In memoriam

After one of the best night's sleep in a long time (well, the best without the aid of a tablet, anyway) I was running a bit behind for the start of the day. It was around 2.30 by the time I got out for my walk. I have no idea what put the notion in my head, but I decided to take the DART to Dalkey and walk home from there, and I actually did it, which was a pretty good walk yet again, making it three days in a row for longer-than-average perambulations.

Carl and I sat and watched his new iMac going through the process of installing Win$$$s, the most time-consuming part of which was the re-formating of the newly created disk partition. I'd suggested that we got out for a meal, and suggested Ouzo in Dalkey (I'd passed it by on my walk and had confirmed that the Early Bird menu was available up until closing on Monday evenings). We watched University Challenge while the pooter did its thing, but there was still a long way to go before installation would be complete, so we left the iMac to its own devices and headed for Dalkey.

Ouzo is no great shakes, really. Carl's seafood starter was good, while my wild mushroom soup was okay. His fishcake (some crab; some not) was adequate, as was my chicken dish -- but why do restaurants insist on only half cooking their vegetables? I know 'al dente' is fashionable, but over-hard can't be right. Anyway, it was nice enough, but nothing to write home about. The standard Early Bird menu is 21.95 euro and the Super-dooper Lobster extravaganza menu which Carl had is 3 euro more. Add wine and two coffees to that and suddenly you're talking about a total bill of close to 80 euro: not exactly great value for money.

Installing Win$$$s completed when we got back to Carl's place (my God, but it's a convoluted process!).

The blip is a view of an abandoned graveyard which is beside the Dalkey Heritage Centre on the main street. The gate is padlocked, and the graveyard is apparently only accessible from inside the Centre. I had to shove the camera through a gap in the gate in order to get an uninterrupted view.