Studyitis

Studyitis has set in rather early this year and is making it seriously hard for me to keep to a rigid study programme. I was so good last year and I thought it would be easier this year (she whined).

No; with the disruption of the field trip, and the resulting extra essay taking me off-track, it has been hard to keep plugging along. The weather, with its unremitting rain and all-round nastiness, has done its best to help keep me indoors, but the dentist and and doctor appointments have kept on coming. Once I'm out of doors, I find it hard to get back inside and when inside, its harder yet to go to the study, otherwise known as my bedroom and get down to reducing my piles of notes and photocopied readings and bookmarked books, to succinct study notes on cards.

But I must do it; in 2 months it will be over and I can enjoy the summer, as much as one can enjoy very much, being without an income, thanks to completely lazy and ungrateful offspring, who refuse to continue studying, which would have allowed me to continue as a supportive mother(and be in turn supported as such).

I am confused; how do I stop being one of those, anyway? Seems to me it comes with the territory, whether or not the idle critters intend to trot along to college classes.

Wilds of Wicklow

I've been all over and it's too cold for this sort of thing. I don't want to do any fresh projects and I've seen the snow, ice and lead mines of the Wicklow Gap area, researched and surveyed bits of it for a project, been rebuffed by deteriorating weather and been forced to go to the anodyne Visitor Centre at Glendalough for a day.
After all that confusion and new work set to replace the abandoned practical (thereby wasting all the research done) I managed to leave all my best gear behind on the bus and had to spend half a day on the phone and another 6 hour jaunt to the freezing cold zone out to the west of Cappagh.
It must be 10 degrees colder out there and to prove it, it seems entirely populated by East Europeans, looking like they just returned from Stalingrad. The Industrial parks and the air cargo depots, the grocery warehouses and so on are peopled by immigrant workers. I came face to face with a side of Ireland I hadn't fully comprehended before. The Celtic Tiger: is it really a Russian Bear? Well, no, there were Italians, Spanish, Chinese and many other languages I couldn't even recognise, being spoken around me. The one 'Irish' voice I could here was definitely from Belfast. Now this is certainly not a rant, since I'm not Irish myself.
It was nice to see, when I finally got back to O'Connell Street, a friendly face from the college, someone who works in the canteen - a Chinese girl. She came over and we spoke about my trip to Blanchardstown. I think she lives in Dun Laoghaire.
I finally climbed gratefully onto my bus home, which was fully heated, unlike the miserable old bus they sent us out to the back of beyond in, and thought: I think we have it pretty good on the south side.
So I've done all the field trips I want to do for the present and I have to get down to the work of revising the past 7 months, most of which refuses to come back to mind without a good deal of committed effort.

A rant about VAT - be warned

Blogger is warning me:saving and publishing may fail, well, I've waited long enough to get on, so I might as well risk it.You've still got at least one of my posts up your sleeve, haven't you?
I am not impressed to notice that in the estimable Ms McManus' political newsleeter, she reports that, of all the taxes paid in 2006, the MOST, come from VAT, more than from income tax, or both excise or stamp duties put together.
YES, the truth is out there - the Irish government raises most of its revenues from across the board, without any regard to how poor you are. Because VAT is on everything, not just the luxuries. Unless you consider your utility bills a wanton luxury. A 21% rip-off, and there's no escape. Many itemised bills actually show it double-entered, so you are actually paying the tax twice.
Income tax also bears down unfairly on the poor, since even the really strapped, have to pay a hefty proportion towards ministerial junkets, etc., but VAT is was and always has been, a real scandal.
OK, let's see if Blogger censors this post now...

McManus and McManus

Sounds like an all-in wrestling team to me, but they are actually Dr John and Liz McManus TD and a lovely couple they are too. Now she has her own weblog, but it looks to me like a boring old political website, rather than the robust beasts we think of as weblogs.
I wondertoo, should I point out to her, that one of the dirtiest weblogs I ever find myself looking at, is McManus, the 'CIA operative' and as foul-mouthed as they come (her, her, her). I wonder if any of her Labour supporters will ever find themselves directed, in error, to his site? There could be trouble ahead and I know who I'll put my money on. Yeah, Liz, --she's tough.
Incidentally, although I post infrequently, I did post something onthe 12th March and Blogger has vanished it, I can't find anything but the date left of it and after I post this, that will be gone too. What does Blogger do with all the posts he (gotta be a he) eats?

Rapacious or what?

One of my favourite websites has suffered an 'attack of the Americans', by which I mean that a site which posted little daily oil paintings, which were for sale, got coverage on the N.Y.Times and was promptly overwhelmed by demand for the paintings. And when I say demand, that is what I mean. The comments on the site, have been extraordinary to read: "How come I can't buy a painting", whines one of many - "are you selling them before you post them?" "I can't get up early enough to get one", "I'd like one of those boat ones", says one who wishes, no doubt, to appear as patron of the Arts. etc. etc. and worse still. It is still a pleasure to see the little paintings appear, but the comment box has become a 'no-go' area of the site.

Then I read that the cost of the burial plots at the cemetery where Rosa Parks is buried, are going through the roof, especially the nearby plots. Her family are understandably distressed: Will Rosa have to give up her plot? No, I made that up, but the acquisitiveness is ugly.

I also see that this last year, according to a Christian Science Monitor writer, Americans are not saving at all - in fact, savings are at -0.5%, the first time since the Depression that that has happened. What is it with you Americans? Some are living hand-to-mouth and the rest are spending like there's no tomorrow. Those bits of plastic you clutch in your hands have gotten into your brains. Pull back, people, time to sit back and be thankful for the intangible things that you have, and not just what you can buy.

Just keep on eatin' the poultry, ma'am

Just skimmed through the local free rag. It says the local poultry industry is very concerned about avian flu. For the sake of the industry, which could be 'decimated'. Or even eliminated. It mentions disinfecting visitors to farms, if they couldn't be disuaded from visiting in the first place.
What is conspicuously lacking in the half-page article, is any concern whatsoever for the humans involved: either residents of our garden county or even the poultry farmers themselves. The tone of the piece suggests that if there is a bowl of disinfectant at the farm gate, then all there is to fear is consumer unwillingness to buy chicken at the supermarket.
Quite apart from anything else, how is a disinfectant mat going to help against avian flu?
So keep on buying that chicken, especially Irish chicken, to ensure the continued health of our Irish poultry farmer.
On a related avian theme: I saw a red kite kill and eat a pigeon on campus the other day. The kite having had its fill, a magpie and later, a crow, also partook. The a groundsman came and put the remains into the dumpster, with tongs. But shouldn't those bird remains have been tested, just in case it was a sick bird?
Anyway, thinking that the sighting of this event was an interesting story to relate, I was in full flow to the offspring, when she stopped me with a bored expression. She had already heard identical stories from 2 different people this week, describing 'a rare and interesting thing' that they had witnessed in their respective gardens. In widely different parts of the county - and except that they described the bird as a sparrowhawk, it was the identical story.
Do we have a suddenly extra-rapacious birds of prey, or is 'something odd' going on? I'm certainly glad there is a ready supply of large pigeons around for these birds - that kite looked a mean customer ( cue 'The Birds' theme music).
I blame the weather!

Fun and games

In the March flurries of snow, workmen are building a pen across the plaza in front of the Arts Building. What will they do - pen us in or pen us out? Or could it be just another device to stop us coalescing in big groups and storming across the campus? It may be an apocryphal story, but I heard thet is why the various sets of steps were set up across that area, back in the 60s, when the authorities were last worried about that sort of thing.
Or possibly, they need to extend the Admin building, to cope with all the extra work (and staff needed) to administer the new Modularisation programme. (Program is really how that should be spelt, but I can't quite bring myself to write American, when I live in a nominally English-speaking country).
Yes, I do feel Bolshie today! Must be the weather...