Like this:

will own you, son.

I think I’ve worked out the last few kinks in my schedule. Classes work differently here than at home — for one thing, I’ll probably be taking six (that’s apparently what’s classified as a full load here, the equivalent of about 15 hours back in the States). I managed to get a pretty good schedule, one class on Mondays and Fridays, three Tuesday and Thursday, and two on Wednesday. I tried my hardest to come out of it with no Friday classes, but scheduling classes here is harder than it sounds, so I’m lucky to escape this last week with anything at all on my schedule.

The North and South class, where I just was, looks like it’s going to tell me a lot about the history of what’s been going on. We started all the way back at the beginning of the 1900s, talking about a bunch of political parties in Ireland and England and how those forces wound up sparking the movement for independence. I feel like growing up here would make this a lot easier; for a long time, I thought the professor was talking about an Irish guy named Bob Dylan who was part of the liberal alliance in southern Ireland (I got really excited), but it turns out his name was John Dylan, which means he wasn’t some kind of wonderful cross-breed of bohemian guitar-strumming vagabond and vigorous Irish revolutionary war hero. Ah, well. C’est la vie.

Nap time, and then a batch of errands to do: buying a notebook, getting my cell phone in order, and obtaining a working debit card (one of the Allied Irish Bank ATMs downtown ate my last one). The sun’s coming out, I hope the weather holds for a while. That’s one thing about being in a rainy country: no matter how good things get, the sky’s still gray and low-hanging most of the time. On the other hand, that means it only takes a few minutes of sunshine to make a terrible day a lot better.

Oh, Ireland. You’re such a tease.

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