Claire's blog

Went to the Nottingham arena last night for a Katie Melua concert – the tickets were part of Dad’s Christmas presents. Had a fabulous time – she’s become much more assured and more of a performer since I last saw her, and I’m now determined to buy her current album (which I was debating before). […]

We’ve spent the day fairly quietly. We went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe earlier – which was excellent – and we’ve been watching Jools Holland to see the New Year in. Of course some of us found even this quiet day just too much excitement…

The snow is still lingering in places, despite the fact it’s been raining most of today, and it looked beautiful for my birthday. I had a lovely time, spent fairly quietly with family. My grandparents came to visit for the day (I hadn’t seen them for about a year) and we caught up on family […]

It’s been snowing on and off all day, and now everythings covered with a light coating of snow. It’s my birthday tomorrow, so fingers crossed that it’ll last until then!

I hope everyone has had a lovely day, and received everything they wished for. We’ve all had a great time – finished preparing the house, opened our presents, had a marvellous lunch, played a game together, and now we’re sitting down to watch Doctor Who.

So my car (aka Danny) is now officially Irish – numberplates and everything. I felt a bit sentimental as they took the old plates off, and have kept them to put up on my wall 😥 The trips were all fantastic, and I’ve come back shattered (but happy!), and am currently cooking an enormous porkolt […]

Today I woke up to blazing sunshine at my place in Knocknacarra, but by the time I got to work (15 minutes drive away) I was travelling through thick fog. I quite like fog, and it’s very surreal sitting in the office on the 2nd floor and feeling like we’re floating as when I look […]

So Mum and Dad came over driving a HUGE van with all my things inside. They arrived Friday evening, Saturday morning we were putting together furniture and finding new and interesting ways to injure ourselves, and then we went into Galway hunting out oysters and Guinness for Dad and a look around the city and […]

Gacked off another blog. Type “[your name] needs” (with quotes) into Google, and see what you get. Apparently Claire needs…. …private support (I think Mum and Dad would say I’ve been getting that for a while…) …a visit to the Bunny Planet …Edie closer …greater spending in economic development (can’t argue with that) …to use […]

Well, the NTL man was waiting for me when I got back home, and I am now connected!! He wasn’t able to set me up for digital TV which I had wanted, as my TV was built around about the dark ages, but I now have internet and phone set up. This means I have […]

Am in work this morning, being shown how to set up a gel for culturing cells in, and am currently in the waiting 1 hour while the stuff we make the gel from dissolves and is sterilised. Once we’ve got this set up, I’m off home to wait patiently for the nice NTL man, who’s […]

Dropped Rob off at the airport for his return flight, and then come into work to catch up on my email (I dragged the poor boy into work with me on Saturday, so I could get caught up enough on my cell work to take most of the day to take him back to Shannon). […]

So Dad’s finally started writing in the blog he set up ages ago. I’d comment in it, but I can’t log in 😥

Been to an interesting talk today on tissue engineering heart muscle by Prof. Buddy Ratner. It’s the first scientific talk I’ve been to in quite a while (what with spending a lot of time back home with Mum and Dad while I wrote my thesis), and I was pleased to find I understood it! Not […]

Not having a great day today. Nothing in particular has happened, except for finding out that after being assured by the correct sources before I came over here that I would NOT need to register my car and get it taxed in Ireland as I was only going to be here for a short time, […]

So Thursday was Mum’s birthday (me and Rob gave her a duck), Friday (yesterday) was Dad’s (bottle of whiskey of course!), and today is their wedding anniversary, so it’s been all go here for the last few days. Thursday night we cooked Mum a nice meal, last night we went to see Pride and Prejudice […]

Flew home on Friday, courtesy of RyanAir from Shannon Airport. Amazingly, I managed to get a lot of the jobs that I somehow couldn’t find time for earlier in the week done in the hour and a half between my waking up, and having to start the drive to Shannon! I then got poorly sick […]

My viewing choice for this week has been Star Wars IV V and VI Guys and Dolls Truly, Madly, Deeply Otherwise I’ve been sorting out printing the final, final version of my thesis for binding. This may seem like a simple job, but I’ve spent the entire week on it so far, and it’s still […]

Due to not yet having the TV or internet connected, and there being a very good offer on DVD rental at the place I joined, I’ve been working my way through the films since I moved here. So far I’ve watched… Tarzan – not bad for when I fancy a cartoon Pleasantville – which I […]

I keep an eye on the weather reports for Galway through an RSS feed, and I’m wondering why I bother. They tend to summarise a day ‘cloudy, chance of rain’, and what actually happens is I wake up to blue skies, bright sunshine, and a brisk breeze (which makes the sea look great), an hour […]