Let There Be LIGHTHOUSE

I’m writing this bit at 11:15ish PM on Thursday, two weeks after arriving on the van Dam farm. I am currently quite buzzed thanks to Mark’s home-brewed ale (which was quite delicious, rather cider-like and fruity – maybe I’m developing a taste for beer after all!) and feeling totally good. Today was actually a great day. I got to move away from weeding and on to post-holing (digging holes for posts) in preparation for erecting a fence along one edge of the property. I was still kneeling the whole time, and my legs are again killing me, but it was a nice change. I don’t know what it is about weeding around bushes, but it just inspires evil feelings within me. Listening to my iPod as I work helps, too – it prevents my mind from dwelling on saddening things. Later, Mark and the twins and I drove a few km to the nearest beach mid-afternoon. The ostensible purpose was to collect sand for future cement-production, but we had good fun there, too. I tried skipping stones for the first time in several years and did quite well, I thought. Then Mark started, and outstripped me like mad. Farther, faster, more skips…it would be hard to be more beaten in such a contest. It was still a good time, though. The kids are really fun. I’ve never spent a long time around toddlers (is that what you call a two-and-a-half-year-old?) and while it has been occasionally tiring and annoying, they’re really quite nice and funny and friendly.

I worked for a bit after the beach, and then Mark and Debbie and I moved to the…well, I don’t quite know what to call it, but it’s a corner of the property with a big pile of drying branches/weeds/roots/grass. We went there and started up a fire in an old oil drum and burned maybe a quarter or a third of the stuff there. It was actually a grand night. Earlier in the day Mark had gotten hold of some free second-hand beer tap equipment and was able to extract the newly-gasified remnants of a “five years old” home-made beer. So as I was pitchforking dead roots into this fire (which in itself was nice, since burning leaves and yard waste has been prohibited back home all my life) Mark and Debbie came out with a pitcher of beer and the three of us shot the shit as the sun slowly lowered. For reference, it starts looking sunset-y around 6:30 or 7 and doesn’t actually get dark until maybe 9:45 or 10. It’s quite nice. We talked about all manner of things, some of the larger topics being children, WWOOFing, aging, and self-discovery. We finished as it got too dark to further feed the oil drum and we went to our respective homes and that brings me to where I am now!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m feeling much better now than I was when I wrote that blog post. My mood has improved incredibly – thanks to everyone offering kind words of support, as well as to the van Dams for earnestly attempting to involve me more after I had told them that I was interested in leaving early.

While I’ve been here, I have been sleeping really well, but I’ve been having really bizarre dreams. I hear (thanks to Esquire magazine) that certain vitamins can cause overactive subconscious, so perhaps my taking a multivitamin shortly before bed is contributing to my odd dreams. None of them have been lucid, but I have been writing down all the dream details I can remember because I hear that is a good way to progress one’s mind towards lucid dreaming. I still don’t know exactly why it’s such a big goal, though…frankly I’m quite happy letting my subconscious decide what happens, because it seems like a whole new self-contained story instead of something I’m making up as I go along.

Written on Saturday (sober, by now):

Today…was a great day. I’m incredibly pleased (as I hope you are, Constant Readers) that I’m more fully enjoying myself here in Ireland after that period of despair.

Saturdays are my “half day” of work on the farm. Since it was drizzly when I woke up, I quickly finished up the job I’d almost done the night before (smashing stones with a sledgehammer to make concrete) and then retreated inside the caravan to assemble a couple of garden benches – my “rainy day” task, natch. I was more-or-less done by 10 at which point I joined Mark in town for another Tai Chi lesson. I further learned that what I have done in Mark’s classes isn’t Tai Chi Chuan proper, and isn’t even a martial art; rather, it’s a series of meditative movements intended to loosen/stretch/soothe the body and mind, heavily inspired by Tai Chi. The real Tai Chi is in his earlier class (the one that I watched and pathetically tried to follow visually last time before doing these movements). Oh well! I still want to find out more when I get back to Ann Arbor.

The twins had a birthday party to attend, and Mark didn’t want me to feel like I was working while he and Debbie weren’t, so they gave me the afternoon off. From 2:30 (after dinner) to around 7 I finally took an intense walking tour of the area. The vast, vast bulk of this hike was just going through/between/around farms and houses, but there were a handful of goals. Actually, come to think of it, each goal was a separate branch off a single “main” (not big at all) road. First I made my way to the second-closest and first-ranked pub in the area – just as a waypoint, not to get a pint at 3 in the afternoon – and beyond it to a small, rocky beach. I found a piece of coal and, of course, used it to write “P.G. ‘09” on a rock in an area that might not get rained on often. Then I went back to the main road and walked a ways up it further until I saw the sign saying “Galley Head – 3 km”. I turned up that and walked to the end and back, for Galley Head is the local lighthouse, said to be quite picturesque. I’ll talk more about the lighthouse in the next paragraph, because there’s quite a bit to talk about there. After seeing that and coming back to the main road, I kept on going to Red Strand, which is a fairly short but pretty local beach. There I met a curious couple – an Oregonian and an Irishwoman who live in Germany. At first, I just took a picture of them like they asked, but later they drove past me hiking back to the farm and gave me a lift. All in all though, I was walking a solid four hours. It was refreshing!

Okay, the lighthouse. Interesting tidbit I got from Debbie: it’s the only lighthouse on the island of Ireland that flashes inland, and it does so because an earlier owner of the nearby castle Castlefreke was very vain and demanded that his beautiful castle be illuminated at night if they were going to build a lighthouse anyway. Well…it was just your average lighthouse, and I couldn’t go straight up to it. But that’s not why I gave it a separate paragraph.

I want to say that I love this dog:



As I was taking a picture along the road to the lighthouse – I was probably four fifths of the way there – this beautiful yellow lab came bounding out of the nearest house and sat down next to me. There were no people visible in or around the house, so I pet him and he turned out to be quite friendly. Then, as I continued walking to the end of the peninsula, he continued to accompany me. Sometimes he was at my side, sometimes he jumped up on the low stone wall separating road from cliff, sometimes he ran a few yards ahead. The lighthouse itself is private property, but there was a little grassy clearing at the end of the public road, and you could go down a relatively safe portion of the cliff. When we reached the clearing, he happily jumped around and sniffed around the edge of the cliff. It was…shockingly nice to have him there. Having a companion – even (especially?) one who didn’t talk, but was just always there at my side wagging his tail – was extremely reassuring.

Also, the supper I made myself today was by far the best I’ve made in my time here. I will tentatively call it “spaghetti with sauce” but only because I’m not sure what really goes into spaghetti sauce so I made it up. Here is the recipe:

1 fresh home-grown leek
1 fresh home-grown onion
2 sprigs fresh home-grown thyme
1 sprig fresh home-grown rosemary
1 sprig fresh home-grown oregano
1 sprig fresh home-grown parsley
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 leftover frozen chicken leg
Vegetable oil
Ketchup
Mustard
Soy sauce
Salt
Pepper

1. Prepare by dicing onion, slicing leek into rounds (including the long green leaves [totally edible, guys – just cook them a little longer]), chopping herbs (leaving them separated), opening can of tomatoes, and removing chicken from the bone and cutting into manageable pieces.
2. Heat a pan with a tiny amount of vegetable oil, then brown chicken along with salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme. Set chicken aside.
3. Add a bit more oil to the dregs in the same pan then cook onion until nearly caramelized. Add oregano about halfway through this step.
4. Add leek to the pan and fry for several minutes (this is the one thing I did wrong – my leek leaves were still a bit crunchy in the final product).
5. Add can of tomatoes, followed by a generous squirt or two of ketchup, a small bit (maybe ¾ teaspoon?) of mustard, and a dash of soy sauce. The odd mix is because I wanted to make things interesting - don't worry, I know spaghetti sauce isn't supposed to have those things in it. Stir thoroughly.
6. Allow to simmer for several minutes. Add chicken, then simmer for several more minutes.
7. Salt and pepper to taste.
8. Add sauce as desired to the pasta that I assume you prepared alongside this pasta sauce. Didn’t make pasta? You are goddamn retarded.

…Anyway, yeah. This was a hell of a long post, but it was fun and hopefully entertaining. And I have finally started to love my time here. Here’s hoping it continues!