End of the first full week and weekend #2.

Alright. So no new pictures unfortunately, but I'll get to work on that sometime this week... hopefully. (by the way, thanks to Cassie Duke for learning me how to actually resize my photos without a decent photo editing program)

I finished my first week of work at XS Direct. It's a pretty cool place. I've been testing their quote engine (basically, you plug in information, it spits out an insurance quote. but it turns out it wasn't working well. but now it is, partially thanks to me.) And I guess I'll be doing that even more next week with other systems that various brokers use to sell XS Direct insurance packages. Probably nobody cares to hear about the intimacies of number crunching though, so I'll spare you the grass-growingly boring details.

So this was a pretty nonchalant weekend. Thursday (which is the new Friday since I don't work on Fridays) was pretty low key. We just hung around Shanowen square. Friday was Allison's birthday, her 21st infact, and so we celebrated the American way. We went to the Temple Bar area and grabbed dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe which, as history proves time and time again, is more about the atmosphere than the food. I got a chicken sandwich and parts of my chicken were overcooked and rock hard. I should've guessed they would find a way to transpose the name into the food. After that we swung by the Ark, where Kathleen was working, and saw what was probably the most pathetic art gallery in the world. It was all art created by children, and there's a reason those finger paintings go into the trash once the refrigerator gets sick of them.

After the Ark, we headed over to the Palace Bar - which felt like somebody took an 1800's Victorian house and decided to start selling booze out of it. I am in no way condemning this, I thought it was a really cool bar. We met up with a girl that Allison knows from work and two of her friends, and proceeded to head over to some place called Capitol bar - which is known for selling cheap mixed drinks (Allison's forte). It turns out the drinks are cheap because they decided to use thimbles as shot glasses when measuring the alcohol that goes into them, so I reverted back to the tried and true Guinness. Even crappy drinks aside, I can't say I was a fan of the place, it was overcrowded and the bartenders wouldn't serve you if you were a guy. After ten minutes at a time of standing at the bar and trying to flag down a bartender, I resorted to just having Erin go get my drinks for me, since the bartenders were more than happy to serve her within about 30 seconds. That's okay though, we all had a good time - especially Allison, which is what matters since it was her 21st.

I found out that 2 of the 3 girls that Allison is friends with all work around Merrion Square (which I also happen to work near) so we made tentative plans (as any plans that are made while drunk at a bar tend to be) to go grab lunch in the square this week. So that's cool. And also a bunch of kids are scheduled to move into Shanowen Square this weekend, so hopefully things will liven up around here, as it's been pretty dull and I haven't met as many new people as I would like.

After sleeping in this morning, Devon and I went and did a bit of grocery shopping. We also decided while sitting around to set apart the weekend of October 5 - 7 to fly over to Europe, but we're not sure where we want to go yet. We had planned to head into Dublin again tonight and meet up with Allison's friends from yesterday, but by the time everybody was ready to go, nobody was really in the mood - especially since we all ended up spending so much money the other night for Allison's 21st. Dublin is by no means a cheap city. So instead, we all just hung out in Kathleen's room and shot the shit and watched youtube videos, which was entertaining enough.

Devon found a place that has shotgun and rifle shooting ranges that'll let you shoot targets or clay pigeons, so we're going to look into doing that one of these weekends. I think tomorrow I'm going to go out for a run and try to get some exercise for a change, and also explore the DCU (dublin college university) area while doing so. We've explored a lot in one direction (i.e. towards city center), but not in the other (i.e. the direction of DCU), so maybe I'll find some cool stuff.


In the meantime to keep you all entertained, check out Devon's blog as well.

http://devonindublin.blogspot.com

He's got a link to a webshots album of some cool pictures he and Kathleen took when they went to the Dublin Zoo a few days ago. I wasn't there since I had to work. I thought this one was especially funny for the caption:

funny guinnea pig picture

Alright, that's all for now. I'll try to be ontop of this blogging thing a bit more in the future. Although I think I said that last time I posted too, so we'll see...