Sun Room Sun Stripes

Peter sent along this photo. The sun is beaming down through the glass roof in the sun room. There is no adequate way to describe the hard brilliance of the sunlight that shines so intensely at Ballinard and environs. It is harder and brighter than the US. Same sun. Different air? It shines down through the lament of the Cow's Croon. That's probably what makes it different. The air, so shaped by the particular pattern of sound waves from a characteristic way of singing the world, in turn shapes the light passing through it.

Skibbereen shopping

One Sat we went to Skibbereen farmers market and pulled into an empty space next to this;

a most delightful example of the positively most ideal way to convey one's market bounty back to the cottage. In the vintage Triumph convertible with the top down (being whipped by ten-foot briars and bombarded by huge flies, but, that's another story). Although we enjoyed our own procured plants and strawberries no less than our neighbor, it was markedly more disorganized how we got them home.

The carrots marinating in the seawater-soaked life jackets and the leeks are cleaning the muck off the bottom of the wellies as the car bounces along the road home.  Sorted!



   .....a big sprig of rosemary from Peter's garden....

I read or heard many years ago that whole fish would be covered in thick matts of rosemary for the journey across the water to the market on the mainland. Something in the rosemary helped keep the fish  from going off. Is this true?

duck demographics

There has been a remarkable change in the demographic at St Stephens Green duck pond. Formerly populated by a sizable number of placid ducks it is now a new hangout for dozens of large seagulls, who float about just like the ducks, almost imitating them. 

The flurry that set up at the edge of the pond where a young boy was tossing in bread bits explained the draw. While ducks, no less interested in such booty, paddled in formation directly to the tosser, scooping up the pieces quickly while keeping their wings trim and using feet and tail as rudder, the seagulls by contrast flapped splashily about in undisciplined melee, stepping over one another to get at the pieces floating. As soon as the supply stopped they resumed their duck-mimicry. They outnumbered the natives 20 to 1 easily. There was two or maybe three types of seagull. The pond is as old as the park so it is a mystery why it has suddenly attracted the attention of seagulls, such voracious scavengers, normally only appeased by the torrents of bloody fish guts sliding out the sidescuttles of trawlers.

Dublin

It lashed rain in garish Temple Bar.

Back in loud Dublin following weeks in the whispering landscapes of W Cork. I experience an automatic tensing moving through the crowds, which are chaotic, not following an apparent predictable pattern. There is much bumping-into of people, each collision rippling outwards and setting the scene for the next imminent collision, yet everyone gets through with surprising speed. The indigenous walk at about twice or more the pace of visitors, so navigation requires a constant visual reckoning in the rapid micro-decisions on whether to brake or accelerate. To brake behind a throng of Italian visitors might well change the course of the entire afternoon. It is much like watching an animated diagram of electrons in an average piece of iron before the delivery of a charge. All the electrons are hurrying about minding their own business, somehow avoiding being creamed by any number of the other thousands of millions of nearby electrons narrowly averting disaster themselves. Mind boggling to watch but if you were an electron yourself it would probably seem normal.
Joan's apt is a welcome sanctuary to which I can withdraw, drink tea and think about this.....

two ipod pics stitched side-by-side of the view out 

Joan's window on a starkly sunny  day, one taken

at 10am the other some hours later.

A gathering at a restaurant on Talbot St for Joan's birthday. Ann took the picture and must have said something that spurred myself and Peter to adopt the paper-slippers look. Good food and fun was had by all.

Cubic

I don't know how this is achieved; a fan with strings that open and close the blades cleanly inserted into a large glass window. It seems to float. One of these remained in the big plate glass window of the former shop which became the sitting room again in Portmarnock, following the relocation of said shop to a new extension. The reclaiming of the sitting room with it's black and white telly was welcomed, by the same individuals pictured above, as it happens, and the perennial squeak maintained by the idly turning fan in the glass was grimly tolerated.

Obscura Camera from julie murray on Vimeo.

A cardboard box with a pinhole in one end and a sheet of vellum on the backside, so that the sun fluttering among the trees is projected onto it. This moving image edit is derived from about 4 or 5 takes on the day venus was supposed to cross the sun's path. As it turned out I got the day wrong, but it wouldn't have mattered as the image that formed on the vellum was so soft and wispish and the trees were in the way that there was no chance whatsoever venus could be seen passing by. The footage (a misnomer) was taken (questionable term, too) with an iPod, which I stuck into a lump of plasticine which I stuck on a box or chair or something. It was very crude in its set up but it turned out better than what I attempted the next day with a much more expensive camera borrowed from the equipment room.


This pic is of the full moon in West Cork last night taken with an iPod. It was bright enough to register pretty well. Visible are the vines hanging down and the hill beyond. 

and the pond at the bottom of the garden during daylight hours....

..............wherein the moon sleeps....

Gardening

Busy hours in the garden. Harvested twenty five approx stalks of Rhubarb (Rheum x cultorum) (Rheum?!) One third of the plant is recommended harvested in third or fourth year of its existence- Peter's looks well established - at least four years with thick roots)

 ....first lot....

....some more.....

...the remaining.....

The first giant batch is stewed now. I found many gorgeous herbs under the overgrown Fennell and hidden in the weeds. Yanked weeds, tilled a few square feet of dark moist soil and popped the remaining tray of lettuce down. I like the feel of everything, the tug of the long grass, the mass of roots of dandelion with its tidy corona and ropey stalks that go wandering about in their long reach, peaking through the prehistoric leaves of Rhubarb and among the spiny Rosemary plant.... definitely shrub-size, a very big shrub. It laughs at slugs. A hollow, megalithic laugh.

About 8 litres of Rhubarb stew.....