Hola granola!

The Music is Dead

I pulled my ancient, creaking mandolin out of its case the other day to see if I could extract a few tunes. I could never really play it, but it's something I'd like to get back into. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble tuning it. One of the strings keeps popping out of the bridge, and if I shift the bridge so this doesn't happen anymore, I can't tune it properly. I might tune an open string to E, but it'll get further away from E down the frets... Is this an omen? Or do I try to see if there's a luthier... somewhere? It's hard to invest a little cash in something you're not sure you'll sustain (I've had the mandolin for 7 years and can't play it), but impossible to invest time in learning something with dysfunctional equipment.

Electrical Dollars

So after reading veen's nice little guide to Ethereum I decided to finally throw a small bit of cash into it, and purchased an extravagant... 1 ETH! It cost me about €260; I was going in line with several Hubskiers' suggestions not to spend more than you're willing to lose. If ETH even goes up by 50%, I'm happy out. If it becomes worthless, at least it's only a couple of hundred quid. I might not have much money now, but that money isn't something I'll be crying about for years to come.

I bought it on Coinbase because it seemed convenient; not sure if that was a good idea or not. Is it safe to just leave it on Coinbase?

Life in Short: Life is Short

Feeling generally low and demotivated over the past while, probably stemming from not really doing anything with my life. I can probably go back to a Pubski six months ago that mentions I need to move out of this town and get full-time work and everything else so I won't repeat it here. I will survive the winter, and when the snows have cleared I will better know the path that I must take. Or something.

A Book about a Stroll

I wrote a few hundred words this morning. My productivity has reached dizzying heights! It was the first thing I did today, to prevent me from putting it off all day. I'm taking the tortoise fable a bit too much to heart, perhaps.

The Weekend Beckons

I'm going out to Clare Island for a birthday party this weekend! My friend Donal just turned 30; I met him in university, and sadly seldom since, but he remains one of my favourite friends. The island is very small and has a tiny population - I think about 100 people total. I'm looking forward to having a few beers and not working on a Saturday night, and catching up with an old friend.

I'll stick around the following day to watch the match on TV. My county team - Mayo - are playing Dublin in the All-Ireland gaelic football final. This is pretty big; Mayo hasn't won since 1951, but has reached the finals or semifinals very consistently over the last decade, only to lose at the last moment (in last year's final, they had a draw with Dublin, then lost the replay by a single point). The hype in Mayo is electric right now.

Romantic Misadventures Vol. 2

My ex messaged me on FB a while back. Kind of the one that got away, I guess. I ended up going to see her last week and spent the night at her place - nothing like that; I slept on the spare futon. Anyway this brought back a ton of old feelings; we exchanged a few messages during the week, but she thinks that if there are still feelings - which she implied were sort of mutual - that we probably shouldn't meet again. I was a bit heartbroken last week, but doing better now. C'est la vie, baby. I did request a meeting just to talk things over, which she hasn't responded to, so that might be the end of that story.

Oh and there's this

I made it into the book and there's even a photo! That's pretty cool I would say. It's a shame I'm described as a primary teacher - I think this probably comes from one of the newspaper articles in which I'm erroneously described so, though it was TEFL I was doing at the time.