May 30, 2025

Dateline – Tralee, Ireland

Today is the 30th of May. If we still believed in traditional calendars, we’d be celebrating memorial day but that was this past Monday due to changes made in my childhood in order to create more long weekends for the federal workforce. I get the reasons for the floating holiday but I think we lose something when we give those calendar traditions up. In this case, the special celebration of my sister’s birth. Yes, she was born on May 30th of a year a number of decades prior to the current one. If you want the exact date, ask her. In her time, she has been annoying younger sibling, creative free spirit, talented graphic designer and now a well regarded tattoo artist. She has always been the one in the family who has always met me where I am and never tried to course correct me. She also tells me exactly what she thinks when I’m being stupid. Here’s to you Jeannie Rae.

The viral illness is being beaten back through a combination of wise eating choices, Tylenol, and adequate rest. I haven’t missed anything major. It seems to be going through our little group. A few others have had a bit of a hacking cough and looked a little peaked at breakfast. All I can say is it’s not terribly long lasting and doesn’t appear to be covid, at least according to my internal barometer. I should be pretty much back to normal by tomorrow with one more night’s good sleep. And as we aren’t changing lodgings tomorrow, I get to sleep in a bit.

This morning, however, it was up early and back on the bus for the drive to County Clare and the Cliffs of Moher. This was the first disappointment of the trip (there has to be at least one). Although we left the hotel in sunshine, when we arrived on the coast it was rainy, foggy and minimal visability. I put on my rain gear, and headed out to the view points anyway. I have long learned with sea fog that patience will be rewarded. Sure enough, with picking a single vantage, and waiting, clouds would lift and separate and reveal different parts of the cliffs. It wasn’t the postcard perfect scenic view expected but was more dramatic with sudden reveals, shapes looming in the mist, and the birds calling and dying down depending on the visibility. Not good for pictures, but oh well. My fantasy of being Sarah Miles in Ryan’s Daughter and losing my parasol over the cliffs in David Lean’s somewhat obvious visual set up of loss of innocence will have to wait for another day. Besides which, I’m not Sarah Miles, I’m John Mills (and at least he won an Oscar).

Leaving the cliffs, we started south to the Dingle peninsula. We hadn’t gone five miles before the skies cleared again. Figures. Something about the microclimate of the cliffs I presume. Down into the valley of the river Shannon and then onto a ferry across as it’s much too broad at its estuary to bridge easily. Then up and down various hilly country roads until we made it into that part of Ireland that I’ve always referred to as the Fingers after Game of Thrones and ended up on the south side of the peninsula at Dingle Bay and the town of Dingle. Dingle is a seaside town that was probably aworking fishing village and port for about ten centuries and has now become a twee tourist destination full of gift shops, yarn shops, and ice creameries. It’s setting on the edge of the bay is spectacular nad the harbor isn’t large enough to compete these days so I guess they had to do something. I took pictures. I had an ice cream cone.

Then, with the waning of the afternoon, a bus ride back to Tralee (as in Rose of Tralee), the big town in the area at 25,000 population. The hotel is decent. Dinner was good and I’ve been watching some bad local television after. Tomorrow, a scenic drive around another of the finger peninsulas, the famous Ring of Kerry.

I poked through the political headlines from back home a bit. Was very amused at the thought of Stephen Miller, the chief protagonist in the sick and somewhat farcical deport them all games the current administration is playing running around with an immigrant who lied on his visa application by the name of Elon Musk. I almost forgot that there’s a genocide against White South Africans – it’s so enormous that fewer than sixty took advantage of expedited evacuation and immigration.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer as to what the purpose of DOGE was and saving dollars wasn’t it. The total savings, despite untold havoc and tens of thousands of disrupted lives is only that of a couple of pieces of top grade military hardware. The purpose was to install assets of Musk, Peter Thiel, and the other tech bros in all of the necessary offices to be able to swipe, collate, analyze and otherwise use government data for whatever purposes they choose and with virtually no oversight. The obvious first move, now that the foundations have been thoroughly weakened is to let government agencies fail and, when the public starts screaming, to replace those services with private companies who can do the same work (as they absconded with the data) for profit – it will likely be done well for the haves and poorly for the have nots with tiered benefits and premium services and it will all be made palatable by direct to consume psy-ops which will make Cambridge Analytica look like childs play.

I really need to look into that British passport eligibility. Although I’m not sure it helps all that much post Brexit.