More from Senator Jim Walsh

"...there was no need to, and it must not happen, that they needed to redefine marriage from its intrinsically heterosexual nature, which was for the propagation of society and the welfare of children, into one which was purely for an adult sexual relationship. That was essential and important."

gothwalk and I are a heterosexual married couple, who married in order to express our commitment to each other and to other people, and to essentially solidify our relationship. We do not have, nor do we intend to have children. Ours, then, is a marriage "purely for an adult sexual relationship." I am certain there are other people out there like us. In the eyes of Jimmy and many other people, this must, inevitably, make our marriage as much of a sham as that of two homosexual people would.

The funny thing is that it's not ol' Jimmy and his cronies who hold that a marriage without children in pointless. You see it, in a lesser scale, in the society at large, even amongst people who would defend the gay right to marry to the last drop of blood. There is an assumption that every marriage will reproduce and that not doing so is automatically a tragedy. Men who don't want children are assumed to be somehow defective and less desirable and women who express negative comments about children are scolded by their peers. I have seen this happen even on LJ. Peer pressure means that while writing about children and one's desire for same is viewed as a sign of healthy mindset, writing about not wanting children and one's dislike for children is seen at worst as perverted, and at best as politically incorrect.

So since I got to the office, I have been sneezing in bursts of 3-7, had a runny nose and watery eyes, but have no other symptoms or do not feel like I have an incoming cold.

Is this how it feels to be allergic?

I must be allergic to work.

Does anyone within a reasonable distance have a bike they want to get rid of? I'm talking about the old-fangled pedal ones. I will pay, too, if you're not looking for ridiculous money. I should have gone for cartographer's bike when it was going, but I was even more financially challenged back then.

I looked at a lovely one in the bike shop in Maynooth and was nearly thrown backwards when I was told that it cost €560. Trust me to instantly go for the most expensive item in the shop...

Today we did a four-and-a-bit hour walk down the Royal Canal and to the Carton House estate. Some of the time was spent having lunch at the hotel there. It was all good, and I took pictures, but the camera is downstairs and really it's a bit too far.

gothwalk cooked a fry in the morning, of excellent sausages and rashers and potato farls and fried eggs, and in the evening he cooked a Sunday dinner of magnificent roast beef, steamed potatoes, gravy, Yorkshire pud, spinach, carrots, parsnips and a rhubarb crumble for dessert.

How do you not love a man like that?

I paid my Flickr bill, the Portugal pictures are up.

Interesting. Two bottles of Weston's organic cider have put me right into the "I love you guysss!!!!!" mood.

This is the first weekend that we can spend in our new home without any appointments at all. It's very difficult to articulate just how comfortable it is. We're still nowhere near unpacked, but we're working our way slowly down the mountains of boxes. I would like it to happen faster, but I'm not sure it's possible without the stress level increasing again, and, really, I could do without that. We'll get there. It does feel a little claustrophobic at the moment because the house is not big to begin with and the box mountains make it seem smaller, but every day something new is put in place.

I really, really love living in Maynooth. I don't even mind the commute all that much: it's an early rise, but I'm choosing to do it - I could take a train around 8 and go to work for 9 but I'm choosing to start work at 8 and get off at 4. I've discovered that a 20 minutes snooze on the train in the morning makes a huge difference to the otherwise physically painful tiredness caused by the 6 o'clock rise (I like to have breakfast and wake up a bit before going out). On the way home, when the scenery changes and the train track becomes lined by greenness, I simply relax: as the city is left behind, so are the work worries and pressure.

So. Much. Green. Still not used to it. And the people are friendly, and the town is tiny and cosy. And the green. I don't even feel the urge to visit the city at weekends: there are five supermarkets here, and the Liffey Valley shopping centre fifteen minutes' drive away, and lots of intriguing small Kildare towns about if we should feel like it, and we must get around to exploring them soon. I haven't spent much time on the internets outside work hours: there seems to be very little point, with the house and the garden and all the new green areas to walk in. The old campus is beautiful, as is the Carton House estate. Lady Emily Lennox keeps haunting me. :) Because of the newfound disinclination to kill time online, I seem to have very much got out of the habit of updating my blogs or looking after my personal correspondence, despite the fact that I have a lot to say. Perhaps I will get around to it once I get used to the new situation soon, or perhaps I should just designate an evening for correspondence and the like.

Hey, gothwalk and puritybrown, check this out.

According to today's Irish Times, Jim Walsh, a senior Fianna Fail Senator, seeks to reverse a Government decision to allow gay and lesbian couples register their relationships with the State.

Perhaps there is nothing surprising about this, as there will be conservatives for a long time yet who are terrified of the notion that There Might Be Folks Different From Us and that They Might Get Equal Rights And Recognition In Law As Humans Rather Than The Freaks They Obviously Are. But somehow this particularly grates me, probably because a) the decision has more or less already been made, and suddenly they have realised what's going on and they backtrack (not that the Irish are unfamiliar with that sort of thing, just look at what happened to a certain Treaty not too long ago) and b) (if the article can be believed) the language used which pretends that the undersigned do not in fact wish to discriminate against homosexual couples.

Yet,

"I don't see any great need to legislate in this area. I have my own views on it. Let people do what they want, but I don't see the need to be putting things into the statute book," said another, who equally would not be quoted by name. (So they are cowards as well, afraid to be associated with their opinions)

Ergo, let people do what they want as long as they do it behind closed doors and don't intrude into my own tight closed minded reality and by God don't demand recognition. Oh Come Fucking On. If you need to be a bigot, at least be a bigot sincerely, and do not pretend that you are anything that you are not.

I was sure I had done this before, but perhaps I didn't after all, on the grounds that I was ashamed of how few (comparatively speaking) I had read. In my defence, I bet I have read several Finnish classics that the lot of you haven't...

( On to the list )

Where the hell is Umberto Eco?

Alison Bechdel is one of the many authors introduced to me by puritybrown. This blog entry will be appreciated by all those who read voraciously, and who feel strongly about reading the classics...and by those who feel they no longer have time or inclination to read as much as they did when younger.

There's no words to say just how really fucking ashamed I am around now.

We are finally utterly and irrevocably at home.

cartographer linked to this geographical game. It is evil. My final score was 468,076 and I got to level 11 out of 12. One of the questions I bombed because I failed to read Iran instead of Iraq.

gothwalk is celebrating his 20-year roleplaying anniversary with a series of on- and offline events spanning through his campaign world. If you would like to take part - and you don't need to have ever played anything before - go here for an introduction/background and here for the first LJ in-character poll. I gather things are going to culminate at some point in a way that is felt across all his current campaigns and the online-offshoots.

Help us get our world even more messed up than it already is!

For what it's worth, I've been really excited about The Great Event (as it's been known) since he first started to talk about it a few months ago.

Back from Portugal. Alive, tired.

Will officially end lease on the 12th. Normal service will be gradually resumed after that.

We'll be in Portobello tomorrow from about noon sorting out the last stuff and cleaning up.

Any help very very gratefully accepted.

We're going to strive to get the old place clear during the evenings of this week, and to do the final cleanup on Saturday. We probably won't need much help in transporting stuff, but any assistance would be very gratefully received on Saturday, in scrubbing the carpets and the floors and the bathroom, hoovering, wiping and all that jazz.

We'll feed and lubricate you as required.

Left mobile home; email or IM me if you need me.

This is a work-related query.

I need to source a TWAIN-compatible camera. Now, as far as I can make out, this simply means that you can use the camera as an imput device for photo editing software and other software that uses TWAIN as a data source.

Would I be right in thinking that most/all digital cameras fall into this category?