Still haven't got the Spain photos developed, soon soon. This is a picture of I think last year's Halloween party, or perhaps a random fancy dress party a few week beforehand. It's Ian Finlay dressed up as Albert, who finally got offered a job with the guarda band after 13 months of waiting! Congratulations.
Myself and Hugh were in Spain for the last week and while i'm waiting to get the photos developed here's an old picture from when Laura visited a few weeks back. It's a beach in Howth were we had a barbecue. I have a small portable barbecue that comes apart and fits into a metal tube, and a thing that looks like a vegetable steamer to light fires in, so we can have barbecues wherever we want. It's dead handy for sunny weekends. This is a picture Emily took of the first course - market sausages. We followed that with potato waffles and mackeral. Best barbecue ever. It's just the perfect size for 4 as you can fit 4 normal sized things on at a time, like 4 waffles, or burgers, and the fire is usually hot enough to do 3 or 4 rounds of cooking and then we take the grill off for marshmallows. Perfect.
This is a picture of the Hibernians orchestra playing in the NCH last night, taken by Mom in the balcony. It was in aid of the Tallagh Breast Care Unit, and the theme was American music. My favourite piece was the Gershwin Piano Concert with soloist Philip Martin. He's fantastic! Catherine was leading and sitting right next to the piano had to restrain the urge to mash her hands down on the bass notes to see if she'd get a laugh off anyone.
I managed to take a brief solo at the opening of the Dvorak New World Symphony by starting a ff section on my own as the conductor took a dramatic pause. Cringe. It was wonderfully in tune though and quite perfectly played. This is another picture taken by Mom of John Hearne (eyes closed), Finbarr stiking "the pose", Hugh and myself having mandatory pints in Houricans after the concert. 
Mylself and a friend Aoife are going to open a stall in the Ranelagh farmers market. We are going to make sweets and also vegan sweets. We're going to make a few varieties of marshmallows, a wonderful invention called "Chocolate Decadence" and these beauties "Sodt Fudge Delights". We plan on having our first stall on the 8th July, so we just need to work on packaging and costs. To sell food in a market you need to get public liability insurance and to keep to certain health regulations, so we'll have that sorted in the next few days. We're going to call ourselves "dolce" and do the whole thing as professionally as possible. Clear your calendars for the 8th and come pretend like you don't know us and put on a big show of how delicious everything is.
On a side note, the fudge is in my new fondue bowl, which has a little candle underneath for melting chocolate and there are 4 little skewers for dipping things with. My favourite so far is pineapple and marshmallow. Excellent.
Yesterday myself and Emily took part in the Wicklow Challenge. It's a 100k cycle around the Wicklow mountains. It was fantastic! We started at UCD Sports Centre at 7am and it took around 6 hours. The route was very cleverly marked. At every junction there was a white W painted on the road and arrow indicating where to go. Even with my terrible sense of direction we didn't get lost once. The weather was fantastic too, the hottest day of the year. Unfortunately this means that I have lots of novelty sunburn from the day, around cycling shorts, t-shirt, helmet, wraparound sunglasses and fingerless gloves. Pretty embarrassing. I got 2 flats in the last hour too which was really annoying, but otherwise it was a perfect day.
This is another of Clair's weird and wonderful friends in Japan. I wonder if he'll get along with the massive Budda statue?
Myself and Emily went out for fancy dinner on Friday after work to spoil ourselves. We went to a place called, I think, Il Pommo Torro near Fallon and Byrnes. It was really nice food and truly sinful desserts. Bit pricey though. We sat out front and enjoyed the sun with many bottles of wine.
Apparently the restaurant used to go under a different name. The owner was going out with a famous model, but he disapproved of her career so she said that she had stopped. While he was supposed to be away she had a photo shoot in the restaurant and he arrived in unexpectadly. It lead to a huge fight breaking out between them and Joe Duffy on the radio was hounded with stories about it for ages from spectators, and even the couple came on the show to have it out, so the name was changed to help people forget about it.
