The World of James Joyce

James Joyce is arguably Ireland's most famous author, and tributes to him and his amazing but not very accessible novel Ulysses can be found all over Dublin.  He even worked at the Dublin Woollen Mills (featured in yesterday's post) for a while.  This plaque is embedded in the sidewalk outside the National Library.

Joyce was the reason for our trip to Dublin in the first place.  Paula is reading Ulysses in a class, which is why Dublin was on her mind.  So on Sunday, Ann, Paula and I took an excursion on the DART to the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove while Pete went off to the Museum of Decorative Arts.  The museum is housed in a Martello tower overlooking the Irish Sea.  Joyce only lived in the tower for six nights, but it became immortalized in Ulysses.

Sandycove is a nice seaside town with rocky shores, lovely vistas, and lots of dogs that the residents do not clean up after.  (If you walk from the train station, watch where you step!)  There's a beach right at the foot of the tower called Forty Four, famous for the fact that residents swim there all year round!  We stopped in our tracks, jaws dropped, when we saw a group of people changing from swimsuits to street clothes in public; their skin as red as cooked lobsters!

The living space in the tower is quite small, so it is easy to understand why Joyce fled less than a week after moving in.  I climbed the very narrow, steep stairs to the roof.  The day was gray and damp and very Ireland.

The museum contains lots of Joyce's personal items, including a needlepoint vest made by his grandmother, a tie given to him by Samuel Beckett, and many portraits of the writer.

We spent some time in the gift shop, chatting with a lovely woman named Antoinette, who very kindly called us a cab back to the station.  I have copies of Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses here at home, but I bought a book of Joyce's poetry, which I had never read.  Paula found some treasures to take back to her Ulysses classmates.   We toured the Irish Writer's Museum the next day, which gave us some insight into Joyce's very difficult masterpiece and was a great way to wind up our trip.

Irish Wool

I wouldn't be a dyed-in-the-wool rug hooker if I didn't hunt down some wool in Ireland.  I googled "wool" before we left and, for the most part,  came up with places to buy yarn. I did find Dublin Woollen Mills (I love that they spell it with two "l"s)  near the Ha'penny Bridge, and it was our first stop after we checked into the Burlington Hotel on Friday morning.

It was a quirky store -- creaky wooden floors and a mixture of fabric, kilts, sweaters, trims, and acrylic yarns.  It reminded me of Horwitz Brother's in downtown New Haven, where my sister Patty would take me to pick out kettle cloth she'd make into dresses for me.  I did find some woolen yardage that I liked:  two tweedy pieces and a heathered pumpkin.  (You can never have enough pumpkin wool, in my opinion.)  It's all washed and fulled and ready for hooking.

We looked around for more fabric stores, and kept our eyes open for a great yarn shop.  We went to Hickey's, which had great oil cloth for sale -- Ann bought a piece to use as a tablecloth -- but really lousy yarn. 

On our excursion south last Sunday (was it really only a week ago?), we passed a sign that said "Avoca Handweavers."  Great!  We thought we would find someone sitting at a loom, weaving freshly spun wool from the sheep we saw grazing the pastures above the highway.  Not.  Avoca is a fabulous store and restaurant, full of color and light and good things to eat.  (Avoca does still weave their own wool in a tiny town south of Dublin in the Vale of Avoca -- you can read about their 280 year history on their website.)  I loved the scarves on the spools and the candy colored throws.

We did find vestiges of other woolen shops in Dublin.  The Blarney Woollen Mill is now occupied by a pharmacy.

Here's a reference to hooked rugs in a book about handcrafts that was way too heavy to schlep home.  Don't you love all the names the Brits have for rag rugs?

Thank you, Ann, Paula and Pete for indulging my appetite for wool.  I couldn't have asked for better traveling companions!

Irish Spring

We went to Dublin for a long weekend!  In late March, my friend Paula mentioned a great deal on Travel Zoo -- airfare, hotel and free full Irish breakfast.  What a deal!  So she, her daughter Ann, Pete and I took off for Ireland last Thursday.  We returned on Tuesday, after waiting for the ash from Eyjafjallajokull to blow away.

Ireland has a rich cultural history and we saturated ourselves with it.  We saw Michael Gambon in a Beckett play at the Gate Theater, toured the Writer's Museum, climbed Joyce's tower by the seaside, saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College, wandered through the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, had a pint and fish and chips at O'Neill's pub while listening to traditional Irish music, toured Kilmainham Gaol, shopped Grafton Street and Temple Bar, drove south to the seaside town of Wexford where walked the grounds of Johnstown Castle, then had dinner in the second best spa in the world -- Monart, in Enniscorthy. 

More on our travels soon!

Here's a Hint

Here's a clue to where we spent our long weekend.  More later -- I have to mow the lawn before the neighbors mow me down!

We're Off

on a sort of spur-of-the-moment trip . . .   Will post pics on our return!

Our Neighborhood

Saratoga Springtime

I 'm up in Saratoga Springs for a couple of days to visit my daughter and to enjoy the area one last time before Clara graduates and moves away.  Spring has sprung here and I am enjoying all the flowers and fruit trees and the blue skies.

We dined at Max London's last night.  Clara had a wonderful panzanella with duck confit for starters.  My green salad was drowning in vinegar and I had to send it back -- the first mistake I've ever encountered here.  My mushroom pizza with a baked egg on it made up for the salad mistake and we shared a butterscotch budino for dessert.  Tonight we will go to Hattie's for the fried chicken, which was featured -- and won -- on Throwdown with Bobby Flay.

We parked behind the Adirondack Bank last night and came upon marvelous garden of red tulips.  The temperature had dropped with the sun and they were all closed up and leaning toward the west.  I didn't have a camera, but they were just gorgeous.  I went back today and took a photograph, but they were much more stunning in the dusk last night.  I wanted to pick them all.

While Clara was in a critique this morning, I drove out to the monument at the Saratoga Battleground.  The monument was built for the centennial of the Battle of Saratoga, which we won in 1777.  It's an impressive Victorian monument, built next to the Prospect Hill cemetary.