From a very wet and extremely windy mid Clare, happy new year to everybody!

It’s not a good night weather-wise to be out, so if you are be careful!

Happy Winter Solstice 2006 to everybody - and don’t go spending the entire contents of your bank accounts and maxing out your credit card(s) either!

Grianstad shona dhíbh go léir!

¡Feliz solsticio invernal a todos!

While listening to Matt Cooper on TodayFM a few minutes ago I was informed that today is Global Orgasm for Peace day! Matt’s just been talking to a couple (probably from California) who have started the Global Orgasm for Peace movement. More details are available on their website. It’s basically a renaming of Lennon and Ono’s “Make Love not War!” idea, so doesn’t get many points for originality. The idea is a great one, however.
I must point out, though, that the site is entirely flash-based which doesn’t make it very accessible. The navigation bar on the left doesn’t have any text on it (or the text doesn’t load), and I can’t change the size of the text either (which is a major usability no-no). I’m running Firefox 1.5 on FC4 with a 19″ CRT which makes the text so small that I can’t read it on this particular site and I’ll be damned if I’m going to change my screen resolution for just one website.

Let’s hope that any sex that results is more accessible! I wouldn’t fancy groping around in the dark wearing a pair of thick rubber gardening gloves and hoping to make contact with a nice plump juicy nipple or mons veneris for instance! Yet that is exactly what trying to navigate their website is like!

Tonight is the longest night of the year and tomorrow the shortest day being the Winter Solstice. So happy solstice to everybody in case I don’t get to post tomorrow - Grianstad shona do chách!

It’s a lovely sunny morning here in mid Clare - you know that yellow-gold Winter sun bathing everywhere in its watery golden glow.

There’s a new moon today! The six weeks of storms and rain we’ve had seem to have finished. Now it’s thick fog with near freezing temperatures, but that’s a welcome change from the rain and wind. Let’s hope it lasts for the duration of this moon.

There does seem to be a link between weather patterns and phases of the moon, though those of a rational scientific bent would argue that this is merely superstition. Having been brought up in the country, I tend to subscribe to the “old ways” of doing and seeing.

I love the fog, even if it makes driving uncomfortable. I love the mysterious other-worldly allure it imparts to the landscape. I love how sounds seem to echo eerily in the hush it brings.

It’s party time again. We’re having our annual staff dinner tonight - can’t say who with or where for obvious reasons. Looking forward to it, as I need to let my hair down just a little. Getting a taxi in so I can have a brace of pints or three - no more than three or I’ll suffer in the morning.

It’s been a week since my last post. It’s been a horrible week since my last post. It’s been an utterly aweful week since my last post. And I’m grieviously wounded. The cause - what else but family, or more specifically siblings. I’ve been devastated, outraged, crimson with anger, sorrowful, bleeding-to-death hurt, sombre, sad, weepy, enraged, beside myself with fury, and combinations of some or all of these in turn. I’m still furious. Will write more later.

One of the primary reasons I started this blog was to increase the fluidity (and speed) of my writing. I had hoped (a bit unrealistically as it turns out) to be able to post once a day, but that has not proved practicable. Lack of time is the main reason for my “paucity” of posts (though some might consider 3 or 4 times a week not at all bad), with the loss of my laptop the other big contributing factor.

You see, when I had my laptop I could happily sit in the kitchen and watch TV while merrily typing away - an ethernet bridge plugged into the mains ensured connectivity to the Internet via the ISDN router connected to a second ethernet bridge plugged into the mains in my office which is attached to the house. Lest you become all tearful at my dreadful predicament I should clarify at this point that the loss of my laptop is in fact figurative. I have not actually lost the laptop per se as it is “in hospital” undergoing rather strenuous tests to see why the inverter keeps crapping out even after a new screen was fitted. In my defence, however, I must point out that I have actually lost the use of the laptop which amounts to the same thing.

The said laptop is, in any case, past its sell-by date - being all of 5.8 years old. I have my eye on a sleek new iBook as a replacement when prices go back to current levels after the big mad spending splurge of mid-December. Then, I won’t have that excuse for not posting every day.

On this dark dank miserable December day of gales, driving rain, and floods, it warms my heart to see the brutish world order of rampant capitalism being overturned in, of all places, South America. Hugo Chávez’s Revolución Socialista forges ahead in Venezuela after his return to power; Daniel Ortega, former leader of the Revolución Sandinista, has once more been elected to the Presidency in Nicaragua; Lula da Silva has won the presidency of Brazil; Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador; Bolivia has an “Indian” for president. All across Central and South America, the people are taking back what is rightfully theirs in the personages of socialist humanist leaders. A ray of light to brighten the planet in these dark days.

I’m off to Kerry with the family to visit the grandparents this afternoon. Will be staying overnight.

The weather forecast is really bad with winds of up to 120km/h promised. Hoping they’ve got it wrong - it wouldn’t be the first time.