The spirit of Bloonsday is pretty infectious! Paddy handily improvised an eyepatch and was an instant James Joyce after breakfast. I took the dart into town then the lúas over to meet Phyllis at St Mary’s Abbey for a tour. The tour, or lecture really, in the chapter house space was excellent. The abbey was built in 1139 by the Cistercian order and was one of the most important monasteries in medieval Ireland. Read more here! https://heritageireland.ie/places-to-visit/st-marys-abbey-chapter-house/. The site is mentioned in the wandering rocks chapter of Ulysses, in which Dubliners make their way across the city going about their…

With two days in Dublin to take in Bloomsday-related festivities, I set out this morning to hit a few. First, I booked a spot on a Poetry & Music Stroll with a singer and songwriter Remco Jacobs. It was held at Sweny’s pharmacy with a walk to Merino Square and to the former Finn Hotel. First though, like Leopold Bloom and many Joyce fans before me, I bought a bar of lemon wax soap. Then the 20ish people on the tour all crowded into the cozy Sweny’s, not unlike the very tight quarters where we saw flamenco performed in Granada,…

We’re in sawyer this weekend and had an errand to run in nearby St Joseph. While there, we visited the lakefront and their lighthouses. I somehow didn’t get a photo of the main lighthouse, so see above here! There are two lighthouses together who’s is for navigation – a ship can position so that the two lights are lined up and be sure that the passage in to the shore is deep and safe. This is import and at this spot where a river meets the lake, since the river is dredged regularly to remove sediment and stay 25’ deep,…

We had a lot going on in May! Liam joined us in Sawyer for a very nice overnight and Mother’s Day visit. Painterly sunsets (different day and beach but still Michigan) Baby animals are a delight in May. In order that they were spotted, teenaged goslings in Humboldt park Teeny tiny wood ducks with their mom in the lagoon at Humboldt park And a fawn in the garden in sawyer! It even stayed overnight, curled up outside the outdoor shower! Blog readers may know her as mom, Mary or nana, and she turned 80 years young this month. Happy birthday,…

We took a walk in the 606 and enjoyed a lot of pretty purples in bloom At the west end, there’s a sundial. The lines pointing to where the sun sets at solstices and equinoxes form an X rather than a + which is something fun and mystifying to think about. It’s because of our distance north of the equator, right? We’ve been charting sunset locations from Michigan using a compass app and there’s a big swing between setting at a WSW position in winter to WNW position in summer!

Goslings spotted in Humboldt park! The next day we saw another family with 2 goslings. Not the biggest expert but these seemed to me a couple of weeks old. That tracks since we usually see goslings the last week or so of April.

Yesterday we got about 4 inches of very dry and fluffy snow, which is super pretty and gives a soft finish to everything. We also found out that our street is plowed when it snows. The snow added a whole bunch of white color for the wind to work with, and the beach was covered with sand and snow abstract shapes. The designs bring to mind the Jack Frost character who makes all the winter ice and snow into works of art. No pictures of this but during the day we worked. Then it was sunset time, which we bundled…

John had a work trip to Cancun the first week of February and then is going on another to San Diego next week, so we packed our warmest clothes to spend this week in Michigan. We’d seen the wintery shoreline in January so thought we knew what to expect, but like all coasts it changes so much with different conditions in light, snow, and the frequent melting and refreezing of lake water into ice.

Readers may be looking for a post with warm scenes of Mexico, but we stayed in the Midwest for all of January this year. And you know what? It’s really cold! Jan 20 was a big day in the world – and in addition to items that made the news, I came down with a bad cold that hung around for about 2 weeks. Here I am undergoing a home humidifier treatment and maybe hiding from the world a bit. Staying inside gets old so fast, so by the weekend, we bundled up for a walk and discovered that Humboldt…

Some posts don’t naturally form around one theme but ‘ice’ is hands down an easy theme for this one! Last night we had tickets for the international puppet festival, and we saw ‘Anywhere’ – a performance with a marionette made of ice. The puppeteer lives in Iceland and as we observed last summer in Iceland, when ice is mentioned in Iceland you can be sure there’s water too. The puppet was constructed from quite a few parts so its movements were really natural and charming, and as the performance went on it melted quite a bit, making drips that caught…