It’s been bitterly cold here in Ireland of late but it makes for some beautiful sunsets.
(A few more on Flickr)
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Twenty Four Hours Of Bliss
Powerscourt Springs Health Spa & Farm, Ireland’s Premier Health Farm: Welcome To our World
My birthday gift from my husband this year is to spend the next two days at the Powerscourt Springs spa. I will be enjoying a massage and a body wrap and other lucious treats but the thing I’m most looking forward to is having a long, uninterrupted night’s sleep with the added luxury of waking when I want to! This is what I have been fantasizing about for the past one year, one month and one week.
I’m trying not to wonder if they have internet access…
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Guinness Brew 39
In Fact, Ah mentioned the limited edition Brew 39 from Guinness a couple of weeks back. I’m not a Guinness drinker myself, not much of a drinker full stop if truth be told, but my Dad, my brother and, through their influence, my husband all consider themselves connoisseurs of the black stuff. They are very fussy about where they drink their pints and will walk out of any bar that only sells the extra cold trendy version. They prefer to drink in slightly quieter pubs since the barman is less likely to be rushed, they know which barmen in which pubs pull the best pints (controversially they avoid barmaids since they maintain women don’t know how to pull a good pint). They claim to know what times of the evening the pints are the best depending on how full or empty the barrel is and they won’t take the first pint after the barrel has been changed. One favourite watering hole was the Queens in Dalkey but this has changed because the head barman left and now the pint just isn’t as good. Finnegans has become the new local although if a better pint is found they are sure to follow it.
My husband was out with my brother not long ago enjoying their usual pint and were just about to order the last one of the evening when they spotted one of the Brew 39 beer mats. Being dedicated Guinness guardians they decided to give it a go purely in the interests of research. To cut a long story short, they got home so late I didn’t see either of them that evening, but I am told that somewhere in Dublin a poor unfortunate taxidermist was phoned at 2 in the morning and asked if he could take a fare from Dalkey.
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Sony Bravia Ad
Eve’s favourite ad right now (which sure beats the Onedirect home insurance ad which was a previous favourite) is the Sony Bravia ad with all the coloured balls raining down on San Francisco. When it comes on she stops whatever she was doing, gets as close to the screen as possible and points at it saying “Oh Woooow!”
This is from their site:
“In an age when CGI is commonplace, this makes the commercial all the more extraordinary. Every single frame was shot over two days – with the main sequence involving a 23-man camera crew and only one chance to get it right.
An entire block was closed off and special compressed-air cannons shot the balls into the air, while earth moving equipment poured thousands down the street. Not that you’d know it from the finished product, but these balls can do some damage, so all the cars were props and crew members went so far as to having protective shields and crash helmets.
But when you get it right, you get it right. The goal at the beginning was to deliver a “really simple, visual celebration of colour”. We think you’ll agree the results speak for themselves.”
Click on the photo to see more behind-the-scenes photos on Flickr.
For the past couple of years (with a break while I was pregnant and feeling so ill I couldn’t bear to have anyone’s hands in my mouth) I have been having a LOT of dental work to fix a problem I have had with my bite since I was a kid. Well, my dentist fixed the bite problem this summer during a number of 2 and 3 hour sessions involving plenty of drilling and those lovely trays of pink goo that oozes down your throat while your eyes well up with the effort of not gagging. He’s a great dentist though and my Mum is his assistant so we always have a bit of a laugh (well they have a laugh and I just make muffled grunting noises).
So, since the main problem was fixed the only thing that has been left to do is to have my front teeth veneered so they look nice and straight because the bite had caused them to become worn down and crooked. Of all the stages this was the most nerve-wracking for me since it involves totally changing the look of my face. It’s almost like having a nose job or some other facial cosmetic surgery. I was worried that it would be like when that girl off Dirty Dancing had a nosejob and she ended up looking extremely plain and not herself at all even though it could be argued that the nose was more traditionally pretty or “right” she just looked like everybody else and it was her old “incorrect” nose that made her look like her.
Before:
After:
OK, I may have been overthinking this a little too much, but I was still nervous going in this morning. I’d been given mock teeth a couple of weeks ago that I could take in and out to give people an idea of what my new teeth were going to look like. It didn’t help my nerves that most people said I looked like Nanny McPhee (see first photo above). The session this morning was two hours long and I had to wear a lovely contraption known as a “SeeMore” Retractor which by the end of the first hour was getting pretty painful and has the unpleasant effect of making you drool all over your face:
When the time was up I was just as relieved to have that thing out of my mouth as I was anxious to see my new teeth. When he did hand me the mirror I was very happy to see that they don’t look as rough as the mock set did, although they’re not quite finished yet. He’s left them deliberately longer and squarer than they will be when they’re done. He wants me to live with them for a couple of weeks to get used to them and then he will trim them and tidy them up. So, it’s a bit difficult to judge them for now and no I won’t be posting any photos, I’m far too self-conscious for that. But if you want an idea, this is kind of how I feel right now:
