Day 3 in Ireland

When I wake up in the morning, I can hear the swallows, and they sound like they are laughing.  I love that – I love knowing that there is something out there already enjoying the day, encouraging me to get out of my warm bed in my dark room to greet the sunshine.  So far sunshine is all I’ve seen in Ireland, although everyone keeps warning that that that’s not the norm.  I took a warm shower, ate healthy cereal and drank hot tea for breakfast, and put on my wellingtons to work in the garden.  I love that they call rain boots wellingtons, after the Duke of Wellington, and wellies for short.  Joe also left a pair of gardening gloves for me to wear, and I spent the first several hours of my morning weeding the onions.  When I was little, I used to pretend each weed was a person, and for every weed I picked, I was saving someone’s life.  I think I probably came up with that because people often say you need to pick weeds so that they don’t choke the plant.  Maybe I thought I was saving the plant by keeping the big, bad weeds away.  Who knows – but it eventually turned into me trying to save people’s lives by picking weeds.  Today I decided to take my game one step further by making up what kind of lives each “person” was going to lead now that I had saved them.  I constantly reminded myself how important it was to get every single weed because everyone’s life is connected.  I often make up games like that for myself; I love coming up with people’s life stories in my mind, and there is nothing I love more than learning about what makes other people who they are.  I talked to Joe for a bit and learned why it is that he loves to teach Irish football so much.  He said it’s like a mix between basketball and football, and he used to play professionally for Limerick for 17 years.  Who knew I was staying with such amazing people – a former professional Irish football player and a former movie costume designer?  Joe and I then began to create a new plot of land for future plants; such a task took weeding to a whole new level.  It was so exhausting, and my allergies were going crazy, so I didn’t have time to think about saving people.  I didn’t realize how bad my allergies can get, but one of my eyes wouldn’t stop watering, and every time I bent over to pick a weed, I could feel the snot dripping down my face.  I’m sure I was a lovely sight.  Joe was kind enough not to say anything, and he told me I’m a good worker when we finished.  It made me feel good.  For lunch we ate sausages and Irish soda bread outside on the picnic table and drank pomegranate juice.  I didn’t realize how delicious pomegranate is.  After lunch we transplanted flowers for quite awhile, and then Grania and I watched a horse race on TV while Joe went cycling.  As we were sitting in the living room, Grania noticed that Lady Gaga had an ingrown toenail that was starting to get infected, so we took her and Harry with us to the vet.  Lady Gaga was heavily sedated and proceeded to stay sedated for the next several hours.  Grania and Joe went to a yacht club party several towns over, so right now I’m house sitting for the two dogs and four cats and am just enjoying a night relaxing.  I’ve read part of my book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which Brendan and I are both reading so we can talk about it at night.  I love the idea of reading the same book together and exchanging thoughts to learn more about how the other person thinks and to gain further insight to the book.  So far, I am intrigued by the way autistic people perceive the world and appreciate their truthful, no nonsense approaches.