Saving our planet is the thing to do

Day 2.

FIRE
I was woken up in the middle of the night around 4:50am with a fire alarm going off. It kinda freaked me out. I thought it was just in our house, and as we hadn't been cooking anything in our sleep I was very confused (my powers of deduction were also not at their peak with the just-woken-up factor and the jet lag combo). Julia shouted from her room, "It's just the fire alarm, don't worry!" Unfortunately, I still worried. I wasn't sure if it was just our apartment that was experiencing it or the whole building, and if it was just our apartment then we were definitely waking up the neighbors and they would probably be breaking down our doors and stabbing us any moment. When it stopped (after I hit a bunch of buttons and twisting knobs on random things around the apartment that didn't do anything) I went back to bed. When I talked to Julia this morning, she said this happens anytime someone smokes in the parking garage. Silly Irish!

WATER
Our water was turned off today. It seems that the Irish have no idea how to handle temperature that goes below 0 degrees Celsius. It's cute, although not very hygienic. I guess they think their pipes will freeze if the water remains on (no one told them it's opposite). Luckily when we returned from grocery shopping they had turned it back on.

EARTH
Google Maps for Ireland is not as intuitive as I had hoped.

WIND
I have purchased the materials for Princess Cupcakes. I was thinking about posting the pictures as soon as they've been created (you don't "make" Princess Cupcakes, you "create" them... did Michelangelo "make" the Sistine Chapel? Did Leonardo da Vinci "make" the Mona Lisa? Did Donatello "make" the David? Did Raphael "make" the School of Athens?) I brought my camera with me for this purpose, but then realized, the first item for a list that is sure to get much longer...

Things that Tom forgot to bring to Ireland
1. The cord that uploads pictures from my camera to my computer

C'est la vie. They're going to be pretty and you'll just have to accept that as fact without photographic evidence.

HEART
I met someone! Well, Julia met someone and I got to reap the benefits! On our way to the grocery store, a girl named Emily was jumping the fence with us (it saves 10 minutes on the walk to the store). We started chatting about the silly Irish turning off our water, and she asked us if we were Americans or Canadians. She's a Fulbright scholar over here studying and will be going back in a year to teach Irish-- the language!-- at a school in California. She spent the past summer on a farm in the north in a town that had like 450 people in it, where the community gets their water from a bog, and the town has one church, one post office and three pubs (plus lots of sheep). Her boyfriend lives here too, working for 3 months at a time to avoid having to get a visa. He apparently is from Boston (small world) and she invited us over for the Patriots game and to watch her introduce her Irish friends to queso dip. Julia and I will probably also try to use this opportunity to introduce the Irish to Princess Cupcakes.