I'd planned to go out for a long walk around the bay today, but the weather had other plans - it rained all day long. But I actually had a fairly productive day! I booked a hotel for me and Kate in London, spent hours staring at train schedules and have pretty much figured out what to do with the Calais-Paris ride, booked the bus to and from the Dublin Airport, wrote a few emails about college things... OH! I booked a tour for Newgrange, on the day before I leave for England. Annnnnnd I'm going to see a play at the Abbey Theater, sometime. It's a musical - "Alice in Funderland" - about a modern day Alice in Wonderland, set in the streets of Dublin. I feel pretty pro-active.
But by far my biggest achievement of the day was tonight's dinner. I spent about an hour on it, in all - with the boys camped out at the counter, watching me every step of the way. (Which was actually quite terrible. Do you know how judgmental a ten year old and a seven year old can be?!) But I conquered. Man, I owned that chicken carbonara. It was a bit of a depressing shock to discover that Carole doesn't cook with spices or herbs, so my original plan for the chicken wasn't going to work. But I acquired some garlic, and worked my magic with that. Between the garlic and olive oil, the chicken fried up quite nicely while I let the spaghetti cook. When the noodles finished, I tossed them into the wok with the chicken (and more garlic, salt, pepper and oil) and cooked it all together for a bit. Meanwhile I heated up the sauce, which (surprisingly and wonderfully) had bacon pieces included! I had to add some milk to the sauce to stretch it a bit, but it was still very flavorful. I also boiled some broccoli, and finely shredded some Parmesan cheese to sprinkle on top of it all. It all finished about the same time, miraculously, and the final product was amazing. I'd accidentally cooked twice as much spaghetti as Carole had suggested (cooking for Muellers is much different than cooking for Speers, we'll just say that), so I had an extra pot of spaghetti noodles on the stove while we all ate our first plates. But apparently everybody liked it, and was hungry to boot, because we all had seconds and by the end of dinner, there was only a small tupperware full of leftover pasta.
And they all LIKED it. That's what was scaring me, because the boys are very blunt about what they do and don't like, even with Carole's fabulous meals. I was terrified that they'd hate it. But every few minutes one of them would say, "It's quite good, you know!" and the other one would try to think of what it tasted like. First of all, it was, "It smells a bit like carbonara sauce!" I'd say, "Well that's good, because that's what it is." Eventually they seemed to understand that that's what it really was, and stopped comparing it to other sauces. The one that cracked me up was when Aaron said, "It's like... like a really adventurous carbonara!" I asked him if that was a good thing, just to make sure - between mouthfuls, he assured me that it was.
I'm pretty proud of myself.
Anyway. The plan is still to go to Giant's Causeway tomorrow, although the weather isn't supposed to be too great. Which is so lame. Why is it that it's beautiful all the time, EXCEPT when I go to breath-taking places where you NEED a clear day, like the Cliffs of Moher? I mean really, Ireland. Get your act together.
Also, I had a bit of a surprise this afternoon - I've known all week that Sunday is Easter, but somehow I didn't put 2 and 2 together and figure out that today is Good Friday. The church up here doesn't have a service, which actually made me sad. I would have liked to be in a church tonight... I wish I could be at our church, listening to the whole book of Mark being read. We did that a couple years ago, too, and I remember really liking it. It's so much better to read a whole book at once and get the whole context. I read a few chapters of John this afternoon, before I started on dinner - I started with chapter 14 and read through to the burial of Jesus. Not very much, I know, but I felt like it was a good-enough sized passage to think about for a day. There's so much there.
I'm going to skype my family in a few hours - I won't quite be talking to them at midnight, but it'll be close enough. I'm going to be nineteen in a few hours. That in itself doesn't seem so weird, but you know what DOES? Next year, I'll be twenty. I actually can't stand the sound of that. I never imagined myself getting that far, I think. Twenty. Sheesh. That's two decades, and there are so many things I haven't done yet. I'd better get cracking! ...well. I guess going to Europe by myself is a good start.
Oh, also, I burned my hand pretty badly while I was cooking dinner and it really hurts. Ugh.
Well, I'm gonna go make some coffee and watch The Mentalist. We only have instant coffee here, bleh. But the other day while I was out shopping, I bought my own brand - I got instant coffee because it was cheaper and more convenient than coffee grounds, since we don't have a coffee-maker here. And surprisingly, the brand I got isn't half bad. In any case, it's much better than Ray's nescafe, which is the other option. I'll be glad to get back to coffee-makers, though.
So long, 18. It's been fun.
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