why beamish is better

Fosters? Bavaria? Ptsh...

If you had asked me yesterday I would have told you I had only driven in the dark once before, under strict supervision, in a well-lit urban area and with a third hand hovering readily over the handbreak. But that was before last night, the epic night where I met my inner boy racer. Previous driving lessons with Keith saw me crawling car parks in first gear or housing estates in second and disconcerting odours of burning clutch; this one however unleashed me to the open back roads of the countryside where speeding away to my reckless heart's content I was spurred to go faster and faster, because, did you know, sometimes it can actually be more dangerous to be going too slowly than too quickly?
After a pit-stop for ice cream cones in a petrol station where we bought too many old school penny sweets like refreshers, black jacks, macaroon bars, love hearts, and mint crisps, we approached village X. I swung a sharp right down an even more back back road and after a while we got out for a walk around which was probably made a lot more terrifying than it actually was due to the fact that we had spent pretty much the whole journey thusfar talking about zombies and the end of the world. Well we discovered a huge old castle, got duly spooked out by a horse who followed us in a field, climbed a bridge over a waterfall, ran down laneways throwing stones, played hide and seek and jump out and scream, explored the ruins of a house, pretended to be zombies, went to a pub for pints that cost two fifty each and drove home via a McDonalds drive thru.
So for it's cheapness, it's superior deliciousness, and it's associated good times, Beamish is better. (And it doesn't need amazing Christmas ads to convince us so)

hey good lookin'

Heeeey, How you doin??!

Ah for all the shits and the giggles I'm a bit of a loser. I think knitting's cool - hey kids, don't do drugs and don't smoke cigarettes, do arts and crafts and stay in school! YEAH! that's right, being high on life is megawesomeous! You know that kick you get from a good game of chess?! Well you can have that every day if you live the right way!!!!

I ♥ MMORPG, WoW rulz 4eva ZOMG

Okay so there's losers and then there's losers, so maybe I'm just a lamebot who gets very excited over less-cool-than-average stuff... This year the best Christmas present I got was from my sister - it was pyjamas, a book and a ball of wool. And no I'm not sixty years old thank you all the same. (Are you putting the kettle on? I'd love a cup of tea and a custard cream...) However, this was no ordinary ball of wool; it was huge, it was massive, it was utterly ginormous! And it was grey! My new favourite colour. Which isn't such a good thing when you have a wardrobe filled with an assortment of crazily patterned mixed up colourful vintage clothes but find yourself each morning wanting only to wear something from the black family *sigh*... Welll what I did with said wool was to knit a plain and simple scarf, that ended up being ridiculously long but wonderfully lovely. Then I had more wool left over so I made a matching hat. Now I still have more wool left over but I'm going to save that for a rainy day.




I have also recently made another hat whose story was a loooooong time coming. Once upon a time there was a ball of wool that was knitted into a scarf. He plodded along rather listlessly day by day as part of the crowd. However, this poor scarf wasn't like very much a didn't lead a long or happy life. One day he was suddenly and savagely ripped apart, torn back row by painful row, stitch by sorry stitch. From his pathetic end came a new start, another, newer scarf made with a much fancier stitch. He was bumpy and lumpy and as he grew he thought he was the bee's knees. Until one cold evening he found himself subjected to the same fatal end as his predecessor. Unprovoked degradation of the highest order. Once more he who gaveth and createth tooketh and destroyedth. And then when the time was thought by all to be ripe for a happy ending to this Goldilocksian tale, gold was struck on the third. A hat was born.

Fire walk with me

Jonathan Leder, Vice Fr.

when you're not around

la belle vie

I'm going to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and wear black every day and be terribly mysteriously romantically chic

images from Paris by way of Facehunter

T minus twenty

a middlin sorta day

Wednesdays are Snoredays. They're B to the Oring.

Although now that I'm a lazy layabout they have become Paydays. And so I'm thinking they should be renamed Fundays. The past two weeks we have come up with very quiet, very sensible, and I guess you could say very boring, ideas to save ourselves from this mid-week boredom. And I've ended up having the best of nights!

Week One - Four of us meet to play Scrabble. We drink two bottles of rum.
Week Two - Four of us meet for a pint. We each drink many pints plus a nagan.

It's the spontaneousness that makes it fun though, so perhaps if it were to become an official Funday there would be all these expectations to be met and the pressure to have fun might actually detract from the good times...

............

So if we're talking about having the fun drained out of old establishments by giving them newfangled names, then residents of Galway beware. We live in a town that now has fifty percent less night clubs than it did a month ago and it looks like the Roisin could all too quickly become Cuba....

We are Cuba 2007:

Lina Scheynius

She takes the polaroid photographs
ooooo.....

What became or is to come

What became of the likely lads?

What became of the dreams we had?

What became of forever?

I don't know and I'm not sure. I'm uncertain and I couldn't possibly tell you. I haven't a clue and I'm as ignorant as an ignoramus. What do I want and how can I do it? It's so difficult trying to chose what to do with your life. At sixteen years of age you're expected to know what you want for the future which is ridiculousness of the highest order considering all you've ever known in the past is institutionalised schooling. You've been taught not to think for yourself, you've been told to give them only the answers they want in response to their questions, you've been advised that in order to succeed you must copy and conform, then ZAP BAM WOW the CAO. FML. I wanted to be an artist and they said don't do that, you'll never get a job. But look at me now, with an academic education and a liberal arts degree, but no sign of that job.

LOST: Zara's mind
LAST SEEN: Salthill, Galway
REWARD: If found and returned intact
URGENT: as required for decision making

my student number begins with 06......

I didn't make a new year's resolution because truth be told it doesn't feel like any monumental change has occurred that merits my resolving over anything. Not that I'm not all for self-betterment, I think it's a positively wonderful thing, but I tend to set myself small day to day challenges of change, which in the long run probably amount to a lot more than a half hearted attempt at something just because the calander turned a leaf.
One of the things I had sort of contemplated doing was to stop blogging. This is partly because one concern I hold is in relation to the inordinate amount of time spent on the internet. The internet is a beautiful thing - unlimited access to endless amounts of information (perfect for self bettering by way of gaining knowledge)However it's worrying how frequently this is taken for granted and I see it as a sort of insulting abuse of our own intelligence when people use it so passively. For example, the Facebook habit; too many people spending too much time on something with too little substance. And so as this concern links to my concern of my blog being pure waffle, I hate to thing that I could be helping to fuel the predicament of world wide web wastefulness.
But then I though fuck it I can't change the way the world works, I mean there's about a hundred years of Coronation Street damage done already and nobody's complaining, so why not fritter away a few minutes of some people's time talking about my goings ons. I like doing it and even if nobody else ever takes anything from the finished output I still gain from the process and hey, guess what, that sounds a bit like art... Plus, this afternoon I watched a video called Julie & Julia where this girl Julie hates her job but loves cooking so starts a blog and sets herself a challenge to cook all the recipes in a famous cookbook by a lady called Julia in 365 days. This inspired me because A - Julie ends up getting lots of free food presents sent to her by blog followers and B - Julia wrote the cookbook in the first place because she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life but knew she enjoyed cooking so decided to spend every day doing what she liked... Perhaps this can also come true for me - people will start posting me balls of wool and really nice inky black pens, and I'll end up publishing an arts and crafts book.

Hmm what else, well now here's a somewhat relevant story from the not so distant past: cue closing of the pub / bar / club (what exactly is the Roisin selling itself as anyways?)and my picking up on a nearby party. We bypass the ping pong tournament and I'm in the kitchen conversing with the man of the house who mid-sentence discovers a large white sports sock in his pocket. I use my pen to draw on a sad face and continue to talk as though it's perfectly normal to wear sock puppets on your hands when there's no Punch and Judy show nearby. I am then told that I'm just like the Gilmore Girls - quote unqoute: "a whole lot of talk and a whole little sense."
Do empty vessels make the most noise? Should I be offended? Surely it's not small talk if not's about the weather...

In other news I started knitting on Christmas Eve with a ball of such soft wool, but then the ball ran out and I couldn't get another as I had bought it in Clonmel and won't be that way again for some time. Thus instead of the lovely long scarf I had hoped for I stitched the ends together and have been wearing this circular scarf-style contraption the past few days