Christmas Party and More Visiting Edmontonians

This week has been insane! As I mentioned in my last post, we headed out for the company Christmas party this past weekend. The Christmas party was held at the beautiful Lyrath hotel in Kilkenny. There are so many people at the company that we couldn't all be put up in that hotel, so we were spread across four different hotels in Kilkenny for the night. Darse, Xan, Diane and I headed out on Friday afternoon to Kilkenny and stayed there on Friday night so we could see a little of the town the next day. We joined several other people for a nice dinner at the Lyrath. Post dinner, we spent a fair amount of time hanging out and socializing in a bar in the Lyrath. By the time Diane and I caught a cab back to our hotel (the NewPark Hotel), it was three in the morning!

We slept in the next morning, and finally got out to explore Kilkenny a bit. It was a crisp afternoon that felt very much like morning, even though we didn't get to Kilkenny Castle in the afternoon. There was a bit of fog in the air, and the green grass was covered in some light frost. Kilkenny Castle was a pretty formidable structure, but we didn't get a chance to explore inside since we had missed the latest tour and the next one was sold out. Since we didn't have time to wait around for the tour after that, we walked down main street in Kilkenny to see some other sights.

One of the places we ended up in was the Black Abbey, which we almost went by. We walked along and were taking a few photos of the outside the church, and were about to move on when a lady passing by stopped and told us that it was "really quite lovely inside", that it was "open anytime", and that is was her "favourite church in town". That was quite a recommendation, and we became a bit more curious about finding the entrance. It was indeed open, and it was breathtaking. The church featured several very large and very colourful stained glass windows that shone very well in the afternoon light.

The afternoon was rapidly disappearing though, so we needed to get back to our hotel to get dressed up for the black tie affair that evening!

We arrived at the Lyrath dressed up and ready to party. The hotel lobby was already filled with people chatting, helping themselves to the appetizers and wine that were being served. At roughly 6pm, the company poker tournament began -- a super speed poker tournament where 4 employees formed a team at one of 8 single table tournaments. The winning team at each table took down €1000 to split amongst themselves. Unfortunately, while my team did well, we finished in second. We bubbled, as we say in the poker world. That is to say, we finished in the place before they start paying out money!

Dinner was scheduled for 8pm (which gives you an idea how fast the poker tournament went) so we were hurried to a huge room with 55 ten person tables set up. Diane and I sat with the Biotools guys, who were flown out for the Christmas party! Nice perk huh? Dinner was a 4 course plated affair: chicken caesar salad, potato and leek soup, either a stuffed chicken breast dish or a steak dish as the main course, and a dessert. It was pretty good!

After dinner there was several attractions: they had a DJ getting the dance floor hopping, there was an open bar all night long, and they brought in some Cuban cigar rollers to demonstrate and hand out the results of their work. The party went super late, with an afterhours bar open until 4am! By the time Diane and I got back to our hotel, it was after 6am. It was an epic party!

We drove back to Dublin on Sunday afternoon and took the rest of Sunday to recover a little bit before starting back to work. But the party didn't stop there. The Biotools folks were still in town until Thursday morning so we had to make sure they enjoyed their time here. So we proceeded to go out for dinner on Monday, over to Aaron's place to hang out and play foosball and nhl '09 on Tuesday, and to the Rockfield pub for poker and trivia last night. I am some burnt out after all this hard partying, but it has been a lot of fun too.

In last night's poker tournament, I managed to catch a good run of cards and turn them into a first place prize for a tidy profit. It's not that often I win a poker tournament, so that was pretty nice. The tournament started out a bit rocky when my full house ran into a bigger one. Whoops!

So it's been a crazy busy week! I've got a bunch of photos to catch up on, so look to see those up soon. I think there's a few worth looking at.

Hope everyone's well, and looking forward to whatever Christmas plans you have. On our plate? Getting ready for our trip to Austria!

Morgan

First Guest from Home

Gee, it's been a little while since our last post. Time has been moving right along for us, and it's hard to believe we really have been here for four months already! The big news this week was our friend JR was over in England for a work trip and managed to get a few days off to come visit us in Dublin! So we had our first houseguest here. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the week and I felt too guilty to ask for both days off so I just got the Wednesday off. JR arrived Monday afternoon and Diane met him at the airport so he didn't have to worry about finding his way to our place. On Tuesday, Diane and JR wandered through downtown Dublin catching several of the attractions down there including Trinity College, Dublin Castle, and the like. They really did a lot of walking and sightseeing! On Wednesday, we took JR to a museum, the Guinness storehouse tour, and the Jameson distillery tour. We got to the distillery for the last tour of the day and it was pretty neat. There was only a handful of people there for it and as a result we all got to do the taste testing of Jameson whiskey next to Jack Daniels and a scottish whiskey. Add to the taste test our free glass of Jameson, and we had a pretty good buzz going after those tours!

We just saw JR off to the airport this morning. I hope he enjoyed himself :) It was pretty surreal to see him here!

Outside of that, we're getting excited about the Christmas party. It's just a couple days away, and it really does sound like fun. We're going to go down on Friday evening and stay that extra night so we can see a bit of the town before the party starts in the evening on Saturday. It should be a good chance to get some more photos.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy for us, but we have managed to get out to do a few things too. Diane and I went and saw the Book of Kells the previous weekend. The book was pretty neat, but the real attractions for me were the information on how much work went into making the book (and books in general back then), and the view down the Long Room which is the library on the upper floor of the building that the Book of Kells is in. Today, it's easy to take for granted the availability of books, but back then the amount of work that went into copying and binding each book guaranteed that there really wasn't enough for everyone.

This last Saturday, we joined in with a very large group of people to help wish Aaron a happy 30th birthday. It's a good thing that their apartment is HUGE, or there's no way we could've crammed us all in there. For this party there was a team event where teams of four competed against each other at various gaming events: Rock Band on the Wii, NHL 2009 on the XBOX, and Foosball. I got conscripted onto a very strong team (including the birthday boy himself), and we eventually went on to win the competition. It was pretty fun!

So that's a taste of what we've been into. Hopefully I'll get a blog entry in soon after the Christmas party so you can hear about that!

Morgan

New Games!

Those that know me, know that I like to play games. Unfortunately, there isn't a board game shop in Dublin that even comes close to the selection of Mission Hill Fun & Games back in St Albert. So when we heard word that there was a new really fun game that we were going to get a challenge from people at Google here in Dublin, we needed to find a place to get it.

Eventually, after some digging, we found a place called Board Game Club, which had a good selection and decent prices. So, we placed an order for several games which have now arrived. We picked up Race for the Galaxy, and the new expansion for it, Power Grid, and Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Race for the Galaxy is the game we were anxiously waiting and it'll be interesting to see how it goes over with the board game crowd at the office. Diane and I gave it a try last night, and it's quite an interesting game. The game's main mechanism is like Puerto Rico, but with a couple of significant differences. Sadly, we'll have to wait until thursday to find out how it goes over with people (that's our weekly games night at the office).

It's been awhile since my last entry -- but there's not a lot to share. This last week has been crazy busy for me at the office so that's put a bit of a damper on the length of my evenings at home. I've been putting in some pretty long days trying to get a feature done for the next release, which meant that most days I was getting into the office at around 9:15 and not leaving until 7 or 8 at night. That kind of a day on a weekly basis makes it awfully tough to want to do much other than veg on the couch when I get home.

The weather here has been pretty decent, actually. There's been a few chillier days with some rather unpleasant wind, but not as many as I kind of expected to find this time of year. The last couple days have actually been quite warm: in the 13 degree range.

Morgan

Busy at Work, Election, Games

This past week was insanely busy. At work, I had a project that needed some help to get it all the way to completion, and it needed to be done by Friday. So I worked pretty hard this week trying to get it all done. As a result, there wasn't all that much free time to do much else than go home and laze around on the couch a bit before going to bed. But we did get out a little. On Tuesday night, a bunch of the American employees went out to a bar to watch the election results come in. It had been a stressful day at work, and I thought it'd be a good idea to get out of the house and de-stress a little over a beer or two. So Diane and I joined the party around 11:00pm and hung out with what turned out to be quite a few people! The group of us maxed out at about 25 people or so all with varying interest in the actual live results coming in. After awhile, a game of Chinese poker broke out -- a game that I've had a little bit of interest in lately. I joined in, and we ended up playing until 2am!

Thursday nights at the office are geeky board game nights, so I stayed late at the office to play some games. This week, one of the guys had just got back from the States with a pile of games eight or so boxes high -- many of which I had never seen before. We played Ticket to Ride Germany, the tutorial for Galaxy Trucker (a game I don't think I'll really like in full, but it's kinda neat), and Wizard (a game that looks like it has got some major interest). Dave also explained the rules of a couple of his new games.

It has been a busy week, and in some ways I'm glad it's done. Not that it'll get any less busy at work. I've got some bugs to fix and I gotta get back to working a project that won't be released until January, but needs a fair amount of work to get it finished. But even with how busy I've been, we're still making time to do some fun stuff!

Morgan

October Long Weekend

In Ireland, the last weekend in October is a long weekend. We hadn't made any plans for the weekend until early in the week Xan and Diane started plotting to get us away from town for the weekend. After a few days, they had us booked in a B&B just outside Kinsale -- a little Irish town south and a bit west of Cork. Getting accomodation in the area was a bit tricky, as the October long weekend plays host to the Cork and Kinsale Jazz festival. So it was lucky we got accomodation when we booked so late. So Darse and I took Friday off and we headed out early-ish on Friday morning towards Kinsale. On the way, we stopped at Cashel and Cahir to take in some sights. At both locations there are castles to go see, so we got to see our first real Irish castles. That was pretty cool, but I'll let the pictures do the talking for the most part. We liked Cahir castle a lot better than Cashel -- maybe because there was a little bit more to do there. You could climb up and down several narrow stairways that twist and turned through some of the walls. It could also be because Cahir was in much better shape. It could also be because the friendly people at the gate let us in for the family rate, even though we weren't of the typical 2 adults, 2 children family composition.

It's really quite amazing to see some of these structures which have been standing for so many years. It makes you realize just how much humans are capable of -- even without modern technology to help.

After exploring Cahir castle, we continued our journey through Cork and on to Kinsale. Both Cork and Kinsale were madly busy, although Kinsale quite a bit less so since it's a lot smaller than Cork. Kinsale was mostly nuts because they were undergoing heavy construction on several of the roads including the main road you'd normally go through town on. Driving in Ireland is a terrifying experience -- drivers don't give you much in the way of leeway, and they're on your tail a whole lot. Between that and the narrow roads and the terrifying speeds that other drivers tackle the road with, you can't help but tense up whenever you see another car. And I wasn't even driving!

We arrived safely at our B&B: Walyunga. A charming little place with an excellent host by the name of Mirtle. She was quite helpful making sure we got ourselves settled in and gave us directions in town to negotiate the construction filled streets as well as some recommendations on where to eat. Having spent most of the day on the road, it was more than time for a good meal, so we headed back into town and eventually ended up at a pub called Jim Edwards. The food was relatively cheap, and pretty tasty -- especially the smoked salmon starter that Diane and I shared.

After having dinner we still had some energy so we wandered around Kinsale a bit and took in the scene. Being there for the Jazz festival was a really cool experience. You can walk down the road and hear live music coming from several pubs all at the same time. The first place we stopped was a pub called Muddy Mahers where a blues band had just started playing. We stayed for a beverage and for a few songs. It was pretty fun. We wandered around the town a bit more after that and stopped in another place for some more music (the name of the establishment escapes me now). We didn't stay long though. It had been a bit of a long day and we returned to our B&B with the idea of getting some rest before hitting the road to explore the southern coast of Ireland.

Unluckily for us, the weather had different ideas. We woke up to Saturday morning only to discover that the sky had opened up and some seriously unpleasant rain with gusting winds took over. As a result, we ended up sticking around the B&B for most of the day, only getting out for the evening for a bit of dinner.

So we were well rested when we left our B&B on Sunday to try and cover as much ground as we could. So we hit the road and explored the southern coast of Ireland a bit. Our first target was the Drombeg Stone Circle, which was pretty neat. There's a set of stones arranged in a circle. At the winter Solistice the sun is supposed to shine through a pair of gateway stones at one end of the circle. There's also some remains of a couple of stone huts which were cool to see. One of the cool things about this was just being able to walk through the circle.

We hopped back into the car and drove towards Blarney which was our next stop. On the way, we stopped in a Irish town called Bandon and walked around a bit and had a coffee at a lovely little cafe. Irish towns are so colourful -- the buildings are often each painted a different colour which gives towns a wonderful feel. After our coffee and a quick snack we moved on to Blarney castle.

Blarney Castle is an impressive structure. The castle is quite tall, and is still in good enough shape to climb to the top of -- which is a good thing or kissing the Blarney stone would be pretty hard. On the climb up, there were quite a few rooms to explore, and the view from the top of the castle was pretty nice! Both Diane and I kissed the Blarney stone -- it was kind of one of those silly touristy things that you gotta do.

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to walk around the Blarney castle grounds, so we'll have to return to do that. It looks like a beautiful area, but we had to get moving so that we could drop Diane off at the train station. Before we made our weekend plans, Diane had volunteered to help out at the Dublin marathon and she didn't want to cancel on them. So she hopped on a train from Cork on Sunday evening to take her to Dublin so she could help with the marathon on Monday.

We didn't spend too long in Cork, but we did walk around a little bit. We were there a bit early for the full in the evening before the Jazz festival really kicked off for the evening. We might have to go check out the jazz festival next year, but since we had to drive back to Kinsale that evening, we decided to head back and have dinner in Kinsale instead of staying late in Cork before having to drive back tired in the dark.

Darse, Xan and I ate dinner at a fancy little place in Kinsale called Jolas. We had tried to get into it the previous night but it was full. Jola's is the town favourite restaurant and it turned out to be quite a nice choice. The food was fantastic, but it wasn't the only cool thing about the place. You enter the building at street level, but the main floor of the building was cut out and the tables were arranged below ground level. So you go down a stairwell into a warm room with a very high ceiling (since it goes up for two floors). The walls are beautiful stone, but it didn't feel cold -- they had the fireplace going and it was a very comfy cozy atmosphere. It was a rather nice evening.

The next day, we had a limited amount of time to explore Kinsale before we had to head home. So we spent some time looking through both James and Charles forts, as well as walking through Kinsale by day. Charles fort in particular was really quite a neat place. There was so much space inside the fort to explore that it felt like it would take us forever to see it all. I'm pretty sure we didn't see it all, but we got through a fair amount of it. There was some nice views both inside and outside the fort and it was really quite a good experience!

The drive home was relatively uneventful, and it was good to get home to relax. Doing touristy stuff is tiring! It was a four day weekend, and even with the relaxing we did hiding from the weather on Saturday, we did a lot of walking and sightseeing!

Morgan