Twitterings & Photo Friday

So as y'all can see from the new sidebar I've given in and joined Twitter! I'd been hearing about it for a while and was never that interested, but I finally looked into it and realized that this'll be a great way for me to give little updates between blog posts etc. Oh and please join me! I get the impression that twitter is only as fun as the network you've got on it. But if you aren't that keen on joining you can still check in either here for my updates (ie tweets - how cute is that btw?), or here if you want to see older updates (my blog widget is only showing the 5 most recent).

Also! Check it out!!! We have some very healthy coriander in the top corner, emerging chives right below it, and some baby basil to the right of the chives. There's also about 3 visible teeny tiny parsley shoots as well. The mint is being lame though :(, I got nothing yet from that corner.

I Slept with a Bag of Compost Last Night...

Tippland Multipurpose Compost to be exact.

Yesterday in town I stopped at Hackett's garden shop and decided I was finally going to grow some plants from seed! I decided on a simple herb pack that had basil, mint, coriander, parsley and chives. Each plant came with two seed mats and each mat has approx 20 seeds. The very helpful salesman got me kitted out with a seed tray and the ubiquitous compost bag (which is now safely stored in our dark kitchen storage closet btw). I only sewed one seed mat of each, because even if only half the seeds germinate and grow I'll still need to cull the sickly ones before I transplant them into proper pots. And if all goes well I can either start the other set or dress them up prettily and give them as a gift!

My supplies: seed mats, tray, compost, mug shovel/waterer

Seed mats. Oh, if only my plants will look as vibrant and hale!

"Firmly pressing" each seed mat into the soil before covering them.

I'm rather proud of my handmade labels :)

ETA (Edited To Add): I just found out that today is St. Brigid's Day, and celebrates "the stirring of Spring and the sprouting of seeds"!! How serendipitous! This clearly bodes well :) People traditionally baked bread as well, so with our new mini oven (woot Argos) I'm so going to do it this evening!!

Photo Friday!

I've still got about 13 minutes of Friday here in Dublin, so the post still counts ;) Here's my cowl that I finally purchased and sewed on buttons for! I'm making a matching pair of fingerless mitts which will each have one of the smaller buttons and coral and olive colored embroidery.


P.S. - Andrew Maxwell was awesome!
P.P.S. - Would you?

Hello!

Sorry for the hiatus everyone! What with the holidays and then pretty much nothing happening after the holidays (or so it's seemed) I haven't had the time or the motivation to post much. But I've decided that these next few weeks shall be activity time, so here's a big meaty post.

Last Friday was Defur's birthday and over the weekend the group of us made the grand tour of McHugh's, White's (this bar is older than the United States!!), the Roost and back to downstair's McHugh's (fancy Radio K! [fwi: links to a myspace]). It was all really fun :D

Today was decidedly quieter, as one of my friend's and I went for a super long walk/photography excursion...which I just spent way to much time making a map of it on GoogleMaps! It really was a nice walk and I got some awesome photographs.

Lovely surprise house on Greygates Ave

Whoa cool graffiti colors

Old Martello Tower

Dart pedestrian overpass, even more great colors!

See??

Semi-abadoned fishing spot

We decided that this is a
moor-your-secret-smuggling-boat-in-the-dead-of-night rope.

Hungry birds on the Merrion Rd strand

Overall it was about 4 miles and quite a nice walk. Tomorrow I get my loan refund available (yay!), so I'll be making a big grocery shopping expedition (don't worry Mom I haven't been starving, just eating a lot of soup haha). Then on Thursday I'll be seeing Andrew Maxwell, he of my visit Ireland side-bar video fame!! Although this video almost makes me cry laughing.

Photo Friday

Its Friday! woot! Except that I need to be practically glued to my desk this weekend because of paper writing. Bleurgh...

Ye olde timey sign post leading into Phoenix Park

Photo Friday

My residences is set up like a little village of apartment buildings and mine is the one at the end! (The door's in the middle of these two). Our apartment looks out onto the back so you can't see my window in this pic, but this is what all the buildings look like here.

Yay Money!

My two new favorite words were discovered today: "fees" & "refund". Got an email today from UCD saying that I had quite a nice bit of money owed to me from the college. I knew that my loans from the government were more than my costs here were going to be, but I wasn't sure what that meant. Would it just not get disbursed? Would it float away in the ether of exchange rates? Apparently the full first half got disbursed to the UCD Fees Office and so now I've got extra! And when the second half is disbursed next semester I'll have extra again! This is how I feel about this:

I've opened a bank account finally and once my info gets cleared by amorphous criminal and governmental entities (which should happen by Thursday evening or Friday morning) I'll be able to deposit the refund check. Now I know that this isn't actually real money, but rather a loan from my illustrious country, so I'm going to try to get a savings account too on Thursday/Friday and put at least half of this check in there so I don't spend it and have the previously mentioned illustrious country pissed at me when I can't pay them back right away. So yes! YAY!

Photography Friday!

Or rather I'll say Fotagrafaicht Aoine in honor of this officially bilingual country. And to my Irish readers, if that's wrong feel free to blame englishirishdictionary.com, it's not my fault if y'all are putting false information out there.

ps sorry about the blurriness