The Singles Table!

My Gaelic Football captain got married on Friday. What a day!! It was such a nice wedding and she looked AMAZING! It's so funny to see people who NEVER dress up all glammed up with hair, nails, tan, etc... So Friday we all took the day off and headed south into Wexford for a bit of wedding bliss.

The wedding was great and I ended up with my friend Janet, sitting at the singles table. Yep - all the other coupled up people on the team got placed around the room and we sat with all of their single male friends. Honestly, I can't complain because the guys were really nice and I think I paid for about 3 drinks all night. An Irish wedding lasts until sun-up, so that's a WHOLE lot of drinks.

It was rather entertaining because I think Janet and I may have been two of the only single girls there and she wasn't drinking and had to leave early because she was IN a wedding the next day, which left me. And the more they drank, the harder they tried. At one point my friend Paul asked if I was running a new 30 second Speed Dating show. It was kind of funny.

Anyhow - I took loads of pics so here are a few to entertain you:

The Bride and Groom (Mary and Michael)

This is our trainer, Paul. I'd say more than half the girls would LOVE to get some personal training from him.

This is the team with the bride and groom - we clean up pretty nicely, eh?

No, that's not a special dance to a song - that's what they looked like all night!

And what's a wedding without a little dancing on furniture and sticking of hands up skirts? In all fairness, Helen was only trying to keep Naomi from falling but we all got a good laugh out of it when we saw the pic!

So that was the wedding from last weekend. I actually started the post Thursday on the train but never managed to get it finished. On the train again = posting again. I'm hoping to take the train a bit more often, which means you'll see a bit more posts. Riding the train and working in Dublin has given me a few more fun things to post about so I don't think I'll be short on material.

Okay - enough for now. I'm going to wrap up, go home, and try to get a run in before I lose my motivation. I'll miss training tomorrow for the Xavier Rudd concert in Dublin, but more on that later!! ;-)

I was doing so well...

I know I’ve been a bit of a slacker about posting lately, but it’s tough with all of the traveling I’m doing when I don’t have an internet connection at work. I take for granted being able to rely on e-mail to get in touch with people at work sometimes. It’s definitely a lot harder when it’s not available. I’m hoping that will be remedied today with the help of a wireless internet card for up here, since the placement of my office makes it more than difficult for them to hook me up to the existing system at my current project.

I started my job in North Dublin on Monday. Holy commute! It takes between an hour and twenty minutes and an hour and a half to get up here in the morning, depending on when I leave. The killer is the two hours + it takes to get home at night. I’m wrecked after the morning drive and a long day at work and all I want to do is be in my own home with my own things, but I sit in traffic instead. I somehow managed to end up directly behind my friend/teammate Cliona yesterday, which was kind of funny. What are the odds?

Everybody keeps asking why I don’t just stay here during the week, but I’ve done the whole ‘living in hotels’ thing during the week and it makes me one completely miserable person. As it starts to get darker and the weather starts to turn to crap, I may start staying one night a week or something. In the meantime, my office isn’t even set up so I’m dragging loads of stuff back and forth and it’s way easier to just have my car up here.

My other option for traveling back and forth is the train. It’s about a 2 hour commute by train but I’d be able to sleep, or e-mail (with my handy new wireless internet card), or read (I think Harry Potter was the last book I even had my hands on), or post, or do work… You get the idea – it would at least be productive time. I could then spend the time at home crashed out on the couch or cooking (I made enough pasta/goulash on Monday to get me through most of the week) or whatever and still manage to get photos edited and e-mails written on the train. I may try it tomorrow and see how it goes.

So that’s the current work situation. The project itself is okay – nothing too special but it’s got a jammed schedule that I want to jam even further so I can get out of here ASAP and stop the insane commute. I can hardly understand a word the architect is saying between his crazy Cork accent and the mumbling – which makes me dread meetings and having to talk to him. Lucky for me he has a rep on site so I deal with the rep most of the time.

In other news – I’m heading of to London (well, Reading really but I figured most people wouldn’t know where that is) to see my friend Sion next weekend. He’s originally from Whales, I met him in Venice, and lived with him in Worcester. Funny, isn’t it? Very small world… Anyhow – I’m flying over after work on Friday and then heading back here on Sunday. He’s picking me up at the airport and then we’re chilling out Friday night and heading to his away game (rugby) on Saturday before going out in Reading. He’s sending me more details on what we’re doing but I haven’t been able to check my e-mail in two days (not entirely true since I could have checked it at home but was too lazy to pull my laptop out of the bag).

I’ve also posted a few pics – see tomorrow’s post for those. Phenomenal wedding on Friday. Mary was brilliant and it was a small enough wedding that we got to hang out with her and Michael all night long. They looked like they were having a blast. Just the way a wedding should be!!

Enough is enough. I have to get SOME work done today. See? I could have had this posted already if I were on the train on my wireless internet connection. Instead, I’ll have to wait until I can upload it later today. Ah, well. It’s Wednesday – as my friend Kara would say: Happy Hump Day!!!

Well then!

Not quite back up to par, but at least I'm posting once a week or more... It's a start and I'm blaming the sunny weather on the lack of posting. I'm okay with that though. I've got a long, dreary Irish winter to post all the blog stuff you could possibly read.

So the week's been a bit crazy. My GM pulled me into his office last week to tell me my next job is in Dublin, which is a 2 hour commute, at best. It's all the way to the top of the M50 and past the airport, so the traffic pretty much rivals going into NYC or Boston at rush-hour. Sweet. The job is meant to last for 6 months but I love a challenge so I'm shooting to get in done by Christmas (4 months). Completely possible if the lead times on materials can be sorted out. Anyhow - I'm meant to start up there on Monday (a week from today) so I have to get offices and everything else set up there this week. I'm also going to a meeting up there tomorrow to get a better handle on the place, people, and what's going on. We'll see how this goes. I'm also itching to meet with my bosses to discuss compensation for the 4+ hours of travel or having to stay up there during the week (so NOT appealing to me).

The weekend was good. Quiet, but good. Thursday we had our staff night out and it was a drunken fiasco, as usual. Fun though and everyone came back to my place and we didn't get to bed until 4am so it was a bit tiring as well, but that's alright. I didn't have a hangover to go with the exhaustion so I didn't mind quite as much. The rest of the weekend I just stayed in - saving both money AND calories. I think if I were to give up drink and cheese, I would drop 15 pounds without a problem. Right now, I'd rather the 15 pounds. Clothes fit just fine and I'm okay with that!

Speaking of food: Friday night I made homemade pizza (rosemary garlic dough from scratch) and made my first attempt at sushi. I made 4 rolls with combos of avocado, cucumber, carrot, scallion, and smoked salmon and chilled them for Saturday. It was gorgeous when I woke up Saturday so after running to the Farmer's Market in Gorey I rang Noush and we decided to make it a beach day. We went and laid out for a few hours and I packed sushi and cheese and crackers and iced tea. It was a perfect afternoon and we totally got to catch up with everything in the meantime.

Saturday evening was spent watching a bit of rugby and grilling up some chicken and fresh Farmer's Market veggies. Then yesterday I went to watch a rugby match and caught up on some movies. Three movies. That's more than I've watched since before my parents came. It was good to curl up on the couch and do nothing!

Back to work today. I'm so much more productive on Monday when I stay in over the weekend. I've gotten loads done today and it's only 11am. There's heaps to do before I have to leave it all at the end of the week (and Friday is a wedding, so I lose a day there!) so I'd better get back to it. Hope your Monday isn't too painful!! ;-)

Less Than a Week

Less than a week since my last blog. I'm pretty sure that's a recent record! Hopefully things will get back to something a bit more normal now that everyone's gone home and I have a bit of time to breathe. Don't get me wrong - I loved having my parents and my aunt here, but it was a whole lot of hectic at my place for 3 weeks! Work and everything else needs to get back to normal now!

So the last week they were here was fun. We didn't do a whole lot of big things - well, except for crashing a wedding. That wasn't planned but it was pretty fun. My aunt says she hasn't danced like that in 30 years and I believe her, because we stayed until the dj packed up at 3am.

Anyhow - we managed to get them all packed and to the airport (which took 2 cars, thanks to the crazy amount of luggage and the small size of cars over here). I got a text when they got back to Boston and I didn't hear from my sister, so I'm assuming they made it to Albany in one piece.

Now- back to work. I've got loads of little things to catch up to and I've got to get myself back into my weekly routine. My body is so happy that it includes heaps more sleep than it's been getting lately!!! ;-)