One of the weekly highlights of my winter has been singing up a storm at St. Tiernan’s School. There are two nights I’ve been attending. One is super relaxed and fun (and is starting up again in late September if you’ve been craving that singing fix– all are welcome!), and the other is a little more formal than I’ve experienced yet, with something like 130 members divided into official parts (I am serving with the 2nd altos).

I sang with this big choir in their Christmas concert and again last week in the Spring concert, both held at the National Concert Hall downtown by St. Stephen’s Green. On both occasions I’ve been privileged to share in bringing an original composition to life. Here below is a clip from the more recent one, a Magnificat* in Irish composed by my friend Brian from the bass section. It’s really cool to sing local composers, to meet them and get to know them, and then to be part of a group large enough to give considerable power to the notes they’ve written. Almost as cool as sitting in rehearsal again (after more than a decade away for me) and feeling the shivers up your spine when some passage really comes together. The concert itself was great too – nobody screwed up too badly except maybe me – and for those who couldn’t make it, I’m sure there will be another soon. And then you can come see where I’ve begun to lean my appreciation of Irish and Latin and old school musak.

So, once again, a great big thank you to everyone for their fanship and encouragement.
It makes it even more fun to prepare the songs when we have such a lovely audience!

Diane

Magnificat (Mórann m’Anam an Tiarna) by Brian Ingoldsby

*For those like myself who initially suspected the Magnificat to be something out of an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, it’s from Christian tradition; a psalm echoed by Mary: “My soul magnifies the lord…”
**Sorry, video uploads seem to be eluding me at present. The same clip is on the choir’s website, at the bottom of the “performances” page.

For the past couple years, we’ve made a bit of a habit of summarizing the year’s events — in a lot of ways just to remind ourselves how much we’d been up to in the previous year. Diane’s already got her ’09 post up. For reference, here’s mine from 2007 and 2008, and Diane’s from 2007 and 2008.

2009 wasn’t set up to be quite as crazy a year as 2008 was — after all, we had set up shop in Ireland already and didn’t have a life-changing schedule involving getting married and moving to another country! It wasn’t without its share of adventures, however. We had visits from several people in 2009, including both my family and Diane’s family, as well as several friends. These visits necessitated trips to various corners of Ireland, and served as good excuses to explore the island we’re living on.

January was a pretty slow month as we went through a fairly lengthy post-holiday case of procrastination. One of the only noteworthy events was we got our Irish learner’s licenses, which was one part of a saga which we needed to go through in order to legally drive our car. The other major part of that saga was a trip home to renew our Canadian driver’s licenses in February. Unluckily for us, delays caused by a week of snow in Dublin made us take 3 days and unplanned sleeps in Dublin and London before finally getting home.. That meant that we unfortunately missed the ski trip out with our friends that we had planned. Doh!

March and April flew by. The company was ramping up for one of the biggest releases we’ve ever made, and tensions were high for what turned out to be an amazingly smooth transition. So I guess I was pretty preoccupied with work. The big event of March though was St Patrick’s day — which is a national holiday here. We headed into town to watch the parade and joined several people after that for pints which lasted well into the evening. In April we made one foray to the Dublin Zoo, and that’s all I can remember!

In May, we finally got out and headed to Budapest to visit my friend Mike. He was planning on applying to work at the company later that year so getting there before he left was high on our list of things to do. Budapest was an excellent time, and we were quite happy to enjoy the time with friends and the wonderful food (I think I really want some goulash now …).

My parents arrived for a long visit in June, so that was a crazy busy month. We took them out on weekend trips out West to see the Cliffs of Moher, and up North to see the Giant’s Causeway, and Diane took them all around the various day trips outside of Dublin that we had seen while I worked during the weekdays. My dad headed home earlier than my mom who stayed on for a couple more weeks — allowing for a short trip out to see the Hill of Tara and Trim Castle as well as a weekend trip to Brighton to visit some friends of my Mom’s there. It was a pretty packed month and a half, and by the end of it we needed a vacation from all the tourism!

In the latter half of July, my friend Mike was in town for his interview, we had an epic company summer party, and we caught one of three Irish tour dates for U2′s U2360 tour.

At the start of August, our friend Bryce came for a visit of about two weeks. That caused us to organize another couple road trips on the weekends – the first out to Galway and the Aran islands, and the second a trip that Christine organized up to Bundoran to go … surfing! I had never been surfing before, and I never expected that Ireland was the place I’d get my first try. But hey, you never know what life’s gonna throw at you!

In September, we headed back to Canada for our JR and Shelly’s wedding. It was held in Jasper, which to us Edmontonians is a pretty special place to us. The weekend went beautifully, and we were very glad to have made it home for that trip. Apart from that, we used the trip home to catch up with as many family and friends that we could conceivably squeeze into a week and a half.

Just a week after Diane and I returned back to Dublin, Diane’s mom and sister arrived in Europe. Diane went over to meet them and they saw some of Britain before coming over to Dublin. The first weekend they were here, we grabbed Carolyn and headed off to Munich with Mike for a whirlwind trip to Oktoberfest. We were there for all of 12 hours, and returned to Dublin just 24 hours after we had left. It was a blast! I’m not too sure that I’m doing that again though. The second weekend of the visit, we took the car back up north again and saw the Giant’s Causeway and the Glens of Antrim.

In November, we went to Oslo, Norway for a weekend which was a pretty fun trip. We followed that trip up with a busy December in which we went to the company Christmas party and then followed it up with a week-long trip to Barcelona! We rang in the new year at a small party with a couple of friends which was a lot of fun — and the big feature of the evening was the inch or so of snow that proceed to fall over the course of the evening.

It was a pretty packed year, full of more traveling than I think I realized. We spent several weekends driving around Ireland, and made trips to Brighton, Budapest, Munich, Oslo, and Barcelona. Oh yeah, two trips home to Canada as well! We sure flew a lot!

To sum up this post, here are some of my favourite photos from this year:

This year has been pretty cool for me, I must say. Sailing, surfing, feeding the sheep… finding new recipes, and then making them over and over… hosting visitors and meeting up with friends and family… giving in to the gardening itch with a few bulbs and seeds in pots… witnessing concerts and matches… most recently finding a choir to sing with as well as an informal “barbershop” group… and I just created a flickr account with two pictures. That’s right, two blurry pics rate the new year post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quebarbarakan/

Massage school continued through most of February and exams were in April. I missed a few sessions when we went home to renew driver’s licenses and so on, but I’m now an ITEC qualified holistic massage therapist. I haven’t taken any classes since, though I’m pondering music instruction in the new year. I finished up the rest of a sailing class owed me from the previous year, and got up for a surf lesson in Donegal, which was really fun. It’s pretty great living near an ocean for a change.

Throughout March a crop of lambs was born at Airfield, and thus began my first serious foray into photography with Morgan’s lovely Canon schtuff. It’s all mine now, especially the zoomy 70-200mm lens, which I like to pretend is a macro. (Thanks dear!) Quite a few afternoons were spent on the grounds of the Airfield Trust taking pictures of flowers and animals after the morning feeding. The farm should really get a post of its own at some point, as I’ve been volunteering a few times a week feeding animals and watching seasons go by in the gardens.

Or at least, I’ve volunteered during weeks that visitors aren’t staying. Both our families have been, as well as a handful of adventurous friends. The spare room has been getting good use, and I do love the apartment, so we’ve decided to stay in it for this year as well. So come make our rent worthwhile by visiting us! Guests are always good for getting us out and about to discover new spots.

Though we always want to travel more, this year had its fair share of trips: Oktoberfest in Munich (and again in Dublin in similar company), Budapest, Oslo, Paris, York, Brighton, and other bits of England, and most recently Barcelona. I’ve revisited favorite places in town (shops, restaurants, museums), and favourite places on the island to the North and the West. I got to see my sister and her boyfriend perform in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” in Vancouver, and see my friends get married on a beautiful day in Jasper, which totally made my trip, not to mention my year.

Around town there is always good company to be had. And pints. I’ve discovered language exchange at the library, cheered on the Belvo ladies rugby team (well, I don’t really yell much, I just take pictures and wonder when I should bite the bullet and play), gone walking in the hills, arranged lunch dates with the girls, and seen a bunch of great concerts downtown, including Serenity’s only tour date before their singer got sick. And being part of the human tsunami that hit Croke Park for U2. Dublin `09, baby! Also, a shout-out at this point to the “pocket queens” who’ve been keeping my spirits up: a happy new year to you wherever you are, and all the best to you wherever you find yourselves in the coming seasons!

Looking ahead to 2010 now, I plan to keep up with my newfound vocal groups and keep spending time at Airfield. I hope to do more blogging and sort out a bunch of the pictures and videos we’ve amassed into something for us all to enjoy. I want to keep taking pictures for sure. Same thing with knitting – hey, I can cast on and off now! Pretty good eh? Almost ready for scarves…

Diane

Once again this year, we are happy NOT to be going home for the holidays. The last cold snap in Edmonton bottomed out at -46. It doesn’t even really matter Celcius or Farenheit at this point. It’s only positive in kelvin. So, our condolences to all the folks at home. We’ve had fun at the epic company Christmas party and good weather for travelling, and it’s off to Barcelona for Christmas!

Happy Christmukkah to those in warm places and cold!

Diane

This is getting crazy. I’m having trouble getting us all caught up. Photos have been up on flickr for awhile, but somehow I keep forgetting about this poor little blog when I get a spare moment to breathe. So … here’s a quick hit list of some of the highlights of the past couple months. Hopefully I can remember all the highlights!

• 

  Sugarloaf

  Company Summer Party: The company pulled out the stops for the summer party. We spent the day at the Ritz-Carlton hotel next to powerscourt gardens. Starting with an excellent BBQ, free booze, massages, climbing wall, trampolines and more. Later on, Republic of Loose played a private show for us (I’m led to believe a pretty popular Irish band). Then when it got dark, we went inside to see some belly dancers, followed by a chocolate fondue fountain, more booze, and dancing. All in all, a very fun day!

• 

  U2 in Dublin

  U2 Plays in Dublin: At the last minute, we scored tickets to one of the three shows U2 played at Croke Park in Dublin. By the time we picked up our tickets and found our seats, we had just missed the opening bands (one of which was republic of loose!), but U2 played a pretty awesome show on a kick-ass claw stage. There’s nothing quite like going to see one of the biggest rock bands in the world play a sold out show to over 60,000 people! Definitely an awesome experience.



Streets of Galway

• Galway trip with Bryce: A little while later, our friend Bryce Paradis came to visit us for a couple weeks which was really fun. On the long weekend, we headed out to Galway which sadly was a little rainy. Highlights from the trip though was the few hours we spent peddling our (electric) bikes around the Aran islands. On one side of the island there’s the ruins of an ancient fort called Aonghasa where you can look over the tall cliffs into the oceans for a fabulous view. In addition to showing Bryce around Ireland, we spent a few nights playing Castle Crashers on the xbox which was pretty fun.
• 

  Over the Hill

  Surfing in Bundoran: The second weekend Byrce was here, Christine organized a surfing trip to the west coast of Ireland. So the three of us drove out to Bundoran to join Aaron and Christine there. I had never been surfing before, but it was a mighty fun time. It’s really quite hard though! We went out both weekend days for a two hour session each day. The first day, I only got up on the board once, which felt awesome after getting smacked in the face for an hour and a half with meter tall salty waves! The second day was much better conditions than the first, and as a result I think everyone did better than the previous day! After our surfing, we headed on a short hike to see Slieve League — apparently some of the tallest ocean cliffs in Europe. Thanks to Christine for organizing such a great trip!
• Another Visitor: Diane headed back to Canada for a visit a couple weeks before I left, leaving me at home, but I was able to keep myself pretty busy. For one thing, my travel buddy Mike Smith (I’ve been in more countries with Mike than anybody else, although Diane’s going to pass him someday I imagine!), started work at Pocketkings at the end of August. Right as he started, his friend Frano from Winnipeg came to visit — a guy I had known back at University. So it was pretty fun to hang out a little in Dublin with yet another visitor!
• Back to Canada: Our good friends JR and Shelly were getting married at the beginning of September, so we made the trip back to Canada to catchup with friends and family. Diane was there for a little longer than I, so she might fill you in on what she got up to before I got there. I got in and tried to see as many people as I could — but unfortunately missed a few people I really wanted to see. Sorry to those people! The theme of our trip back? All the engagements that had happened! I can count no fewer than five newly engaged couples. Eesh. Congrats to all of you!
• 

  Elk

  Jasper in September: JR and Shelly’s wedding was lovely! We spent two nights in Jasper in the lovely Canadian Rockies. We ran around taking a lot of photos — at the ceremony, and then taking scavenger hunt photos around Jasper. They had some pretty fun ideas for contests. The scavenger hunt had us taking creative photos, and we ended up with some great ones (including this lovely Elk!). The reception was also really fun — it has been a long time since Diane and I got out on the dance floor. So congrats to you guys, and here’s to many years of happy marriage!
• Back in Dublin: Life didn’t slow down at all after returning to Dublin. Work has been absolutely nuts, and now we’ve got Diane’s mom and her sister in town to entertain (look at all the visitors we’ve had!). They’re in town for about ten days or so, and we’ve got some plans to head up to the Giant’s Causeway on the weekend. In the meantime, we made a short, wild trip to …
• Oktoberfest! That’s right. Mike, Carolyn, Diane and I got on a plane headed to Munich for a very short, but pretty fun trip to check out Oktoberfest. We took off from Dublin around noon on Saturday and arrived back just 24 hours later the next morning! I’ll have to type more about the trip later, but it was really quite fun, even with the insane schedule.

I’m trying to get this post done, so I cut things a little short. I’ll try and flesh it out a little with a couple more posts, but no promises! It’s going to be a busy few weeks here still!

Morgan

We’ve got a lot of catchup to do! It’s already the latter half of July, but there hasn’t been any blog posts to tell you all about the adventures we had while my parents were in town for most of June and the beginning of July. So, in an attempt to catch up, I’ll be spending some time writing posts about some of the things we did!

Here’s a summary so you know what to expect:

1. The Arrival: Malahide Castle
2. West Coast Road Trip: The Burren, and the Cliffs of Moher
3. Northern Ireland Trip: Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, Giants Causeway
4. Little Road Trip: Trim Castle and the Hill of Tara
5. Off to England: A weekend in Brighton

That’s what I’ll be writing about, and hopefully catching up with uploading pictures (as of this moment, I’m finally almost through the west coast trip photos, so I’ve got a lot to catch up on still!). If Diane gets a chance, she can fill you in on the other stuff she took my parents to see while I was at work. There’s a fairly long list there too!

So … on to the posts!

Morgan

Life has been pretty insane of late, which partially explains the lack of updates here. Apologies for that! We sure have been up to a lot lately, but there really hasn’t been a lot of time between sleeps to post.

I plan, however, on finally working through the hundreds (perhaps a couple thousand) of photos over the next little while here, as well as posting about our adventures while my parents were here. In brief, Diane graciously showed my folks around Dublin and its neighbouring attractions during the weekdays while I was at work. On the weekends, we did several trips — one out to the west coast, one to the north coast, and a shorter trip to see a few castles and other landmarks. Then, this past weekend, we traveled with my mom (my dad had returned to Canada two weeks prior) to Brighton, England to meet some friends of hers and see some more things!

So in the coming weeks, I will work on recounting our recent adventures to you before I forget all the fun stories.

Morgan

It’s our first anniversay! As of Sunday, that is. We got married June 7th last year!

Wow, it’s the middle of March already! Apologies for the lack of updates. February was an insanely busy month and it appears to have disappeared. So lets see if I can catch you up with what we’ve been up to.

The snow in Dublin caused our trip home to be delayed. We attempted to get out of here on Thursday morning, and things looked like we’d manage to get out of Dublin as we got on the plane on time. But the snow and the below zero temperatures were causing havoc to an aiport that couldn’t handle those conditions, and we missed our opportunity to take off by not having the de-icer truck come by in time. By 2:00 in the afternoon, the conditions in Dublin had worsened, and we began to know that we weren’t going to get out of there in time. So after they finally decided to cancel our flight, we spent another hour or two standing in the airport waiting to rebook our flights.

This led us to a fun story. Standing in the queue for the airline agents, we passed by one of those Star Alliance signs that shows you all the member airlines. This sign had caused the lineup to squeeze by it, but after the sign there was some room on the left hand side. The next thing we know, there’s this older couple working their way *past* the girls who were in line behind us, and strategically setting themselves up to pass us as well. One of the girls behind us saw this happen, but was talking on her cell phone (presumably telling someone that they weren’t going to make it out of Dublin that day) so didn’t get a chance to confront them. After she hung up though, that confrontation happened and the older couple first claimed innocence and when that didn’t work, they said that the girls were not moving in the queue fast enough because of talking on the cell phone (which was clearly not the case). Thankfully, even though they were in a position in the line to get to the counter first, the customer service agent had seen what went on and refused to serve them before us. It’s a bit funny what people think they can get away with. They could have asked us if they could jump the queue in front of us — and if they had had a relatively good reason, I’m pretty sure we would’ve let them do it.

The next day we were back at the airport, and this time we would get out of Dublin after a 4-5 hour delay waiting for the aircraft to arrive. But this meant that we had missed our connecting flight in London. Thankfully, the customer service agents at BMI took good care of us both times we needed to rebook. This time they got us on an air canada flight to Edmonton direct the next day, plus a hotel room, and dinner and breakfast. Not bad!

Our week in Edmonton was a crazy time. We got the errands we needed to do done, and spent as much time as possible visiting people. At the time, we had only been gone for 6 months — but it was still a bit strange coming back. Not much had changed really, and I guess that we didn’t really expect them to. Still, 6 months is a fair amount of time! It was an exhausting trip though. There wasn’t a lot of rest to be had, and my body refused to sleep in past about 8am every morning despite being out every night visiting people.

When we got back to Dublin, work started to get really busy for me and that basically dictated what we did for the next month. There was a lot of nights where I didn’t do anything more than sit and watch tv programs and then go to bed. But we still managed to fit in quite a few social activities. On one memorable evening, we held a surprise birthday party for one of the other employees. His wife planned it flawlessly, and he was so surprised when they entered their apartment to find 15-odd people wearing party hats and yelling surprise, that he dropped into his martial arts training. I have some great photos of him with his keys clenched in his fist ready to defend himself.

On another night, one of the Polish guys at the company took us (for the second time) to a little Polish restaurant downtown. A group of 18 or so of us took up most of the back of the restaurant where we ate what I can only describe as gourmet perogies and other very tasty items. Mmm, perogies.

This past few days leading into this weekend have been insanely busy. Despite it being deadline time at work, we were still out Thursday night for farewell beers, and then again on Friday night for birthday beers. And to top it all off, yesterday we had people over for Pi Day. For the uninitiated, Pi day is March 14 at 1:59pm (3.14159…). It is a great excuse to have a gathering of people and eat pie. So that was great fun. I think the day’s best pie was Xan’s beef and bacon pie. In the early evening we caught the Ireland versus Scotland rugby match of the 6 nations cup. I kind of feel like I’ve got to learn something about at least one of the sports they play here. Of them, rugby seems the most exciting to watch — and it’s an exciting time right now since there’s this international competition going on right now. Ireland seems to have a fairly strong team, and are one win away from sweeping the competition.

Diane and I have finally booked our next trip: a long weekend trek out to Budapest to visit a friend there. That should be fun!

Morgan

Well, January looks like it has slipped away without much in the way of blog updates from us! The last couple of weeks haven’t been particularly eventful in terms of fun stuff. But I haven’t updated with what we’ve done since the turn of the new year.

On New Years Eve we were over at Darse and Xan’s for a rather fun evening of party games. In the first of several of these games, we all wrote down names of 4-5 famous people in a hat. The game proceeds by going through the hat three times. The first time, players try to get their team to guess the person using any words not on the paper. The second time through, you only get two words to get your team to guess, and the third time through you have to do charades to get your team to guess. The game is naturally comical, and this night was no less so than expected.

This game was broken up by the countdown to zero for the beginning of the 2009. We were out on the balcony and got to see fireworks going off all around us. I’m not entirely sure where everyone would’ve got them, but they seemed quite plentiful. It reminds me that this kind of behaviour was happening on Halloween night here in Dublin too.

We finished our game, and then moved on to play another one. In this one, each player writes down a famous person on a slip of paper, which is then taped on the next person’s head. That person now has to ask yes/no questions about that person until they can guess who they are. Thankfully, Darse gave me someone I knew, so after a little while I managed to guess mine: Kurt Cobain. Diane had a little more trouble with “the artist formerly known as Prince”, but she got it. The toughest one that was eventually given up on? Genghis Khan.

We had a bit of trouble getting a cab, so we settled into playing a game of dictionary pictionary until something like 5am at which point we finally got a cab to come pick us up and take us home.

On the 2nd of January, one of the server guys had got tickets to a Rugby match: Leinster vs Connacht. So a group of us server guys went to go see this clash of Irish rugby teams. Before going, I spent some time trying to read up on the rules, which helped me know a little bit of what was going on, but I found it extremely hard to follow exactly what was happening. The thing I had the most trouble seeing was some correlation to the penalties being called and what was done wrong by the offending player. The other thing that I expected was that the game would flow more than american football — but that turned out to not be the case. There was many more stoppages than I had thought there would be. Still, it was a fun time, and it was a great atmosphere to watch the game!

The last few weeks have been relatively quiet for us. I’ve been working, and not getting to bed early enough on a nightly basis so by the weekend I’m ready to sleep and laze around. The weather also hasn’t been all that cooperative for doing fun stuff on the weekends. On one particular Saturday afternoon, the clouds were dark, it was raining, and the wind was blowing harder than we’ve seen here.

The next day wasn’t too pretty either, but we were invited out to go have dinner and see a movie called Slumdog Millionaire. Dinner was at a place called Indian Summer for some rather tasty Indian food, and then we wandered over to the movie. The movie was about a guy who gets on India’s version of who wants to be a millionaire and makes it deep. They suspect him of cheating, and through interrogation (and flashbacks for the audience), they discover that he actually knew the answers through a series of unlikely events. It’s a moving film, as it shows many harsh conditions which the man had to live through when he was a boy.

This week, Diane and I went in to take our driver’s theory tests. We had spent some time studying for it over the week and both came out with 100%. So after we take an eye exam, we’ll have the necessary paperwork to get ourselves a provisional Irish drivers license. When that happens, we’ll have to wait 6 months before we can take our practical test. It’s weird having to go through this process again, and a little awkward too! I’m not sure why there isn’t a faster route for someone who already knows how to drive to get a full license here. Oh well.

There’s another party that we’re going to tonight, and it looks like our social schedule is starting to fill up again!

Morgan