Autumnal activities...

....as with last year Autumn has so far been pretty nice here in NI. 


We have been going for walks with the dawg and on one of them I took a picture of the back of LB and SM, walking off ahead as usual, and in it I was amazed to see -

The Lough Ness Monster, Nessie herself, there in the water for all to see (if you look carefully). Far from home but that would explain why nobody has been able to find her in Scotland for ages. I will be doing guided tours once I can get my hands on a world War 2 amphibious landing craft and get some mugs and t-shirts printed up. 


Being a bit further North than London I have noticed the sun seeming lower in the sky and it also gets dark very early so is usually pitch black when I get home from work. Call me paranoid if you will but I think that this has given the farm animals the cover they need to plot the takeover of the human realm. It is like Charlotte's Web meets Chicken Run meets Babe Pig in the City. I was driving along our road one evening and saw this shocking and frightening sight of a chicken and cow in mid conversation. 

I had to stop the car and reverse to make sure I was not seeing things. The cow has camouflaged itself but you can just see it there to the right of the gate. They shut up as soon as I shone the light on them and waited until I had gone before they continued their scheming. It is true I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough? 


I also spent 7 days over the last two weeks on a tree climbing course, learning how to climb, rescue people from trees and how to use a chainsaw in a tree. Today at work I was able to climb into, dismantle and take down my first tree. The X marks the condemned tree - 

  
Luckily there were not any photos or video of me getting into the tree in the first place as it was neither impressive nor pretty but I got up there in the end and lopped off the branches one by one, carefully avoiding the heads of my colleagues below - 

And once it was small enough I felled it.

 
First with the chainsaw and then to finish it off with a mix of pure brawn and raw power - 

Here with his well defeated foe is the great white hunter (of trees) - 

After all of this hard walking, hard work and hardcore livestock suspicion nobody would deny me the occasional afternoon siesta would they? 

Didn't think so (thanks a lot Andreas). 


Sweet dreams everyone!!

Update time.....

.......it's been a while so thought I would write a bit about what has been going on recently.


We have been busy busy busy and seemingly away most weekends, mainly celebrating the marriages of some of our friends. LB and I have been to Kent, Northumberland and France, as well as to a few here in NI including our own. Congrats to all of our newlywed friends but thank God the wedding season has finally finished.


As well as singing hymns horrendously out of key, eating and drinking too much and dancing like an ass I have been developing my climbing skills - 

  
and my shooting skills - 

and my Viking boat racing skills. 

Myself and some mates were the core of our local pub's team - The Smugglers - and we got to the semi finals where we let the army boys beat us. They were off to Afghanistan soon and we thought we'd give them something to celebrate before they do. 


Have been hiding from the dog but she has a way of sniffing me out - 

I did a bit of stand up. 

Sitting down.


We went on a friend's folk's boats to celebrate her birthday around Lough Erne. These were the boats - 

The birthday girl (sporting her versatile changeable necklace/glasses thingy) -

  LB - 

Your hero (with a magic laser ring) - 

I have been working down south and having to leave earlier than usual. One of the people on the roads at that time of the morning seemed to be mocking me - 

We have also come into contact with one of the more unusual hazards when working in the tree surgery business. Nothing that a chainsaw cannot solve though - 

One other thing I did was go back through some of my old photos, trying to clear a bit of space on the computer, and I found an amazing photo of LB and CK and if you look really carefully you can also see a cheeky little leprechaun sneaking in on the photo - 

Got three days of non-stop torrential rain on the way. Woohoo!!

Fishy fishy fishy fish.

I have been living in Ireland for almost a year now (how time flies) and realised the other day that I had not been proper fishing yet. A couple of times I have put out a line behind a boat that the mackerel have chosen not to bite at (bastards), but I had not been fishing with a rod.


This situation needed an immediate remedy and I managed to persuade my friend FF to take me out today with his girlfriend ER (royal dont you know?).


I got to Seaforde just before 5 and we went out in a rowing boat. FF showed me the basics and we started casting away hoping to catch some fish. 

FF was using what looked like a small fish with hooks attached and I was using what is known as a spoon bait which looks like a table spoon with a three pronged hook on the end. 


We were out there for about an hour before one of us got a bite. Just my luck it was FF who got the first one. After a battle of 5 or so minutes he successfully hauled in a 10 pound pike - a veritable monster.

I felt like it would soon be my time and it was only a matter of minutes after FF had put his pike back into the lake that I got what felt like a bite, quickly followed by confirmation that I had a fish on my hook - Woohoo! Get in there my son! Heave it in.


My battle with the fish was over a lot quicker than FF's and I initially put this down to my superior strength. After only a minute I had landed my fish onto the boat and it soon became apparent that my muscle power had nothing to do with it. FF's fish had definitely been trying to eat his fish-like bait. My fish had other ideas and must instead have been trying to make sweet fish love with my spoon-like one.

We're definitely not gonna need a bigger boat!!

Easily excitable Karl?

.....I was over in England last weekend for my sister's son Jacob's christening which was an absolute blast - great to see lots of friends and family over an action packed weekend.


As I was going straight from work on Friday I had to do one of the most uninspiring activities known to man - choosing between various options for airport parking.


At Belfast International airport you have a lot of choice. There is Cosmo, BCP, Killead Airlodge, Mccausland and Karl to name but a few.


In the end I went with Mccausland as I could book online and it is very close so you do not have to wait very long at all however on the way to the airport I drove past a sign for the Karl carpark that caught my eye. 

    

I was very happy that I had not chosen this option. There was something about it that I found a bit depressing for some reason. 

It was on the way back home on Sunday evening that I went past Karl again, from the other side this time, and I realised that actually Karl is the most exciting of all the airport carparks and the one I will be using from now on. 

Bar Bar Barber, have you any skills?

....I went to the barbers this week.

Called Shear Madness it is one of the many in Ireland where the name seems to be more important than the standard of cutting (another notable being "Curl up and Dye".


I asked them for a bit of a trim and thought I was happy with the results until I got home and had a better look which was when I realised that she had left me with a patch of longer hair at the back.

The plan was to get LB to cut it down to the length of the rest of the hair until I realised that instead of being a bit scatty and also a bit unprofessional, the barber was actually doing me a big favour and starting me off with the foundations for a comb-over. I will now be cultivating this patch for my hair-swirl of the future. Hopefully Northern Ireland will become wind free or I may be in trouble.       

The Honeymoon period is over..........

.......Boohoo.


Sorry a post has been so long in coming but I have had a busy couple of months.


For those who dont know, LL and I got married on 18th of June. When we have some pictures to show I will write some stuff about the wedding but for now I will just say it was friggin' awesome. Absolutely amazing. LL shall forever hereafter be referred to as LB (on here). 


We went to Italy for our honeymoon so for now I will tell you a bit about that. 


Before going I downloaded a teach yourself Italian course - 8 Cds worth - but sod's law dictated that the first disk did not download. As a result I knew some clever phrases (like pua dire me dove....., please can you tell me where...) but not the vocab to finish it off (the library is??). Was a bit of a bummer but luckily most people spoke enough English for us to get by so was good. I did know some words that came in handy.


The cab was booked for 3.15am the Monday after and was to take us to Dublin to fly to Rome. LL was renowned for being a terrible traveller, and LB started her married life as the same. She got into the cab and then says that she has left her phone charger in the house. 15 minutes later and we have broken into her folks house and retrieved it and are off 15 minutes late.


The cabbie decided to drive like a granny on a mobility scooter and time was running out to get to the airport on time. That and the fact that I thought we were flying Aer Lingus instead of Ryanair (wishful bloody thinking and a completely different terminal) meant that by the time we got on the plane we had already had quite a stressful journey. Still we were on the plane and on our way to Italia.


We arrived and it was hot. Hot hot hot. Brilliant, but it made me wonder if the three jackets, two jumpers and a fleece that I had been dragging around were going to be surplus to requirements. We decided to get the bus into Rome to save some pennies (WTF were we thinking??!?) which was a bit of a pain and after walking for 30 minutes we were at our first point of call. Fortunately it was not this place that I thought looked quite interesting - 

Whats with the nose? I cant see what benefits that may have for gays or lesbians. Oh right. I get it now.


Instead we were staying at one of the Rome Luxury Suites which was much more like it. 

Located in a quiet courtyard (above) just off Via Margutta (below) - one of Rome's most beautiful roads, as seen in the film Roman Holiday) we were told my some Italians later in the trip).

  
....and the room itself was incredible - best hotel(ish) room I/we have ever stayed in. The photos I have do not do it justice. Large living room area, huge bedroom with walk-in wardrobes, amazing bathroom. Here are some any way.

So we had a day and a half wandering around Rome, mostly aimlessly, and we saw great historical and modern sights including - 


The Colloseum - 

The big marble monument roundabout thing - 

This fishy fountain - 

He's got the right idea - deal with the octopus attacking the family jewels and then get rid of the pigeon on the head.


Some awesome artwork - 

and my personal favourite - this statue of the Abdul Ceasar (the lesser known Islamic Ceasar) and his four wives of choice - 

Rome is full of gorgeous and glamourous people and everyone is super fashion conscious. This does not stop with just the humans and I was amazed to see that even the working ponies take pride in their appearance and like to look sharp - 

A day and a half in sweltering Rome, as tired as we were, was enough and we picked up our hire car (Fiat Panda one point zero baby yeah) on Tuesday afternoon (LB "forgot" her driving licence back at the room so guess who was doing all of the driving for the whole f*@%ing holiday) and we started off on phase two of our honeymoon in Tuscany.


Before more about Tuscany I have to mention something about driving in Italy and Italian drivers. Rome is a nightmare to drive in - FACT. I had primed LB that it was not going to be easy and to not scream at me too much and to give her her dues, she was very good, even when we were driving towards a stream of six lanes of cars coming towards us and when we crossed straight back over the river that we had just crossed. Throughout Italy you have to be aggressive when driving and it is no surprise that most of the cars in Rome have at least one scrunch or scrape on their bodywork. When you get onto the bigger/faster roads it is like everyone else is playing Gran Turismo. You dont look in your mirror for a couple of seconds and next thing you know it is like you have a car in your backseat. They drive along the motorway indicating, flashing lights and in one case with the brighties on in the daytime so you know to get out of the way. The roads however are gorgeous to drive on, lots of hills with curves and turns, and when my wife had given me some useful driving pointers I was away and she was gutted not to be able to drive. 


So we were on our way to the first of our relaxing destinations - Villa Bengodi on the Western Tuscan Coast. 

This was more like it. A lovely villa in the middle of nowhere with a private beach, crystal clear water and sunshine. 

Whilst here I underwent a transformation. This is one of those spot the difference type things. Five points per difference (maximum ten points) - 

From there we went to a place called Cortesa de Forteza near San Gimignano (spelling in Italian is not my strong point). 

Another lovely boutiquey B&B with six rooms, great views (from the loo in our room), a great pool and a high quality clientele of drivers like ourselves.

From there to Montepulciano where we stayed in Relais St Bruno which had a lush room -

a cool pool - 

sweetass hammocks - 

and useful and attractive people from whom to get directions - 

We did a 3 day cookery course, where we made three courses a day (which we then ate for lunch with a bottle of their wine) including learning to make three types of pasta and cook sausages and sausage meat in a variety of clever ways. The plan was to take a picture of each of the three courses every day but as is often the case with plans, I have none to show.


We were stressing about what presents to bring back for the nieces and nephews until we found this gem of a shop which solved all of our problems in one - 

Crossbows for everyone!! Woohoo!! We decided against it in the end as we thought LB's brother Ed would have an apple on each of his kids' heads before it was even out of the box.


Of course I took lots of photos of buildings and alleyways and statues and vistas. I tried to get LB to pose for photos but it seems she is not too keen on being photographed. I did however get many of her disappearing into the distance.

When I did find her again she either had found a gelato shop - 

or perhaps was to be found being chatted up by some Italian hunk - 

The last place we stayed was Locanda Rosetti near Orvieto in Umbria. 

The best thing about this one was that we got to have four course dinner with the owner and the rest of the guests, and free booze. Now that I was not having to drive home after the meal, I was able to let my hair down and get plastered on the free wine, limoncello and grappa. Something I did with great relish.

Needless to say we stayed in some awesome places, went to many cool towns and villages, ate and drink some fantastic stuff, and basically had the time of our lives. 


It was a bit of a pain to come back to Ireland but at least we had the weekend to enjoy ourselves before going back to work.


On Saturday we went to Northern Ireland's premier festival where we and about 50 (max) other people -

......got to see a few bands including the awesome beatboxer Shlomo - 

......and my friend CK got his face painted - Meow!! 

......embarrassed at all LS?


Sunday we were invited to out friend LF's island where we spent the day in the sunshine eating great food, having a few beers and swimming in Strangford Lock. 

Here is a view from their loo (this may become a theme). 

Bloody great. 


I was actually quite relieved to go back to work to burn off some of the alcohol and pasta that I had ingested over the previous couple of weeks.


Married life has proved to be pretty tough thus far. Long may it continue!!