Adam's R&R

Anyone that knows me well, or anyone that has read this blog for long enough will know that I did not drive until I was 25, when I moved to the US.  I used to justify my lack of driving in Dublin to the fact that even if I had a car my commute would have been horrible, but secretly I was just a bit too lazy to get lessons.

Combine that natural inertia with regards to lessons/exams with the ludicrous insurance rates for those under 30 in Ireland and the fact that I could get by without a car and you have a fairly good idea why I didn’t do it.  Once I started driving int he US, I found that I liked it and my sneaky suspicion that I should have been driving all along in Ireland seemed to be confirmed.

If nothing else, these last couple of days have confirmed to me that I was right all along, driving in Dublin is awful – the traffic is bad enough to make you want to cry, the road layout is insane (even to someone that knows it fairly well having grown up here) and itis far from a stress free environment.

My initial trepidation about driving on the left was quickly dispelled – I don’t seem to have a problem with the switch, but the general mayhem getting through the city was worse than I remembered.  My American colleagues have probably been put off renting a car here in the future after this week.  Of course I have picked one of the worst times to be driving – it has been raining constantly since I arrived and roads have even been flooding on occasion.  Nevertheless, I think if/when I move back to Dublin I will be requiring a short commute to work – driving like I have been the last few days will not be an option…..

Technorati Tags: dublin, driving, rant, ireland, traffic

My blogging performance and my picture uploading has been shockingly poor recently, it’s just one of those times – lots of travel, lots of work, people visiting etc.  Ironically enough it is posts about this kind of time that I most enjoy looking back on – I tend to forget what was going on at a particularly busy time and the blog entries and pictures help me remember it all.  In fact, looking back it’s amazing how often I get things wrong chronologically in my own memory.

So, to help myself out I have prepared a nice bulletpoint list of recent events

• James visited, got drunk at Mie ‘N’ Yu, left same day I did (April 3rd)
• Flew to Ireland for 10 days of fun and Visa wrangling
• Visited old work colleagues, met old friends
• One – James – is now a Doctor, which I couldn’t quite believe, but it didn’t affect his drinking – sorry to anyone in Tallaght emergency room the next day
• Ate kebab in Zaytoon on Camden street while hammered, mmmmmm
• Helped my Dad/Andrew put in windows in my brother’s new house
• Helped my Dad/Paul fill a skip with the rubbish from same house (shoveling crap mixed with 40 year old wallpaper and lino sucks)
• Went to Wexford for a long weekend – took it easy
• Ate a lot of my Mother’s cooking
• Got 2 Easter eggs – wooo!
• Got driven around by my little sister
• Got my Visa renewed – Yay!
• Flew to Luxembourg on the Sunday, stayed in the Hotel Grand Cravat
• Did my work thing – trained people etc.
• Ate a LOT of good food, drank a lot of good beer – aided and abetted by Steve who seemed to know every bartender in town
• Flew back to the US on the Friday
• Picked up some weird Sinus/Allergy thing that still has not gone away a week later
• Andrew arrived on the Monday after I did, then left for New York on the Wednesday (he’ll be back)

I think that about brings me up to date, links to be added appropriately when I get around to putting up the pictures

Technorati Tags: Travel, Luxembourg, Ireland, Wexford, Dublin, Adam Comerford

The excellent BBC series Coupling, which I have been watching recently brings about this question.  In explaining how well he knows a friend of his, one of the main characters (Jeff) explains that they are “porn buddies”.

He goes on to explain that being someone’s porn buddy involves making a pact so that in the event of one of the buddies untimely demise, the other buddy will get to their house and remove any pornography before the parents arrive.  The porn is not (of course) destroyed but kept by the surviving buddy as a perk of the duty and to help ease their loss.  It also means that the parents of the departed can continue to believe that their child was not a sexual deviant.

Naturally the woman he explains this too thinks it is disgusting.  Sounds like a good deal to me – I’ll have to sort out a porn buddy for myself in the near future

Technorati Tags: porn, porn buddy, coupling, friendship, tv, bbc