Happy Birthday, greetings

[Godric]

Cool! You're a Dr. Who nerd as well!

[Godric]

Have a big one, Banksy!

[aramantha]

Spooky how there's no one around --

Happy Birthday, Odhran -- if a happy birthday falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, it's still a happy birthday. Best for all you could wish for yourself, and more that even you don't think of.

[Godric]

Cheers, Lynn. It has been eerily quiet here of late. Maybe yourself and myself should have a party to liven it up!

[aramantha]

It has been eerily quiet. I don't suppose it's because everyone hated the film . . .

There's a pretty big party bearing down on New York just now -- things could get lively enough by the weekend with the storm coming up the coast. But I could do with a beer, if they will still let me have any -- I actually fell on my face recently from drinking a second glass of wine, and that with a good meal. Getting too old for it, and I never had the art down anyway.

Are you still teaching? Writing? I used to think you'd be a Neil Gaiman type, writing bizarre and sharp YA. You have strong makings of the skill, the sense of humor, and the weird vision, I think, anyway.

Teaching starts for me this week coming up -- it may be that the storm will take out the first day of classes. It's the subways that break down in the city -- transit can't take an inch of rain. But all the wires are underground, which makes it a lot safer in storms out of the center where the big glass-covered buildings are, and also less likely we'll lose power.

So let us now how you're doing. I'll have that beer, carefully, if the storm hits the city.

[Godric]

Starting yet another new teaching job in September. Back in a mainstream school again. Writing is going okay, but finding more than about half an hour a day is tough. London living, I tells ye!

[aramantha]

Good that you keep finding the new positions, and I'm sure any school can see you're a good catch, but -- I don't know the system there, but is it hard to find one good spot and settle into it with the benefits that come with some staying? Getting a lot harder here, that is for sure. I am semi-settled, which at my age is unsettling, between the Psychology and English departments of a city college full of bilingual immigrants' children. And it is hard to find time to write -- but I got a small grant to do some translation in the coming year -- critical essays by maybe the greatest of the American Yiddish poets. His poetry has been Englished a million different ways (and is impossible to render just the same) but his critical essays, untouched. So that's something to publish eventually. A handmaid's art. Doubly so, with it being one of the "endangered" languages.

You must miss Ireland. Do you feel it getting permanent? No -- you're young enough to eventually come out the other side of this Christ-awful economic mess we are all in, and maybe go home, if that's what you want.

[Godric]

The translation woks sounds excellent! Go for it. Permanent work isn't too hard to find here, but mostly if you're willing to work in difficult schools. So far I've been in one that I left because the location was to rural, and Emma wouldn't have have work she wanted. The other... was more complicated. I loved it but I'm happy out of it. So another shot at this... week after next actually.
We would like to move back eventually, Dublin preferably. Whenever I get back to Galway it amazes me how many people have left the country. The West gets hit hardest as usual. On the topic of endangered languages it's saddest seeing the native Irish speakers leave, and in disproportionate numbers. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll see a time when there are no Gaeilgoiri left under, say, 30 years of age. What will the state of it be in 2100? I was thinking this week how, when I was about ten I met an old couple, way out Connemara, who had no English, that was about the time the last non-English speaker on the Aran Islands died. I very much doubt there's anyone like that left now. Here's hoping for the best.

[Godric]

Have a big one, Mantha.

[Godric]

J ye big eejit, have a big one!