Marching on with Spring

                                                     


With Spring comes that dillemma of Mother's day. I usually hate holidays like Mother's day, as I never know what to get for my Mother, as she is slightly fussy. She doesnt wear jewellery, she thinks flowers are a waste of money as they dont last long, she thinks chocolates are overpriced, and I couldnt just get her a bottle of wine, not personal enough. Luckily enough, my lovely Mummy understood my dilemma. So when out shopping the other day, she solved my lil problem.

Mom - 'I am going to give you a hint for what I want for Mother's day'

Me - 'fantastic, go on'

Mom - 'there is a small greenhouse for sale in town, I want that'

Me - ' subtle mom, real subtle'

I have no idea how I didnt think of it before! Its perfect for her. It also means lovely tomatoes and strawberries for us to enjoy later on in the year .... mmmmm.....

At the moment both her any my dad are executing the mission impossible of rotivating the vegetable patch, nightmare! But it does mean that we are on our way to lovely potatoes and beans again, plus there are plans to extend the patch. We will be veggie mad by the end of the season :-)

Also, it appears we have a broody hen. Roy (our rooster) has discovered his libido in the past month, and he now has his pick of the 12 hens around him. It does appear that he has a lil girlfriend who devotedly follows him from morning to night, from one scratching spot to another, and she stands and adores him as he views his vast estate of half an acre from the top of his pile of woodchips, now that's love!! ;-) We have noticed that  his lil girlfriend is refusing to leave her eggs these days without a good fight. Of course we are thrilled with the prospect of lil chicks running around, but with it comes pressure from my Mom to get my Dad to build the maternity wing, another addition to the ever growing list of tasks for the poor man to complete ha.

Plus the weather lately is stunning, and more and more people are taking to the green areas of college, sitting on the grass with cups of tea and ice creams, basking in the sunshine. I always thought that if Ireland had better weather, if it had more sunshine, no person would ever want ot leave here. It would be a pretty perfect country .... minus the R word of course, we will just pretend its not happening .... lalalalalala.

Back to life, finally

After being stuck in the house from last Tuesday to Friday, it was so good to get out of the house. I had work over the weekend now, but lets face it, an hour and a half drive (which usually takes a half hour by the way, minus the ice and snow) is not the nicest thing to face, so forgive me if I wasnt jumping off the seat to head to work. Dont get me wrong, i like doing my job, but shuffelin hangers for 4 hours and sucking up to incredibly rich and stuck up people is not my idea of an ideal weekend.

Anyway, back to college i went today. The roads werent great, but drivable. The lil micra put up quite a fight getting up, and when a little ford (07 by the way) got stuck in the college car park, my lil micra (which is a 97) zipped past. Pretty happy about that I must say.

Had four lectures today. I must say, I find my Early Modern History module to be extremely interesting, even though I am terrified of the exam next month, lots of information to deal with. But anyway today we were hearing about Malthus and his take on the Natural Laws. Without going into too much detail (simply cause i dont remember it, but shhhh) Malthus said that nature rearranges the world and its population when it becomes out of balance. For example, Malthus says that if a population is poor and they cannot feed themselves, one should not take pity on them and try to save them from their predicament, as not only does he believed that they got themselves in that position through a lack of logic, but he believed that nature itself would sort out the problem through means of natural disasters. He said that it was the world's way of evening out the balance of population and food supply. He believed that God, instead of playing a big part in the goings on of the world, simply set the pendulum of nature in motion, leaving it to govern itself.

Now that sort of thing would evidently cause a major amount of controversy in these times, yet you may be surprised to hear that this wouldnt have been too much of a big deal in the 15th century, You see the Catholic Church, in order to gain more taxes from people, asked people not to give to the poor, but instead to give to the Church, which they said would distribute evenly (take a wild guess how well that went). There was also a lot of propaganda which portrayed the poor as lazy and greedy. So therefore giving to the poor and being sympathetic towards them was something that was not common.

Thinking of the people sitting in the cold in Dublin City on cold nights such as these, with no home to go to or people to care about them, its kinda hard to understand isnt it?

(By the way, sorry if I have any of this wrong, simply trying to remember what I was told. If I am wrong just leave a comment and explain)