Inconceivable!

OMG guess what. 


! ! !


They put a link and a little blurb about my Millennium post up on Lance Henriksen's website. And my blog is listed under "Friends."


Excuse me while I dance around the room and squeal like a little girl. 


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Anonymous 1: I have never actually watched Dexter, but it is on my list of things to watch on the internet. I don't have any of the fancy movie channels, so I couldn't watch it when it was on TV. :/

Anonymous 2: YES, of all the Millennium episodes I picked that one. Sure some of the cliche ones are on my list of favs (A Room With No View, the Mikado, Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense...), but SBoG is still at the top. 

*~*~*~**~*~*~*~*

Fasting today, since I pigged the eff out yesterday. But I did NOT binge on Friday or Saturday. This is an accomplishment. yesterday was unavoidable, what with Mother's Day and all. 

It was a good Mother's Day. When you have 5 siblings, holidays and birthdays become a form of trench warfare--all of us trying to outdo each other with making our parents happy. I brought Mum breakfast in bed. Took her out on a lovely walk.

(Sunday is my "day off" from exercising. Mum strictly enforces this, so I must get crafty.)

For dinner, I made some of Mum's favs--steak and kidney pie, and rhubarb crisp.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find lamb kidneys in America? Impossible, because apparently that's considered offal and thus illegal to sell. I went through 3 different Irish butchers who had always supplied me with that sort of thing in the past, and none of them had any. Apparently the health department or something had caught them and threats had been made. 

But on Friday, Other Secretary called up a butcher near her house, and praise be to God, he had lamb kidneys. It was the sketchiest thing ever. When Mum and I went there Saturday, he brought them out in a paper bag (so no one could see what was in it) and told us to keep in on the DL. 

But YAY, I got lamb kidneys!

I left the pic small to minimize the horror. 

5 whole pounds of them. Since no one answered my summons of free lamb kidneys (I only needed like 1 or 2 lbs of them for Sunday's dinner), I shall be making 2 or 3 more steak and kidney pies tonight and freezing them. 

Ok fine, maybe it's a bit gross; but I don't think it's any nastier than people eating solidified rancid milk. And my S&K pie was pretty delicious. Mum said it reminded her of home. :D

It did, I guess--it tasted just like Granny's. I miss Ireland. 

When I was a kid, Mum shipped me off to Ireland every summer. This gave nanny time off to go back to Jamaica for a while, and meant Mum was free of parenting for 3 months. 

I went to Polranny, in Achill, out in the western boonies of County Mayo.

Check out these guys' blog: Polranny Pirates. Their photos are amazing. I LOVE it there!! If there were jobs there, I think I might move. Just waiting for my writing career to take off...

..... 

In summers in Ireland, it gets light out at 4 in the morning, and doesn't get dark until 11 at night. As a child, you were expected to get the feck outside and come back for dinner. Then get out again until it's dark. We had tons of bog and shoreline and mountains to wander around in, because there's so much unowned land--crap land that's hard to build on, can't be farmed, and gets destroyed by non-stop wind and rain, so no one wants it. 

We're on the Google now!

Sometimes the carnival would come to Achill and camp out in the football field down the road from Granny's. 

They were tinkers. Trailer folk who drive round the country. Like gypsies, I guess?

One of my cousins (I have like 28 1st cousins just on Mum's side) and I were bff's, and most days we would walk into town to get lunch, wander in the supermarket, the chemist, and her uncle's shop, wander around the abandoned Protestant church, light all the candles in the regular (Catholic) church and go exploring in the attic (they just left it unlocked?), or wander down by the water and look for seals. 

Just having the craic in general. 

So this one morning (I think I was 10 or 11) we went walking and we passed the carnival that was camped out in the football field. 

I use the word "carnival" loosely. It had maybe some battered old excuse for the teacups and a haggard pony. 

So when we're a little ways past the field, Cousin says she thinks someone is following us. I tried to be subtle when I turned around to look.

There was someone following us. 

. 

.

..

...

...

...

....

....

....

...

...

...

..

..

.

.

No joke. 

A guy in a gorilla suit was following us. 

Like what?

When he followed us past the pub and all the way over the bridge to the supermarket, we started to get nervous. So we ran into the supermarket to hide. 

And buy candy.

But mostly to hide. 

After a while, we figured he might have gotten bored and left, so we left the supermarket. We checked all around--no gorilla. So we continued on our merry way. 

The f**king gorilla was still there. Idk where he was hiding, but he started following us again.

He followed us all the way to Cousin's uncle's shop (her uncle on her mother's side, so not my uncle, which means it's ok that I think his son is hot as hell). The shop is more or less a convenience store, though they don't call it that. It's just The Shop. 

Cousin told her uncle that there was a gorilla following us. He gave us the same response all Irish parental figures give to children who come to them with these kinds of problems: "Stop talking nonsense. Go outside and play."

We tried to make Uncle believe. Told him to look out the door and see for himself. After much bothering from us, he looked; but of course the gorilla was crafty and hid. Uncle didn't see him. We were booted out of the shop. Gorilla was still following us.

So now what? We had planned on going to the playground behind the church (the normal [Catholic] church) to go on the swings. But the playground was set kind of far back from the road (and not even a main road), and was separated from the church property by a big patch of woods. Basically the playground was completely isolated, and once you were in it you could not be seen or heard by anyone (clever spot for a playground, no?). Cousin and I were not dumb enough to go there with some gorilla-man following us, because surely that would lead to our ultimate demise. But we didn't want to go home, because we didn't want him to know where we lived.

We wandered around town just to make sure we were surrounded by people, and as luck would have it, we ran into one of my aunts in the supermarket. We begged her to drive us home and she agreed, though she did not believe us about the gorilla. (He had conveniently disappeared again, as soon as he saw us with an adult.)

For the rest of the week, until the tinkers and their carnival vacated the field, Cousin and I only took the long and perilous way into town, through the bogs and the abandoned railway rather than along the road. No one ever believed us about the gorilla.