Le fheile Phadraig gan dabht

This year, I'm going to see just how Brisbane celebrates the day of the Oirish. Plan is for a breakfast in the Irish club in the morning, maybe hang around for the freaks in the parade for a half an hour. Then home for a while to pile all the cr&p in our yard into the skip and then out for a couple of hard earned Guinness in some Irish bar in the city. Thats the plan anyway, and I've even managed to recruit a couple of heads from work to join the festivities so I shall report back on the relative success of the mission in the next update. Its a long time now, but I still retain fond memories of the best Paddy's day I've ever had. Sydney with the boyezz back in 2000. Pedro, Nolo, Breno, Dayo. All bedecked in black. On fire we were back then.

We now have a front door in the place where its meant to be, and where it will stay. The renovations have come along quite quickly over the past week. We have walls. We have stairs. We have most of the wiring complete. I believe we will have ceilings shortly. Getting there. Pictures tell the story.

Spent last weekend down in Sydney, staying in Quay Grand on circular quay (not messing with muck here) - mind you that was purely thanks to the fact that Barb came down with us as she was looking at some interior design places that only had outlets in Sydney. So we crashed in her private suite. With Aibhe. In the master bedroom. Aibhe seemed to have some serious craic over the weekend, doing the hotel lift run as regularly as we could manage.... up and down, up and down (rather fascinated she was with this little moving mirrored room), running around the steps of the Opera house yacking her head off as the tourists watched her flying by, chasing the multitude of seagulls on the banks of one of the most spectacular scenes in the world and quite importantly - sleeping quite well. That said, the hour and a half trip on the plane with her was.....interesting. Absolutely NO IDEA how one would manage the long trip home with a child of Aibhe's age and current desire for mobility. Nightmare. Drugs perhaps?

While there I spent a bit of time with Murt of Malahide - great to catch up with a face from the old sod - and we even met his folks (over for a month and left to head home on Monday I think) and Shelley and little Molly the next day. Am sure the kids will see plenty of each other in the future. To cap it all we attended an engagement party on Saturday evening (the primary purpose behind our visit). On Circular Quay staring out at the Opera house and the coathangar (the Harbour bridge which this weekend celebrates its 75th year). Not a bad party location.

Slan agus Slainte.

Nearly there. And Aibhe hits 1.

5 weeks on and we now wait for a wee bit of plumbing to be done so the water from the toilets/ taps etc, goes where its actually meant to go as opposed to spilling out under the house. Wouldn't be too popular with the neighbours I'd imagine. We're good to go back home once thats all done and dusted. Yayyy. Spent just over 2 hours cleaning the place this morning - given the big hole cut in the hall floor and the new stairs we now have, there was just a little bit of dust here and there. Hard to describe the state its in at the moment so I'll just have to let the pictures do the talking. At its "worst", just over a week ago, the place look like this (above). Difficult to envisage that it would be possible to turn it into something that we could actually live in within about 8 days.

First the floor supports......

then, the floors and wall structure....

And now we have a stairs to get in. That little piece of genius, coming from our unpaid architect (Geoff) who dreamt up the eureka notion of having our front door downstairs. How traditional I hear you say. A long way to go yet, but once we can move back in with functioning electricity, plumbing, phones and aircon, we're laughin.

And "little" Aibhe has turned 1. Had a party for her at 10am in a nearby park last weekend. By 12 I was shattered. She appeared to enjoy herself, mind you she barely needs all the other child company at times as she's quite content to bog off on her own to do her thing, whatever it may be. 1 year ago eh? Tell ye what though. All that shite about the first 6 months being rough and then it all gets easier? Steaming poo. I reckon Aibhe breezed the first 6 months and once she decided to start really participating in life and all that was going on, THATS when it started becoming "interesting" for us.

Sicknesses, messed up sleeping patterns, frustration at lack of mobility (short lived) ya-di-ya-di-ya. But, right now, it has to be said, she's on fire. Spends most of the day laughing, or looking for an excuse to laugh, pegging round the place just begging to be chased and eats for Ireland. She's also very partial to dancing like a freak to practically any kids DVD we choose to put on. She starts on the guitar next week, I figure some basic scales won't hurt at this point. Maybe I could even get her going on some low whistle. Which takes us on a natural segway into Friday just gone. And the Lunasa gig here in Brisvegas.

As usual, they were bloody brilliant live and Kevin, the flute man and speaker in between tunes was flying, had those in the audience that could pick up his knife like Clare accent in stitches laughing. From the first strum of the guiter, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I felt like I was home, just for a while. The Aussies I brought along were gobsmacked at the speed the lads play at. As we said before, Lunasa are trad on speed. I went to say hello to Kevin afterwards and it was nice to see that he remembered myself and Alissa very well from when he played at our wedding in Killaloe. I guess nobody who was there can ever forget.

Next up, Grada in April. We'll have another posse lined up for that one.