, untranslatable into the narrative in my brain but needing to be worked through all the same.

This morning is not so depressing though, thankfully at this particular juncture of my life there is not so much bottled up as to leave me reeling in the aftermath. The stomach wobbler thought this morning is where in the hell to start with the packing. We handed in our notices yesterday. Mixed feelings about that. The other butterfly inducer is the struggle to come to terms with the thought of leaving this house. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere since I moved out of my parent’s house. I get very attached to places and things, I feel as if there is something of myself in them. It is hard to imagine leaving them behind. The words tearing and separating come to mind. Though they’re a little too harsh.

Mixed in with that of course is the thought of leaving Darren and the cats. It’s just hard finding the balance between the worries and the feeling of excitement at moving forward, hard to completely surrender myself to looking forward to leaving when I’m fretting about not being able to get a job, or whatever hiccup, and having to abandon the whole thing and come back to Dublin with empty pockets and the knowledge that we failed.

And so the pendulum of my thoughts and emotions to’s and fro’s as it must for me to deal with all of this. One thing of which I am certain is that this is the right thing to do, to sit still and not go after our dreams because of fear is a much greater failure than to have took the risk and failed.

The title of today’s post, in case your wondering, is from a song of great significance to myself and Katie. Over the past few years we have picked apart the days together and worked through some tough things over a bottle or two of ‘vino callapso sur le patio’ (our name for generic ‘it’s made of grapes’ specials in the local ‘offy). The song, by Aesop Rock, the title of which escapes me at present, has for its chorus the line ‘all I ever wanted was to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way’. Maybe you have to hear it to get why it sounds so right, but it comes close to summing up a good Lou ‘n’ Katie night. The pic’s are from one of our nights this time last year, in the a.v. room just before I redecorated it (I had to say something in case you noticed that ridiculous wallpaper).

I decided a nice picture of the view out the back door in the wee house in Cavan would cheer me up this evening. Hopefully it will fit nicely on the page unlike that flaming mutant leaf I posted on Tuesday. Holy god almighty – when I saw it in work this morning via IE on a 17″ dinosaur monitor – I had no idea it would look like that and screw the page up so mightily, it looks perfectly lovely and neat and interesting via mozilla on my 19″ flat panel. Though I’m not entirely sure the monitor makes any difference. Anyway, apologies for that dreadful mess of a thing if that’s the way you saw it, not intended and not to be repeated if I can help it.

I’m still not feeling well. I don’t know what it is. I had more energy today because of the rest but ‘more’ is a relative term here. I think I rather worried a colleague in work who found me slumped in front of the screen on my evening break. I had only intended to rest my eyes (does anyone ever actually mean that phrase, seriously) but found upon closing them and lowering my head onto my folded arms that I just couldn’t summon the will to unfurl myself. I eventually disentangled and went back to taking calls, but I could only manage it by employing my most profoundly robotic super polite air-hostess persona.

The day’s saving grace, and it was a pretty shitty day, was the beautiful colour of the sky outside my window in work this evening as the sun was setting. I think last year I must have completely missed out on winter sunsets, sitting with my back to a window that had the blinds permanently down to keep the glare from my screen. That’s a rather good analogy for my winter last year as it happens, but anyway. This evenings display of pinks and violets and powder blues was soul quenchingly beautiful. I don’t have words for it this evening unfortunately but it did its job on the parts of myself that words struggle to soothe to the same degree. My spiritual side takes a fancy that some pleasant caring force directed my eyes to that scene for a reason this evening, I’m thankful for it one way or the other.

I thought I might share with you, that which I have been staring at all day, my big red mug, full to the brim with steaming hot caffeiney beverage. I think it was coffee in this particular shot but it was tea all day today. I made a choice this morning which greatly pleased the mogs but possibly not my manager – I didn’t win the fight to leave for work this morning. It was a very tough decision because I genuinely hate taking sick days, it leaves me feeling so guilty and ashamed and like I’ve let everyone down that it’s something, morality aside, that my nerves couldn’t take if I did it too often.

The last few nights I have not slept well. My skin has been producing weird hive like itchy bits, my scalp has been itchy and my sleep (when it eventually comes) disjointed and sweaty and altogether unpleasant. Last night Benny’s cold went into the tossy-turny-coughy phase, this added to the fact that I am most likely also coming down with his affliction, left me as weak as a kitten this morning.

There is a terribly sweet and funny story in my family anecdote collection about my two great-aunts who, funnily enough, came from Sligo. Oonagh and Peggy were two of the loveliest, most charitable, and above all, most religious and pious people you could ever meet. They attended mass more often than just Sundays, they carried out extensive work in the community, caring for their elderly neighbours and the like. They were to all intents and purposes like lay nuns, such was the level of their devotion to the church and to its good works in the community. One night, out with my parents in a pub for a little night-cap, I don’t think I was there, Peggy turned to Oonagh and proclaimed for all ears to hear “Oonagh, I’m bollixed”, to which Oonagh replied “I know, I know, sure Peggy, I’m bollixed myself”. At which point my parents nearly fell off their chairs in shock. Not at the language you understand, they just could not believe their ears – my poor great aunts would never, never, have intentionally used bad language, and to hear them cursing would be akin to seeing the Pope give the finger out of the window of the pope mobile.

This morning, I can safely, and in full knowledge of the gravity of the word, claim that I was Bollixed, the capital b intended.

I had a good long hard think about it, and I honestly struggled. Sometimes all you have to do is actually make it to the toilet to win that epic battle between bed and bus, but this morning I just could not do it. There was a heaviness in my forehead that either signalled the onslaught of a major sinus infection or my body’s ability to generate its own biological bed magnet, very conveniently positioned in the first part of my body to hit the bed when I finally gave up wrestling with the sink to stay standing in the jacks.

The guts of five hours later I finally woke, not much refreshed but at least able to stand. There followed a day of struggling between couch and kettle, kettle and couch. On the plus side that meant tackling the Michael Palin Himalaya series from the box set Benny’s cousin very thoughtfully bought him for Christmas. Apparently ‘Mícheál Ó Paoláin’ was an elephant in a past life, and is destined to be born the daughter of a rich western family in his next incarnation. I reckon I was a big black panther. But that’s another story entirely.

And now, barely nine hours after I last extracted myself from the leaba, I am being drawn back to it by the forehead magnet which has since morphed into a biological bed seeking missile. I started the day as I meant to go on I guess.

Nighty nite all xxx

The big picture of a leaf I took in Bective estate, relevant? No. Just wanted to see what a big picture would look like. And now I have.

It’s a novelty I’m sure will wear off with time but each time I sit down to do this I have no idea what I’m going to write, no notes, and unless something in particular tickled my fancy during the day I pretty much just starting yacking* via the keyboard and see what comes out. Which is why I kind of have fun reading it back when I’ve posted it, well, that, and I always have to do that last typo check. I’m atrocious for typos. I am a product of the spell check generation, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Although I do sometimes wonder if I’m not a little bit dyslexic, or something like that. Myself and Benny have noticed I have a tendency to remember numbers backwards – not mirrored images of the numbers, they just seen to switch around in my mind. For example, he told me today that he had taken 86 calls at lunch time, a few minutes later I said, wow, 68 calls. This ‘backwardisation’ extends to images as well, particularly when I guess at what a room looks like, the entrance to a house etc. I tend to be right, but everything’s on the other side. Peculiar.

In move related news I rang my bank today to see if there was any movement on my credit card application. I needn’t have bothered because typically, no sooner had I sat down from ringing them than my Dad texted and said some info had arrived. Well drat and blast the who’ers* anyway – they sent me out forms to fill out and send back. I spent ages filling out the flaming stuff on the net and they all ready have every piece of information about me that they could ever want as I’ve been with the bank almost my whole life. I’m sure it’s some legal necessity but I could have done with knowing at the time I was applying that at the end of my two week wait I would have to wait some more.

I needed the card to buy the parts for our new computer, Darren, the meaty-internet, computer whiz kid extraordinaire, is building us our very own super-d-duper one from scratch. Works out a tiny bit dearer than a production line one, but the spec is much higher and we’re getting exactly what we want, right down to the exact same screen I’m sitting at now. And now it’s starting to look like I’m not going to get the card in time and will have to lean on his extraordinarily good nature again to buy it on his and let me transfer the money into his account. Which is crap.

I was explaining my woes to Paulina in work and she told me that the bank who had given her a credit card in America had given her $100 to take their card! What is it with Ireland? You have to jump through hoops of flaming dog shit to get them to give you something they’re only ever going to end up making money out of.

Right, enough ranting (as if!). I shall return with further thoughts, if they occur, before the night is out. Bye for now

*Yacking – Irish-English for talking, more gossiping or waffleing but something in that general area

*Who’ers – not pronouced whores, it’s a Cavan thing, denoting someone tight-fisted or just generally irritating.

Ok – looking at the threads in the help forum it’s a known issue, phew. Fingers crossed it’ll all be nice and Russian again by tomorrow. Actually, I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it before but the image I have used in the header is a cropping of a photo I took on the Elektrichka on the way out to Pavlovsk – stunningly beautiful day and the picture had odd connotations for me, which are possibly another days blog altogether. I think I’ll wait til I have a method for directing you to multiple photos before I do that, it would take a bit of explaining. Bit of suspense for you there…

Where’s me lovely header image gone? I’ve deleted it and the Punto image, reloaded them under different names, deleted my cookies, stamped my little feet – and none of them have worked! Gah! I’m sending an email to the helpy-supporty people and I hope they’ll get back to me fairly lively. Sorry for the lack of prettyness, I’ll get it sorted as soon as I possibly can