Dan Q

Kind: Notes

Cooking with Wine

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can’t get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.

Dan, in a kitchen with some kind of tomato sauce on a hob behind him, holds a glass of red wine and shrugs at the camera.

Ah well, what’s a chef to do? 🤷🍷

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Morning, Sheep

Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village’s hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning.

Warm colours break through scattered clouds from a winter sunrise over sheep grazing in a scrubby pasture.

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Disarmed

In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks.

Dan, wearing a sling, stands near the reception of a Minor Injuries Unit.

In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion.

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Goodbye Ireland

I’m leaving Ireland a day late, from the wrong airport, and with one fewer functioning arm than I anticipated. It’s been quite the ride. I’ll be glad to get home.

Dan sits in an airport bar drinking a beer held in his right hand. His left arm is in a sling.

(for those that are concerned: I’ve damaged my shoulder, possibly while slipping down a hill in search of a geocache or geohashpoint; so, y’know, the usual reason I get injured… but I’ve got some physio instructions I’m supposed to follow, and I’ll be okay)

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Dublin

Sooo… I’m in Dublin.

I missed me flight at Knock airport, which turns out to have been the only plane leaving that tiny airport today. So I arranged a flight from Dublin tomorrow, extended my car rental and arranged to drop it off in the capital’s airport instead, and zipped over here.

Two pints of Guinness on a candlelit table.

Now I’m in an underlit bar sipping a Guinness and waiting for a pizza.

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Irish Signs

I’ve only been driving in Ireland for several days, so less than 100% of the iconography of the signage makes sense to me instantly, for now. But this one’s a complete mystery to me.

Photograph showing a road sign; it's yellow, diamond-shaped, and depicts in black the silhouette of a person running from left to right. Above them is the silhouette of a car, much smaller than them and twisted anticlockwise by about 20 degrees. Impact/movement marks eminate from the lower of the car's wheels, as if it's a thrown object that's just bounced off the head of the runner.

Is this warning joggers than tiny cars might bounce off their heads? Or is it exhorting distant swerving motorists to put on their right indicator to tell people which way to run to avoid being hit by them? Or maybe it’s advising that down this road is a football pitch for giants and they’ll play “headers” with you in your car if you’re not careful? I honestly haven’t a clue.

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Guinness in the Bath

It’s been a long day of driving around Ireland, scrambling through forests, navigating to a hashpoint, exploring a medieval castle, dodging the rain, finding a series of geocaches, getting lost up a hill in the dark, and generally having a kickass time with one of my very favourite people on this earth: my mum.

And now it’s time for a long soak in a hot bath with a pint of the black stuff and my RSS reader for company. A perfect finish.

A pint of Guinness alongside a can, on a tiled bathroom shelf.

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Note #25196

Gorgeous view of Slievenamon towering over Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, as seen from Gurteen Wood, where my mother and I are just on our way back from our successful expedition to the 2024-11-24 52 -7 geohashpoint.

Under a blue-white sky, a rounded hill towers over a fertile green valley dotted with little white houses, as seen from between the trees of an ancient forest.

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Note #25194

With Storm Bert raining off our plans for geohashing in Co. Limerick, my mother and I are off into a forest in Co. Tipperary in search of a hashpoint over this way. It’s still pretty wet though.

A woman wearing a grey bobble hat and a blue coat walks away down a forest track.

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Note #25192

Step 2: brave the fierce weather surrounding Storm Bert and head out into rural Ireland in search of a geohashpoint.

But first, the crucial step 1: a big ol’ bacon and egg sarnie for breakfast.

Bacon and egg sandwich on granary bread, with two bites taken out of it.

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Geohashing Ireland

When my mother proposed that we take a holiday together somewhere, and that I could choose the destination, I started by looking at the Geohashing Expeditions Map.

Where, I wondered, could I find a cluster of mostly-land graticules (“square” degree of latitude and longitude) in which nobody had ever logged a successful expedition?

Somewhat recognisable map of Western Europe, broken up into square degrees of latitude Ave longitude and colour coded based on the number of geohashing expeditions recorded for each. Four contiguous squares on the West coast of Ireland are marked and annotated by hand with the word 'Target!'

I’ve been geohashing for ten years now and I’ve never yet scored a “Graticule Unlocked” achievement for being the first to reach any hashpoint in a given graticule.

Over the next week, if the fluctuations of the Dow Jones and the variable Irish weather allow, I’ll be changing that.

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The Dog and The Snowman

On the way to school this morning, the 10-year-old lagged behind to build a small snowman.

On the way back, the dog saw the snowman, which wasn’t there when she’d passed earlier. She wanted to make it clear that she Did. Not. Trust. it. She stood back and growled at it for a while, and then, eventually, was persuaded to come closer.

Leaning as far as her little legs could manage, she stretched to carefully sniff it while keeping her distance. She still wasn’t entirely happy and ran most of the way to the end of the path to get away from the mysterious cold heap.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog wearing a teal jumper leans hard to sniff at (while avoiding getting too close to) a small snowman about the same size as her, on a footpath mostly covered with snow (except for a patch from which the snowman's materials were clearly extracted).

(This same dog earlier this year spent quarter of an hour barking at our wheelbarrow when, unusually, it was left in the middle of the lawn, rather than beside the shed. She doesn’t like change!)

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