Ireland day 0752. Friday 20 October 2023- Working *

Ireland day 0752. Friday 20 October 2023- Working

Today’s summary	We got our Covid (and in my case flu) vaccinations at the local pharmacy first thing, then I had a meeting about a possible consultancy project, followed by a difficult Spanish exercise. Watched our new TV in the evening
Today’s weather	Very wet and heavily overcast all day. Moderate to strong north easterly wind. Appx 13c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (No GPX today)

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

“Working” may seem like a bit of an odd thing to be doing, given that most of my activities lately seem to have revolved around things like hiking, going to the gym, and sorting out tax(!). So in some ways, today was a bit different to most of the previous Irish days that I have written about.

First off though, as our guests have departed now, we spent the early part of the morning ploughing our way through the mountain of washing that has accumulated over the last few weeks. So now our flat rather resembles a Chinese Laundry, with miscellaneous bits of clothing draped over chairs and radiators in a vain attempt to get things dry in the very humid air here at the moment. I should note, in passing, that the notorious storm Babet seems to have regained her strength and has settled herself over Dublin again. She has been busily depositing what feels like metres of water over us all day, which with the ground already being saturated, is making everything feel a bit flooded.

After the washing, our first activity was, actually, to go to the chemists to get vaccinated. So we are now rather pincushion-like, and buzzing with deactivated flu and covid viruses. And nursing slightly sore arms.

But for me the major activity of the day was to meet with a representative from one of the utility companies here in Ireland. For reasons that are too long winded to explain (but related to a happenstance meeting with the Geological Survey of Ireland almost two years ago), they may want me to do a short piece of consultancy work for them. Today’s meeting, which was at the Croke Park Hotel, was to discuss a bit more about what they want. Who knows what if anything will come of it, but it sounds quite interesting and it would be good to get my brain back into business mode again, albeit only for three or four months. Let’s see what happens.

Once I returned from my meeting, I spent the rest of the afternoon tackling some immensely hard Spanish homework, which took the best part of two hours. Anyway, now as you can see from the photos below, we have at long last taken possession of a TV, so we are going to settle down to watch highlights from last years “Tour de France”. Phew. What a day.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Iarnród Éireann have another eight nights of overnight works in store for us. Will it ever end? Lesson no. 1 when flat-hunting – don’t live near a railway	*Spanish deberes. Particularly tricky trying to sort out different past tenses today.*

We now have, for the first time, a TV here in Ireland. We brought it back from the UK when we sold our house, and it certainly makes watching Netflix a much more enjoyable experience than trying to squint at a tiny phone screen



Storm Babet’s languid progress over the UK and Ireland continues.