Tag Archives: irish

Saturday

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As so often happens, I was quite tired from the work week last night, and went to bed about 9 PM, sleeping until 8 AM today. The forecasted snowstorm had not yet left much on the ground, so about 10 AM I drove into Minneapolis. As I wrote last month, Irish Books and Media was going out of business. Their lease expires at the end of the month, so today the owners were having a big move-out event. I have been involved in countless moves over the last 35+ years, including two previous bookstore closings. Most of the friends I have helped move have large collections of books, as do Mia and I, so I have a lot of relevant experience :-)>

This was one of the best moving sessions in my experience. There were plenty of people there to help, and lots of tools for taking down the shelves. I helped package several pallet loads of books to be trucked away, took down some furnitures, and hauled lots of boxes, bookshelves, and whatever. I also helped take a truckload of books to Irish on Grand in St. Paul. We got pizza for lunch, as is almost universal at such events. One of the pizzas was Pizza Lucé‘s “Pizza Athena”–the best commercial pizza I have had since we moved to Minnesota. The plan had been to work all day Saturday and Sunday. By 2 PM Saturday we were finishing up, and the owner was cancelling Sunday’s session.

So, with more of an afternoon than I expected, I drove down to c_nocturnum‘s, for colgaffneyis “camp drill”–a sewing and fabric work session today. mia_mcdavid and rillapins were there, along with a couple other members and haddayr, who had just joined. It was a pleasant time.

We are back home now. The much-heralded snowstorm seems to be finally here, but we have done our important weekend things. I am particularly pleased that the bookstore move went so well–they don’t need to worry about tomorrow’s weather. We hope to go to church and visit Tom tomorrow, but if we are snowbound we will be fine.

A day off

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….because of the Presidents’ Day Observance. I accomplished the first and foremost objective of any day off: Sleeping in. During the rest of the morning I helped mia_mcdavid with the process of “warping” her loom, for the Ulster tartan plaid she is weaving for me. Not difficult work, but it took a while. I am never going to be able to listen to Captain Kirk talk about “warp speed” in quite the same way again.

In the early afternoon the three of us ran a couple errands, then went for a two mile walk along Snelling Avenue. Bookstores at both ends gave this some additional definition and motivation, although I did not buy anything.

Over the course of the three day weekend I have done some organization of historical research materials that I had scattered about the house. They will be much more useful now, and in fact going through them I noticed a couple more references that are relevant to an ongoing discussion in colgaffneyis.

Lord Mungo’s Irish Counterpart

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Many of us in colgaffneyis know about John Michael Wright’s portrait, from c. 1680, of the young Highland aristocrat Lord Mungo Murray. I recently learned that the same artist also did a portrait of an Irish Jacobite nobleman, Sir Neil O’Neill, 2nd Baronet of Killeleagh.

There are some interesting points about this:

  1. Sir Neil is wearing trews, traditional dress known in both Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, but scorned by the establishments in London and Dublin. Similarly Lord Mungo is shown in a belted plaid, Highland dress that would have been considered barbaric in Edinburgh. It may not be a coincidence that the artist, like Sir Neil, was a Catholic. Perhaps this was a protest against the Protestant establishments that ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland.
  2. He is armed with traditional weapons, a shield (larger than a Highland targe) and a javelin (his servant in the background has some spares). These weapons were of course long obsolete: The Irish had been effectively using firearms for about a century. Their appearance here seems to be symbolic, showing that he is really an Irish nobleman.
  3. The doublet is very similar to Lord Mungo’s. Either it was quite the fashion in some quarters, or the artist really liked it.
  4. At his feet is an incomplete suit of Japanese(!) armor.

Irish for “vegetarian”

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Last night, as part of a general reshuffling at Gaeltacht Minnesota, I was moved into the next class up. I was going over my new instructor’s notes when I found this gem: The Irish word for vegetarian is feoilséantóir. Feoil means “meat”, while séantóir means “renegade”, “denier”, or “apostate”. So in Irish a vegetarian is a “meat renegade”!

(Yes, I did confirm this with my Irish dictionary)

A lot going on

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Busy days at work. Everybody seems to want me to help them. If the people I did the work for had the final say I would not be worried about my annual review. Unfortunately, my management regards a lot of these as “distractions”. They are rather vague about how people are supposed to get their work done without my help. I think I am making progress on their pet projects.

Spent some time today on colgaffneyis business. I exchanged several e-mails with the President (I am on the Board) about an unfinished piece of business from last summer. We appear to have very similar ideas about what went wrong then, and how to clear it up now.

More cutting back: mia_mcdavid has urged that I skip a party tomorrow night, and a colgaffneyis event Saturday afternoon. She is SWMBO, and I need to have some time at home. I will go to another party on Saturday night, and the Gaeltacht Minnesota fundraiser on Sunday.