gingerandjohn.com

Today starts a four-day weekend - Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday are both public holidays in Northern Ireland. Friday at work was quieter than usual, it being the Good Friday holiday in the Republic. Assuming things don't go totally pear-shaped with the testing, I only have three more days in the office until I head back on the 30th.

The weekend after Ginger and the boys went home, I took myself to the Lisburn Road Starbucks, and surfeited myself on caffeine, corporate-branded familiarity, loneliness, and self-pity. We'd been intentionally avoiding "things from home" - I mean, I can go to Starbucks anytime, but I can't always go to the Crown, right? (For the record, my attendance at SB's now outnumbers my visits to the Crown.) The local coffee shop (across the street from Starbucks) took about 30 seconds to lose my business (boring story). Starbucks at least has better (more familiar?) service, product, and maybe most important, atmosphere. Sitting on the couch, surrounded by decor I can see in any Starbucks in the States, listening to 70s disco and R&B, was hard but I've come here for grounding nearly every Saturday and Sunday since. It feels like home, and most of the time the music's too loud to hear the accents, and it's hard because I can't stay here forever, I have to go back to that smelly, cramped, uncomfortable place that's quiet and loud in all the wrong ways and most emphatically NOT home.

At last and least I'm at the end of this self-imposed exile. That's certainly what I beat myself up about the most, is that I brought this on myself - it was my idea to come here after all, a great combination of altruism and selfishness.

But enough of that - here's some pictures of people who care about me and have no expectations in return: Ginger and Paxton at the Ha'penny Bridge in Dublin, Chance and Paxton on the beach at Portmarnock, and Ginger at Portmarnock.

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