andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

The first in a series of somewhat random older photos…

January ’03. The murals in Derry (known to the English as Londonderry); this is where the Catholic population live.

September ’02. David and Carolyn after a hard night on the town, Neil is nearby. David is still sore after trying to break into a car, and climbing a crane.

(Edited to include useful information like dates)

I started a series of posts recently, roughly every week or so, and then stuff came up and then something else happened, and then poo, the post was rendered essentially useless and I had to start again. The few remaining regular followers of my site, which include Tee and Tony, occasionally Kenny and Sean, and sometimes Fergal and a couple of Parallel customers (allegedly, but I hope so; more on this shortly) have no doubt been thinking that this is one of the less persuasive reasons to fire up a web browser, though my outburst of 11 November seems to have gone down very well as a piece of entertainment.

I was going to do my posts during my recent trip to England, but I didn’t have quite enough time (as you’ll see, that’s kind of surprising but that’s how it happened) and then after that I was all tied up until now, at the end of my week off…

Weeks of not posting, an absolute sin in terms of maintaining an audience which as I explained in a previous post is very important indeed, according to dogmatic self-appointed Danish web experts. Though as my previous post demonstrated, I have an audience which hovers in at around two so stuff like audience numbers is a moot point. Anyway, there’s been a lot on, and over the next day or two there will be many, many photos and all sorts of odds and ends. I’ll probably break them down into individual posts.

A bit of a recap: Two weeks ago Rik the Belgian came over, and although he spent a lot of that two weeks roaming around the country, we had a lot of fun in Dublin and it was great to see him again. During that time, I went to Tee’s brother’s wedding party,
The traditional pulling off of the garter with the teeth. I don’t think this was their first time…
That’s Tee’s (and Joseph and Derrick and Michelle’s) Oul’ Fella in the foreground
Michelle and Laura, Tee’s sister and best mate respectively. Dangerous women for sure.

Dmitry and Alex’s party,
Sarka, Tanya, Rik and Ciaran; aren’t we cosy?
Dmitry is concerned we’re not drinking enough, while Rik realises he is actually very drunk. Again.
Me, Ciaran and Sarka celebrating Sarka’s theft of Ciaran’s beer

I got myself a room in Los Blancheles (that’s Blanchardstown; I won’t say it again), hung out with Rik,
Rik tasting Guinness; this is his ‘appreciation’ face

went through childhood ephemera with my brother, more parties, a vast improvement in my footie skills, my mother bought a house (with cash! What a turnaround.), I visited the Jennifer,
Jen and Tristan having a wrestle; that kid is strong!

I had a big adventure in England, I walked to Maynooth,
Garret The Troll surveys the journey ahead. There is still far to go.

there was a great party to help poor Pakistanis,
Ibiza Uncovered. In Owen’s house. Notice the pride of Pakistan at the top…

and I painted my mother’s house.
Haarrrgh! The roller!

Friday morning two weeks ago I got to experience the Calcutta Express, which is the train from Maynooth to Pearse.
Waiting for the Calcutta Express at Castleknock station. Sitting on the roof will be harder when they electrify the line out here.
Not many people know or even believe that Los Blancheles has a train station although it is cunningly named ‘Castleknock’, and I’ve discovered that people in Dublin know surprisingly little about the greater Dublin rail network, or at least what’s left of it (it’s a fact that as soon as the English were out of Ireland, the Irish ripped up the bulk of the rail network and replaced it with shoddy roads and poor public transport. Fucking idiots.). The line through Los Blancheles is known as the Calcutta Express simply because it’s generally completely packed solid during rush hour, standing room only, and to make matters worse it has to wait for a random period of time just before Connolly station (and sometimes at other points on the line) because it plays second fiddle to the coastal line.

Potentially a great service, unfortunately run by an Irish state company (yeah, underfunded, I know, but money doesn’t organise timetables or explain to people why the train has stopped apparently at random. Diligence does that.).

We had a company lunch on Friday too, which is always an odd experience
Having an interesting lunch. That is Lyner on my right.
I mean, it was great that Tom took us out to the Indian, the food was good albeit minimal, but having a regimented lunch with most of the work crew in a semi-structured environment tends to feel like… work. It was reasonably good food though, and relaxed enough.

After a hard and fast game of footie I had a hard and fast game sprint to Kilkenny to visit Jennie and her remarkably fast growing kid. Originally the idea was to stay for most of the weekend but for various reasons (not least, having spent very little time in my new home so far and having to get a number of things done, as well as the ongoing crusade to weed out uneccessary old stuff from my childhood memories since my mother is moving and wishes things to be ‘sorted’) I ended up staying just Friday and heading back on Saturday evening which was probably better for everyone… Jesus, her young fella has grown! I hadn’t seen Jennie and her kid since well before I started going out with Tee (which comes close to putting exact dates on it all) so the last time he was exactly a year old. Now he’s 18 months, walking, talking, making lifestyle choices, negotiating his next mortgage and figuring out how to steal my job… Crazy stuff, and reminds me that time is passing; I’m not getting any younger. 33 next March!

So there’s Tristan:
Tristan sizes me up. He reckons he could take me.
And the Jennifer:
Poor Jennifer is all played out. She needs a rest.
And we can combine them:
Now they’re both all played out!
And then we can remove Jennifer, and add Mikey and Jane:
Mikey (Jen’s brother) and Jane, his wumon, with Tristan
For those who routinely make the same jokes (and you know who you are), I was in Australia at the time. So go fuck yourselves, it’s not funny anymore.

Kilkenny is great place even if it’s expanding like there’s no tomorrow. There’s a great clothes shop called ‘Praha’ which has a logo in the colours of the Czech flag. Actually, it just sells the same stuff as everywhere else, I guess the proprietors must be Czech.

I got my duvet on Sunday morning, after an overlong and tortuous trip to the Los Blancheles Shopping District, where you can buy just about anything that it is possible to buy, and get caught in 10 kilometre tailbacks with your SUV on the way home. Shopping, ‘they’ say, is the new religion here in Ireland and everyone was at worship that morning, flinging their cards and cash about with abandon. A lot of these people have high mortgages too, or other debts, it’s pretty frightening to shop for a pastime under those circumstances.

The entrance to Los Blancheles Retail Park. You park, and then you retail. Shop til you drop from sheer irritation.

Me? I just needed a good warm duvet with feathers pulled from a real duck.

A non-eventful weekend, really. I wasn’t even productive (other than managing to scan about 4 million photos and organise them and some others on cds for the girleens what travel).

Girleens trying to look innocent. But I know better now…

I was shaken after talking to Tee on Sunday. It was great to talk to her and I could ask for little more but reminded me of how much I miss her too, which is good and bad all at the same time. Like being wrestled by a huge angry chocolate bear.

So, not much happening otherwise. But I did buy an international call card with which to call Jane in England (that’s her on the left there; the other woman is Ute. They are way older than me but don’t look it). Hopefully I’ll visit her soon. I had booked the trip during the summer months but some pretty serious stuff happened to one of my nearest and dearest which meant I couldn’t go. Anyone who knows me well knows what I’m talking about.

Jane and Ute laugh at the comedy that is life, while encouraging me to make a meal of my travel plans

Since I had the card and I hadn’t been in touch with people, I called Erika in Japan, although I ended up having to call her on my mobile.

Erika with More Alcohol! No good!

And I called Sean, who I could always email but a chat is good, and besides he is very entertaining to talk to. And his mother Gael, as well.

Sean on the left, G—– organising shady business deals on the right

Sean and G—– discover that flight is powerful. And next to impossible.

Sean will hopefully be writing some articles for this site soon, including some stuff on AJAX and Content Deportation technologies, which we think are going to be really big soon.

And Rik called! Rik is coming over from Belgium to explore Ireland for a couple of weeks. Rather foolishly, he seems to feel that Ireland is a great way to spend his first extensive holiday in two years. Well, I better find stuff for him to do.

Rik in Ljubljana preparing to loudly call me a cunt from across the street

So, my weekend in pictures, more or less. I shaved my head again which is something I feel I need to do more often because, as you can see in the photo below, there really isn’t very much hair left at all so I’m trying to get a bit of consistency to the hair extinction situation.

The baldness.

And I was out on the town in a low key manner on Friday, where I saw the new bridge out past the IFSC over the Liffey, which looked great with all the lights and what have you.

Sean O’Casey Bridge by gaslight. Or halogen, probably

(edited 28.06.2007)
Obliterated the photo references to Garret, by request.

In between all my usual ramblings, being laid down this weekend with the fierce tail-end of a cold (atchoo), and trying to get some work on Keith’s Image Gallery code done, I took a couple of minutes to update the theme for the site. I think it’s stronger with the new colours, and more… Relaxing. Actually, I think it makes using the site a better experience. I’ll have to add some lightweight image switching code or something similar to rotate the main header image, which is actually a CSS background (for those that care).

Bray station on a wet morning

Anyway, back to the usual rants soon, I’ve got plenty to rant about and even an Epiphany in there about the state of Ireland today.

Dublin on the way to work on a wet and very dark morning

My mother walking on Arklow beach

I’m really feeling like shit right now, thanks to my bi-annual cold having kicked in. I got home early today but under the promise of being in and fit to work the next few days… I have a feeling it’s going to be a trying couple of days that’s going to probably end up with me hating work. I don’t tend to take time off for sick leave, by and large; I don’t get sick much and I wouldn’t see the point, other than that if you take time off and get better sooner, you can get more done afterwards.

I’m going to post some photos now, because I’ve been remiss in doing that. Although I’ve had a hectic month and taken lots of photos of this, that and the other, I’ve written relatively little and posted almost no photos at all. I’ve been trying to work out how to get a decent photo-upload system going for Therese and her girleens of Ideas For Cheap Stuff because that was part of what I promised but it’s one of the areas where unfortunately WordPress is a little patchy and the solutions tend to be over-engineered cludges or hacks. I think I can do better but I haven’t had enough time. Most likely, I’ll embrace and extend one of the existing tools to do what I want, adding some features, making sense of existing ones, and generally achieving what I want.

The pictures! Some of these are several weeks old; Therese and Lids have been gone a couple of weeks now, for example and some of these are from well before that. Most of them are, actually.

The eyebrow bar

Tee staring out a tiger at the zoo

Me and Therese monkeying about in the zoo

Me and Therese, yum!

Me spazzing in the Odious Bar

That’s Tee on the right and Lids on the left, getting ready to check in

Tee, Lids and Dee posing for a photo shoot. Messers!

Tee, Dee and Lids, girl dancing action!

Therese on blue doing the eyes! Eeep!

Me in the abc suit, helping out with DIY in G—– and N—’s gaff

G—– is a painter boy

N— is a painter girl

G—– The Destroyer surveys the carnage he has wrought

Me spaz dancing in the Odious Bar. How bizarre!

The next episode will be about sunny Drogheda, and my adventures up North! Yay!

(edited 28.06.2007)
Obliterated the photo of Garret and Nora, by request.