When I think of Ireland, I think of green, and castles.  Outside of Dublin, on the way to Blarney, the green is everywhere.  But the castles?  It’s like heading to Maine and expecting to see lobsters by the side of the road.  It doesn’t quite happen that way.  You have to go off the beaten path just a bit to find towers and turrets made of stone.

On our way to Kenmare, we stopped off in Cork just to say we did.  Fortunately, they don’t know about Black Friday (probably ‘cause Thursday was just another day), so the city centre, while getting ready for Christmas, was civilized and festive.  We parked our minivan (yes, an Irish swagger wagon) and had lunch at Oliver Plunkett’s before heading to Blarney Castle and that famous stone.  I don’t go in much for tourist-y attractions but there’s a difference between the Hollywood footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theater and a medieval keep from a thousand years ago.

Before heading up the cold, wet steps to the spot where everyone does the kissing, I

Blarney Castle. We're the little people at the bottom.

read about the history of the place and how the masters of the castle liked to entertain.  I imagined getting an invite to a dinner at Blarney and groaning because the place I saw yesterday was frosty and inhospitable.  To say that my forbearers were a heartier bunch than the five Neils is an understatement.  While I love my dreary weather, I love my roaring fires even more, and the fireplace at Blarney hadn’t been used in some time.  Regardless, we made our way over to the nice man who dipped us each down to the Blarney Stone where we kissed the smooth rock and laughed at the silliness of it all – ‘the gift of gab’ and such.  For the most part, we’re already a chatty bunch.  And oddly enough, we all got mighty quiet back in the minivan and promptly fell asleep while the husband continued to maneuver the tight, windy roads, driving with the steering wheel on the right side (or the wrong side depending on how you look at these things.)

We arrived in Kenmare after dark, which is about an hour after lunchtime in Ireland this time of year.  I’d told the girls to pack warm clothes because I knew, even indoors, the Irish were used to the cold in ways we Californians certainly were not.  After entering our rental cottage with Mary, the proprietor, I thought, “I told you so.”  You could nearly see your breath and the heat was on.  We started a fire right away, which helped, but at bedtime, Erin slept with her sweatshirt hood pulled up over her head.  Brrrrrr.

This morning, after sleeping late, I went into town for a quick run down our quiet country road.  It feels familiar – the cold, the damp, the smell of peat bricks in living room stoves.  I can imagine my grandparents coming of age here, though I barely knew them or not at all.  They looked like everyone I see, and sounded just like the woman sweeping in front of her store before customers.  “Morning, there ya go,” she said to me as I jogged by.

Kerry on her Ring, joined by Erin and Tara.

We started the Ring of Kerry, a scenic 120-mile drive around the county, and sped through the first major stop, Killarney, a little too quickly.  I was feeling slightly nauseous in the passenger seat on the winding roads and was reminded why I always take the wheel on Highway 1 heading up to Big Sur.  (Or Jesus takes the wheel.)  The husband’s been doing a stellar job navigating so far but I’ve made the sometimes stomach-upsetting mistake of looking down at a map while the car’s in motion.  I picked up a Coke to settle things and it worked, so by the time we drove through Killorglin, I was thrilled to be in the heart of what you dream Ireland will look like – quaint towns with pubs named O’Reilly’s, Harrigan’s, Murphy’s – and green vistas, rocky beaches, and stone churches.  Everyone speaks with a lilt so, naturally, the girls are annoyed to hear their mom and dad now speaking with one, too.

We had dinner in town at Tom Crean’s – Fish and Wine, the sign says – and I ate delicious scallops, proving that some of the Irish do indeed know how to cook.  Across the street, the husband had a pint while we listened to some music.  Now we’re back at the cottage and I’m nestled in front of the fire again, feeling like I’m home.  Tomorrow, it’s back to Killarney to make up for snubbing it today – not so much for the town but for a hike on one of its many verdant trails.  It’s a designated national park for a reason.  It’s almost December so we’ll be singing “Christmas in Killarney” whether the girls like it or not.  Chances are, they won’t.

Every so often, I need to write a post on the wonders of owning a dog.  Here’s one for the file:

This past Thursday afternoon someone tried to break into our house while I was home.  “That’s terrible!” you might say, to which I would respond, “Not really.”

I was sitting in our den, which is located in the back of the house, furiously typing away on my laptop, trying to finish up a project.  Our two dogs and our guest dog, the Luck Man, started barking furiously at the front door, the way they do when solicitors come whom they don’t know, or someone is putting a flier on the doorknob.  I didn’t get up to investigate because no one rang the doorbell, I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I was busy.  Besides, the dogs were clearly taking care of business and I had work to do.

They work as a team.

About twenty minutes later, I got up to stretch and do a few chores, one of which was picking up dog poop.  When I walked out the front door to take the smelly bag to the trash, I noticed the screen door to our front bay window on the ground and the window itself wide open.  Hmmm, I thought.  This is exactly what Miss T and I came home to when we were robbed five years ago, after which we got our first dog.  Looks as if I didn’t lock that window and someone tried to get in and rob the house again. When I remembered a few details of what had transpired – the dogs weren’t just barking at the door, one of them had run into the office where the bay window was located and went crazy – I quickly glanced into the room through the window to make sure nothing was amiss.  Of course nothing was, because the intruder never made it past the window sash.  Chances are, he faced the fangs and fury of our cattle dog and the entire incident lasted a few seconds.  I don’t really know because I wasn’t paying attention.  Because of these dogs, I take my safety in this house for granted – with obvious good reason.

I love my dogs.  I love the Luck Man.  They keep me company.  They think I’m perfect.  They’re super, duper cute.  I love that they need me and I appreciate that they know I need them.  Thursday, they did their job and I’ve never had to tell them what that is.  This is their home, too, and if you’re not invited in, chances are they’re going to take a big bite out of you unless you leave, quickly.

I can’t honestly say I felt violated by what happened Thursday because the entire incident began and was over before I had a chance to react.  The dogs were given extra cheese treats that day and I’m not mad anymore when Shelby sneaks onto the lawn I’m trying to repair on the side of the house.  She deserves a nap on the soft, cool grass.

Sure, alarm systems are good, too, but I don’t trust myself to always set one and then remember not to set it off in the middle of the night.  Besides, the dogs make me smile.  I like scratching their bellies and watching their emotions on full display depending on what they’re doing with their tails and ears.  It’s unconditional love wrapped up in a protective, furry, warning system.

Dogs – gotta love ‘em.  If you don’t have one, what are you waiting for?

Getting out of town for a weekend away with the ladies is a logistical nightmare extravaganza.  In addition to the in-laws, it took no fewer than five additional adults (not including the husband) to move the chess pieces of our life around and get everyone where they needed to be for three days – so thanks Veronica, Kelly, Jeanine, Susan, Beth (for the car), and Angelee (even though in the end, you were given a pass).  Every year at this time, I head up to Big Sur/Carmel to run a relay marathon and every year I think how much easier it would be to stay home.  And then we pack up the swagger wagon anyway and hit the road.

Some say it’s important to get away every now and then and take a break from the usual routine.  I agree, but more crucial is getting away to a place that feeds your soul.  For me, it’s here.  If you live in California and haven’t driven up the coast or spent any time in and around the Monterey Peninsula and points south to Cambria, you should be ashamed of yourself.  The sights will take your breath away and force you to bask in the beauty and wonder of nature, the power of the ocean, the smell of the pines, and the touch of cool, sometimes foggy breezes.

This summer, head to San Simeon and Hearst Castle (make reservations beforehand), then further north to Big Sur.  Stay at one of their cabin/campground operations (reserve now) and after a long hike, have a drink and an Ambrosia burger at Nepenthe.  Twenty-six miles north still (hence the marathon), you’ll hit Carmel with all its charm.  Dogs are allowed on the beach so head down Ocean and take in the scene on the sand where our furry four-legged friends frolic with the two-legged humans.  (Did anyone appreciate my alliteration just now?)

This place…it’s unexpected, undeserved, expansive, gracious in its offerings.  It’s the coast of California.  It’ll make you feel lucky.

My nearly thirteen-year-old daughter came into the kitchen the other day and said something like this: “Mom, there’s this whole thing online, on Facebook, this guy Joseph Kony is kidnapping children in the middle of the night and killing them and raping girls and everybody is signing this petition and we have to stop him.”  I told her to hold on and wait a minute, and said something like: “Online/Facebook stuff that kids send back and forth to each other is usually hysterical and not based on fact and if there’s some guy kidnapping and killing children, then likely the police have been called.”  I didn’t catch the name Joseph Kony and thought she was talking about some guy in the San Fernando Valley where we live.  Oh boy.

Goldie went into some details and when she said African warlord and child soldiers, I told her that, yes, those people do exist and they’ve been around far too long.  I didn’t know specifically about Joseph Kony but I’ve read a few newspapers in my day and learned of unbelievable atrocities – man’s inhumanity to man – and back when I was her age, I wanted to save the world, too.  When I was first told of the Holocaust, I couldn’t understand how it happened and why no one stopped it before six million Jews were already dead.  There’s still no ‘understanding’ of it, though sadly, as we get older most of us, if not accept, at least exist day to day with the knowledge that evil has been around forever and there’s a pretty good chance that unless it comes into our neighborhood, we’re mostly going to go about our lives.  Of news in far away lands, as recently as 1994’s Rwanda genocide and this week’s continuing massacre in Homs, we wring our hands and hope against hope that someone does something.

Remember high school, when the cause du jour was banning Nestlé products because they sent off their baby formula to third world countries without educating women on how to properly use it?  Reasons likely remain to boycott certain corporations too greedy to do what’s right for humanity. But what do I tell Goldie?  She doesn’t understand why we’re all just sitting around, proceeding as usual, when Joseph Kony is making children kill their parents.  Perhaps the activism that KONY 2012 has spawned will finally bring the man down.  I sure hope so.  But what of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad?  Why do we continue to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, whose record on women’s rights is abysmal?  How did Kim Jong Il isolate and starve his own people without anyone intervening?  Darfur?  Somalia?  Colombian drug lords and FARC?  Heck, there are people being abused and killed in our own cities and towns.  Try explaining that to a teenager.

I don’t want to explain any of it because I want Goldie to be outraged and confused.  There’s no making sense of evil and even though most of us don’t do anything about it, for reasons big and small, there are many others who do.  I have a Facebook friend who always seems to be somewhere else in the world, speaking at conferences, enlightening others, feeding the hungry, fighting for human rights by making us aware of their dearth.  Sure, there’s some controversy surrounding Invisible Children, the organization behind KONY 2012, but who cares?  And okay, I could’ve done without the sappy scenes of the filmmaker’s son but that’s not the point.  The point is, we live in a world where it IS actually easier to make a difference because it IS easier to get the word out, to enrage, to enlighten, to shame where shame is due, to ask for help.

I have always believed that people are, by nature, decent.  I was raised to trust that notion by my parents and by the evidence I saw, and continue to see, every day.  The news we hear is generally all bad, yet I want my children to know the opposite – to know of Good Samaritans, the value of a kind word, the importance of advocacy, the strength of a compliment, the simple meaning of caring for another before yourself.  More than anything, I want them to believe that they have the power to make a difference.  I know what it feels like to be righteous and think you can change the world.  The fact that I haven’t doesn’t mean that I’m going to discourage my kids from trying to do exactly that – even if it just means sharing a video online, or signing a pledge, or telling their mother about a guy named Joseph Kony.

The husband and I nearly named two of our girls SOPA and PIPA oh those many years ago, unaware of how controversial they’d become in 2012.  Fortunately, we opted for names more traditional, in the Irish vein, and avoided the embarrassment of having to explain the coincidence with this week’s congressional legislative brouhaha.

By now you know that SOPA stands for Stupid Online Piracy Act and PIPA breaks down as Poopy Internet Piracy Act.  Their purpose was to stop the stealing of copyrighted material on the great big World Wide Web.  Yeah, good luck with that.

At the dinner table Thursday evening, Goldie said one of her classmates told her Facebook and Twitter were going to shut down.  That allowed me a rare opening to demonstrate I was smarter than my children.  “He’s wrong,” I said simply, then proceeded, in even more facile terms, to explain what was going on.  Beyond a rudimentary dissection of SOPA and PIPA, I explained that Congress was incompetent and, while their intentions were good – pirated movies and music is bad business and illegal – their solutions were not.  Fortunately, smarter folks in the private sector, spurred on by Silicon Valley, took matters into their own hands, staged a highly successful internet protest shining light on the poorly written legislation and its sickening side-effects, and forced Congress to scratch their heads, sharpen their pencils, and get back to work writing laws that make more sense.  In the case of online piracy, that might not be possible.  Beside the point, I wondered why we can’t be more successful with other idiotic legislation Congress enacts.  Or heck, can’t we all agree now that the SOPA and PIPA debacle was proof that many of our elected leaders proceed with governance even though they don’t know what the f*** they’re talking about?  And yet most intelligent individuals with leadership qualities generally shy away from politics.  I wonder why?

Have you been paying attention to the GOP presidential candidates and the fight to become their party’s nominee?  Iowa miscounted and took Mitt Romney’s win there away from him, giving it to Rick Santorum instead.  As of a few days ago, Romney was poised to win South Carolina’s primary Saturday by a comfortable margin but that rascal Newt keeps gaining ground.  It’s shocking really – we’re talking about Newt Gingrich – but unbridled confidence goes a long way.  I keep shouting at the television, “Why is that man so sure of himself?!”  Faced with accusations this past week that he wanted an ‘open’ marriage with his second wife, and questioned first about the story in Thursday night’s South Carolina debate, Gingrich not only managed to deflect the discourse from his marital history and shine the light on a media he feels is biased in favor of President Obama (ha!), he closed the gap between himself and Mitt Romney and now stands a chance of winning today at the polls.

I don’t want to get into the marital details of the candidates – who really wants to imagine Gingrich naked with any woman – but this is the same man who helped lead the charge into impeachment proceedings against President Clinton after it was discovered Clinton unzipped for someone other than his wife.  Sure, they’ll all tell you it was about perjury but let’s be honest.  The Republicans smelled a fabulous scandal involving oral sex and marital infidelity that would help them politically, and so seized it.  Democrats would have done the same thing.  For the record, I wanted Clinton to resign so that many months later driving around in my car listening to the radio I wouldn’t hear a bunch of men in Congress – our leaders – discuss fellatio instead of ways to improve public education.  But hey, that’s just me.  Gingrich received a standing ovation Thursday night for the manner in which he handled John King’s question at the start of the CNN debate.  I think Mitt actually responded best: “John, let’s get on to the real issues, is all I gotta say.”

The real issues?  For me, it’s about rain and soccer and how the two are going to affect my football viewing Sunday.  Postponements today are pushing games until tomorrow, though I think I’ll be able to take in most of the early AFC championship game in New England as the Patriots host the Baltimore Ravens, and the later NFC game at Candlestick when the Giants visit the 49ers.  I’d love to see the Ravens take down pretty-boy Tom Brady and I-don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass-what-you-think-of-me Bill Belichick.  It would also be nostalgic for Californians to see San Francisco back in the big game after an unlikely and long-overdue return to quality football.  As always, we all hope for good games.

Enjoy the weekend.