Back again

[radegund]

We got back from the wilds of Connemara on Tuesday night, and I still haven't got back into the swing of mornings. The holiday was great - houses infinitely more basic than last year, but dead pictureskew. And really, apart from the night the middle generation plus niallm and I all went to Roundstone for dinner, and the wheel fell off the bus on our way home, and 33 of us, in various stages of drunkenness, were trapped for two hours in a pub the like of which one usually encounters only in plays by Tom Murphy or the more desolate kind of grim realist novel - a pub complete, need I say, with rat-arsed under-age drag racers who performed handbrake turns and wheelies on the small country road outside (now we know the origin of those news stories that begin "Two seventeen-year-old men and a forty-two-year-old mother of four died last night in a collision in County Galway"), although everyone was obeying the smoking ban (except for the owner of the pub) - until the coach company was able to send one of its other buses to get us, which couldn't happen until all the local young people had been safely driven home from the disco - apart from that, it was all pretty idyllic.

Work is hotting up. The question of staffing is getting interesting, not to say alarming - a protected post may follow. I've only another 15 weeks before I go on leave, and I don't know that those holding the reins fully understand this. We're now moving into the Headless Chicken portion of the year, and we're doing it on 2.5 staff where last year we had 4. Watch this space.

I totally failed to see brandnewgun while she was here - sorry, Kate! It would have been lovely to meet you, but hope to catch you next time (or make it to Edinburgh some day, of course...).

In pregnancy news, I'm expanding goodo - and getting kicked with ever increasing oomph (the. weirdest. sensation. ever). I think I have a touch of carpal tunnel syndrome - yet another of the many ailments that are perfectly normal in the gravid female. My left wrist has been whimpering since yesterday. At least the tendonitis in my right arm seems to be quiescent at present.

It does freak me out somewhat that so much of this experience involves being told that chronic, low-grade discomfort and inconvenience is absolutely natural and fitting. I'm living in my body, and by its strictures, to a greater extent than ever before. And it's coming home to me with a new immediacy how very, very geared towards the non-pregnant body the traditional structures of a working life are.

Comments

[ainetl.livejournal.com]

last year when i visited we stayed several nights in cashel (the galway cashel), and we stopped by roundstone, dogs bay and gurteen beach. i was so beautiful!

can't believe the whole bus incident...