i meant to say

here. if you look to the slideshow on your right and right click and open a new tab/window you get to a whole heap of pics that i just uploaded from the wholetrip.
they are an edit! and they are all from my camera so you can expect more from zees!

enjoy.

got nearly back

yay! no silly underpants inspections or anything! friends collected us from the aiport really early and it was lovely to see them both. thanks so much for taking the hassle out of the morning leg of the trip and giving us a lovely welcome back to this particular continental shelf. it was great hanging out and we tried to break any jetlag/soul delay that may have tried catching us. didn't fully work.
just chilling out in siblings dwellings and generally enjoying their company. hope the can say the same!
the flight itself took hardly any time. not sure if that is true or just because we are used to really long bus journeys and now. watched the movie "where the wild things are" on the plane, one word. DON"T. tried to sleep but only zee got any sleep i think i may have drifted of for a minute or two but the trip seemed so short it didn't even register.
still feeling out of time after afew days. getting a bit more synced with local time.
the trip up to boston went very nicely.
after an emotional goodbye we were off. got good seats and chilled out. listened to music/read/listened to podcasts/slept/watched america drift by outside the window. when we got into boston we had planned to go to lunch in a diner but we ended up going straight to the airport and going through security to get to the stuff beyond security. then wished we hadn't rushed so much when we arrived in a small seating area with a tiny coffe dock. we were not going to stay there for three hours! so we went back out into the main airport. in one of the corridors there we saw nice white rocking chairs and plug sockets looking out over the airstrips. noting it for later we wandered into bookshops and tack-stores and then got a huge burrito each after weighing up the odds of what was good value in the food court. we thought it was funny that after having been in central america we had to go eat more of the same! so after getting food all over the place while trying to not drip our burritos everywhere we went up and installed ourselves into two comfy rocking chairs and watched the sky collect a few planes. ah that's the way airports should be. so needless to say we took to the air ourselves and got our next flight easy too.
fingers tired! as am i!

coming over all CIE

not there but getting there.
we have had a great time in south carolina. folk here have been so welcoming. had a great st. patrick's party where we were the token irish people and had some great chats with great people. met some neighbours who have a lovely lovely garden and chatted to them about life the universe and scifi, as well as making things yourself and recycling stuff to make useful things for yourself. they have also made the cutest most gorgeous little red boat that they can easily lift into the nearby lake. i like it a lot. they are really great people.
while were were here we built a set of raised beds 4ft x 4ft. they only took a few hours to build up and the next day we got earth for them so now they are ready to plant up just in time for planting season.
we tried to catch fish in the lake near every day, to no avail. i think we need to learn a few things.
building the raised beds got me to thinking that myself and zee are like johnny appleseed only maybe deeandzee raisedbed.
off tomorrow to begin the long trek home. should be a fun trip. sorry we did not post more pics on the way and update as much as maybe we could have but that's the way things go sometimes.

sitting in a wafflehouse sunday before st. patrick's day 2010

when we were in Charlotte we tried to put our luggage in a locker at the greyhound station. they don't have any. so, luckily they(the city) has a set of free buses that do two crossing routes through the centre of the city. we were able to get on them and saw the centre of the city anyway. the buses are kitted out to look like old wood trams, very nice. we wandered the city a bit thinking that if we could find a museum or some such we could waste a few hours before the bus to Columbia. that did not work. $20 to a small museum, i think not. so we heard of a place called the epic centre up where we had started our city wanderings. it had a cinema. we decided to go see "Alice in wonderland". they were very nice and let us put our bags behind the counter. so having just over 1/2 an hour before the show we went next door and had very nice burgers at "just five guys" and then went to the cinema. the setup for the cinema reminded me a fair bit of a shrunken version of the UGC in Bruxelles. it seemed rather classy and we had a pair of chairs that was in fact a couch. comfy seats! while watching Alice i was near overcome with pangs of mortality by something the hatter said to Alice. it is so strange to think of death and your own death. if anything rather than make me nihilistic or religious(though that does rear it's head) it makes me hopeful that i shall try to dd to humanity in a small way, maybe become a starting point or a cog in a grand design for something grand like an actual long term plan that helps uplift humanity.

a whole month!

well we have just been not writing up anything.
lets see. not much to tell really.
but we went to the beach and had a glorious few days. you never know how much you miss the sea until you see it again. had a pair of prescription goggles. very useful. saw fishies in the seaweed and chased them a little. had great icecream made by an italian couple in placencia. saw a whole heap of pelican just chilling out around the place. and while we ate lunch one of the days we saw two kids climbing a tree to get what looked like unripe fruit so after we finished eating and they were gone we went and got a ripe one we could see. having never seen a guava before i was puzzled. yet having just drank guava juice i was able to smell what the fruit was so i hid it from zee as she loves guavas. a few seconds of childish running saying "i'm not telling!" and i relented. we ate it as we scooted along the edge of the carribeen sea and looked at young conches as they sluggishly walked along the sea-floor.
the day we got there we went for a long walk up the beach and went as far as the final point of land you can see on placencia's beach. loads of early morning swims and late night swims(is that a shark!) finally got lobstered up, though i have to wonder why folk spend a whole holiday making up for lost time by staying on the beach all day. we only needed about an hour and we really only did that twice. wandered the whole town. we were staying in a place called carol's cabanas. it was nice and simple. cooker fridge bathroom breakfast area bedroom and veranda(with mozzie shielding set to maximum). all we needed.

the trip back up was fun. we had a fair amount of time to waste and so went to get icecream before going to the ferry and when we reached the ferry it was pulling back in to collect someone who had just missed it. strolled on and on the other side we speedwalked up to the bus station(it takes about ten minutes) and the bus was just arriving. got a seat on the bus easily. down the back. then a nice mexican gentleman with bristling tattoos told us it was his seat. figuring that i liked earth i just said grand and we moved to seats opposite him. and then on came a guy selling "lemon juice. tamarind juice!" zee said "lemon please!". oh. wait. "i have no lemon juice". and another guy sold us mango slices(unripe) with cayenne pepper and sugar. it was lovely. listening to our mp3 players on the way up to block out the horrendous radio station trying to crawl into our heads. i was bumping along to the balfa brothers. a very cool creole band from cajan country and they have some great tunes i tell ya. every big stop a few guys would get on and give us the option of buying a bit of food to tide us over. and a girl got on just over halfway with loads of fresh "cinnamon bons" and as she worked her way down the bus we hummed and hawed not knowing what she was selling. the second zee heard her say "cinnamon" money was near thrown from zee's hand. "you cannot resist the power of the bark-side luke".
i tell ya, the bus was better serviced than any in ireland. granted, it may not look all flashy but the seats are comfortable enough and the food we were offered was a hundred times nicer and nobody felt like they were being screwed over for a sandwich. and they will drop you off wherever it is you need to be dropped off during the route.

so back in the homestead. eating green beans that were planted about a month into us arriving and looking at the land.
finally got around to lighting a fire today for some cashew nuts. i did not know they were so much work! if you get the raw juice from the fruit around the nut onto you it will burn,like acid! so you fire roast the nuts and shuck them after they are dry, i now appreciate how much effort goes into making just one nut edible. as well as roasting the nuts we fired a few of the random pieces of claywork we made a while back. now while the clay cracked while it was drying we figured it would be a good way to see if the clay fired well. so now we have a few nice looking fragments that are vitrified and so we know the clay works as does the simple way of just heating them up and putting them in the fire embers.
i made a small sculpture just there too. using the local rock. couldn't really tell what rock it was. it was all dusty and yellow and dirty. on cleaning it however i found out that it was a lovely rosy marble! come to think of it, i have seen pieces in museums made from just this stuff and from this part of the world too. and also while sanding and filing it smooth i had an idea that you could use vinegar to smooth the stone down a bit. i dont' know where this idea sprang from but i have vague recollections of hearing the idea somewhere before. so when i was near finished out came the brush and a bowl of vinegar. it worked! now the piece is super smooth and nicely polished.the vinegar burnt away the gritty parts and gave the whole piece a uniform finish. it is only small but it looks lovely. i wanted the piece to look like it might still be a pebble and i think it worked very nicely. now i am making a slightly bigger piece and carefully chipping away small pieces so as not to crack the whole thing down the middle.

so that's the lot. there is more in between the month but that's all the interesting stuff i think. more soon enough, i promise.