Yellow kayak, lilac skies

More proof that the best things in life are free: Kayaking, or watching someone kayak

This summer, John brought his kayak up from Wexford, and when the conditions are right, which has been nearly every day this week as we are experiencing an Indian Summer, he goes down a grassy path to the shore (it's the lower part of our road, interrupted by the big road), and drags the kayak into the water. It's not the best place to go kayaking in terms of getting in, but it is just a two-minute walk from our house. After a wild start, I decided to go with him every single time and anxiously await his return / jump in if needed.

I stand on the rocks and watch, and it is the picture of perfect happiness, a man out on the ocean - until he returns and tells me that it's difficult to manage the kayak and very different from the calm waters down in Wexford (where I have been brave enough to go kayaking myself). We are on the Wild Atlantic Way, after all. Yet he persists, and for me, watching, it is the most relaxing time of my day, once I have reassured myself he will not drown.

On Monday night the colours in the sky were changing rapidly, and on the way back we met a lovely man and his two dogs, for whom the above spectacle is just a few metres away from their garden.This display makes up for the inevitable winter storms. And what a wonderful way to spend part of the evening after work, out there with the negative ions.

Reset - fruitfulness

A couple of months ago, when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and flustered, a friend gently reminded me of the Pomodoro Technique, the virtues of which I had extolled in the past. It was the same friend who had given us the kitchen timer that gave this technique its name. I was still using the system on and off (setting the alarm on my phone), but her comment made me realise that I needed to make it my default way of working.

This week I am working from home mostly. It is not quite back-to-school for me yet, as I won't be starting work in the Uni again until the end of the month, and I won't be teaching before October, but there are various things I want to get done before returning to the externally scheduled part of my work, and these quiet days at home are a chance to do that and also look after the garden. So here I am with the kitchen timer instead of the phone beside me (although I am not sure whether the ticking noise will become a nuisance. It is supposed to add a sense of urgency, but I don't want to view this as a race against time), and it has been going well. 

I am finally (finally) revisiting the Pirates poem that I illustrated years ago, and hopefully it will be a physical book soon. Having given away several of the drawings and not taken good-quality photos of them, I had some sort of block about redrawing them, but it is high time, or the author's children will be adults by the time this gets published.

For my Pomodoro breaks I mainly do housework, which tends to be the biggest procrastination tool for me when working from home. I can avail of the bursts of sunshine to get clothes dry outside and race out to take them in when the next inevitable downpour starts. Today I also made use of some garden goodies during a break, making apple sauce and preparing beetroot for tonight's dinner.

For the longer breaks or the mornings and evenings, going for a walk or a run is a non-negotiable, and as of this week I have made yoga a daily habit. My sister got me started again when I was in Germany, and I was embarrassed to see how much of my flexibility has suffered. In the past year other things had taken over, between the new house and the garden, and my haphazard routine often meant I would only do ten minutes on the mat. Better than nothing, but it wasn't what I wanted. So now I put on Yoga with Adriene every day and do at least half an hour. I used to teach myself with books (I have never been to an actual class), as I thought I preferred peace and quiet and following videos would just be another version of screen time, but being guided is so helpful and ensures that I show up.

Beauty | Rituals and Rituals

Heatproof

Still water in a glass bottle

Sun protection on my mom's patio

I switched to aluminum-free deodorants a good while ago, but have switched back temporarily (to this one by Rituals), due to a holiday heatwave (although I need it primarily for fear sweat; the heat is secondary), while waiting for the launch of this natural deodorant cream.

I used to travel with a suitcase full of stuff when visiting home (there was a time I would bring up to ten CDs with me...), but now I have mastered the art of traveling light, hand luggage only, which isn't hard to do when you can have some clothes stored at your mother's house.

It means lightweight purchases if any, so when my sister showed me the natural cosmetics line at a German chemist's, I picked one of the smallest items, a nail and cuticle oil pen, which is lovely to brush on - a calming late-night ritual I had never really tried before. I like to keep it simple and limit the amount of products I use, and I am sure using oils and the hand cream I already have does the job adequately, but this is perfect for trips.

Something I wish we had in Ireland is still water in glass bottles. It may exist (restaurants have them), but I have never seen crates of bottles, which are ubiquitous here, and in Ireland you would pay a small fortune. Luckily, our tap water is safe to drink, but with the bottled water pictured above you know its mineral content, and it is suitable for my little nephews.

Around here, August

Friends

 Gifts ('cairdeas' = 'friendship' in Irish)

 Bathroom art

This house is turning into dog-sitting central; we could have had three dogs with us last weekend. We are still not sure when we will be able to commit to having a dog ourselves, but in the meantime we are enjoying our canine visitors.

Every morning I get up early to take the dog/dogs for a walk. I am willing myself to carry this habit into the dog-less days, especially when working from home, to simulate a 'commute' - it is one of these things I know would be good for me, yet laziness tends to win. Nothing new there.

I have been swimming in the sea, in beautifully clear turquoise water in Donegal and in the waves of Galway Bay on a grey Wednesday. Our (British) gardening books tell me that in August the garden needs watering several times a day - not here! Instead I had been waiting for a dry day to go around collecting seeds (another job for August). I am still very much a gardening amateur, putting plants into places that are completely unsuitable. The only thing I am truly good at is weeding. But I have high hopes: one corner of the shed is being turned into a potting station. And we have been eating our own courgettes, raspberries and beetroot (all very easy to grow, so hardly an achievement, but very satisfying).

Yesterday a year ago we got the keys, and I am ashamed to say I still haven't made any effort to learn Irish. It is only now that we live in the Gaeltacht that I am acutely aware of my lack of the language; people do use it. A lot. I re-read Nada and was thrilled to feel all my Spanish flooding back, and as a result I have newfound energy to tackle the language of this place.

Drawing | Joan the dog on Barna Pier

Between visitors, housework, the garden and dogsitting it has been too busy (in a good way) to make time for art, or so I thought. But then I snatched 15 minutes yesterday evening to draw a scene we witnessed a few weeks ago on Barna Pier - a man and his dog looking at the water. We spoke to the man briefly and learned that the dog's name was Joan. She must be the first canine Joan I have met.

In mounts and frames

 

Even though I have most of my illustrations stored quite safely in portfolios, I am always relieved when I mount one of them and slip it into a protective plastic bag or wrap it in florist foil (after panicking about damaging the mount). It is so satisfying to see them well-presented and smoothed out. Generally I am not that precious about my work (twice now I have lost piles of drawings and paintings to leaks/burst pipes, and  the second time I just shrugged it off), but the neat freak in me loves to see everything ordered and safe.

Some of the illustrations for Amie's book are off to new homes, which prompted me to get organised and sort out mounts. I seem to be in mounting and framing and hanging mood - we have been rounding up all the artwork we want to hang and creating clusters and 'gallery walls' (a big chunk of one wall in the corridor) displaying work by friends as well as our own. 

John is obsessed with maps (who doesn't love a good map?), so we are hoping to get a few framed, for example a print of the 1651 pictorial map of Galway he was given and Tim Robinson's beautiful Burren and Arann maps (my aunt bought the Burren map for me, and I always thought it was a pity to just have it folded up in drawer).

It may seem laughable how excited I get about little things like mounting artwork (see also tidying the shed and sorting out a kitchen drawer), but as India Knight said in her column last week (about losing yourself in a hobby in times of crisis), "It is so important to remember the comfort of ordinary things" for "whenever we feel discombobulated by life."

A tale of two homes

There is still a lot of summer to come, but I can already feel its end. It is over a year since we first came to view this house, which is hard to believe.

Our lovely neighbours dropped in with a box full of gooseberries, rhubarb, herbs, spinach and rocket from their garden, all beautifully picked and put together. The care and time spent growing these things is immediately apparent when they come like this and not wrapped in too much packaging from a supermarket shelf. We have become quite good at not letting anything go to waste - this has been a week of turning leftovers into all kinds of new dishes. Some of our apples and pears had gone so soft that touching them made the skin come off, so I simmered them in a bit of water, and we ate the result with yogurt and cinnamon - an autumn taste, which might explain my dislocated feeling of nearing the end of summer.

Our builder kindly sourced legs for the bath and threw them in for free (the legs that had arrived with the re-enamelled bath didn't fit), so we finally have a bath that doesn't wobble, and I had my first bath in it, with lavender and a cup of tea. And then of course we always have the sea. I went for a walk at the coral beach in Carraroe this week. The water was clear, but the beach was covered in jellyfish and I hadn't brought my swimming gear.

We had the first of our housewarming parties last week (hence the leftovers), with the neighbours, and now, with the building work finished, I feel more settled. But it can be bittersweet, because I miss my family in Germany more than ever. I feel at home here, but at the same time, because this is the closest to a 'permanent' home I have had here in Ireland, it brings into focus that I am separated from my orginal home.

I feel it every time a German tourist or language student comes up to us after the storytelling night to buy a book. Most of the time I am not that conscious of being a foreigner, but when I hear their accent and they spell out the name of the person they want the book dedicated to, I feel a twinge of homesickness.

As so often happens when something is at the forefront of our mind, it pops up everywhere (or we are more attuned to it). Several articles and reviews I have read in the last few weeks were about the concept of home (this book looks interesting, if controversial).

Emma Cullinan wrote a column in last week's Irish Times about moving house and starting over after over two decades of sharing a family home, and about the objects, including a lot of books, she brought to the new place: "[I]t's been a revelation as to how at one you feel with yourself when everything around you has meaning, and, as the Danes would have it, hygge (a sort of huggy cosiness)". I thought of that when we filled our new bookcase with the books that had lingered in boxes for the last ten months. On the other end of the spectrum, I also did a purge, burning diaries and getting rid of paperwork, but not before reliving the first decade of this century, with a mixture of nostalgia and relief that I am now in my "mellow thirties", as John would say. 

Then there was an interview with Jungian psychoanalyst John Hill a few weeks ago, also in the Irish Times, about his book At Home in the World: Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging.
An Irishman living in Switzerland, he talks about noticing images of the land he has left (the sea, the hawthorn bushes, the hills) coming up in the unconscious when he is away, which is when he feels home as a sense of belonging.

The gooseberries remind me of the summers of my childhood and were an immediate trigger. It must be the first time that I have had them here in Ireland (apart from jam). As Hill - who misses apple tart - says, our sense of home can have "a very sensuous basis".