PRONO!

It was too good to be true. Things were going far to well in Belfast not to hit some sort of snag. This morning I got snagged. I've had a very productive week at PRONI and it showed. I think I had something along the lines of 50 pages of typed notes from all the materials I had looked at so far. Before I left for PRONI this morning I opened Word to get the file ready for action. I tried to scroll down to the bottom of the page, but it said there were only 2 pages in the file. So I did a Spotlight search on my computer to see if I misplaced a file or something. Nope. That was the only PRONI file on the machine. Pages and pages of notes, hours of work, gone. What I think happened is this: When I was typing everything up over the past three days I was forgetting to put page breaks in to ensure that each file has it's own page. That helps reduce confusion later. Well I must have had most of the document's text highlighted while inserting the last page break without noticing it, or something along those lines because the only thing remaining was the last thing I was working on at the end of the day yesterday. Once I saved and quit the program there was no chance of getting anything back, let alone the following day. What a huge pain in the ass. Right? Luckily, today just happens to be the one day of the week when PRONI is open late, so I have time to go through everything. And I did. I put my grant money to use and just ordered copies of everything I had already taken notes on. Fortunately, since I had a pretty fresh memory of the pertinent files I was able to get everything done by about 3:00pm, after about 4.5 hours, and move on to stuff I hadn't yet seen. So yes, the situation sucks, but if it was going to happen, it happened at the right time because I had time to get everything back. So it could be worse. At least I'm finding useful material and PRONI will post it home for me so I don't have to bother carrying the stuff around. I think that qualifies as turning lemons into lemonade. For my efforts, I'll have a beer tonight!

A few other observations: Every where I go in Ireland I run into Italians. Does Italy have some obsession with Ireland the rest of world needs to know about? I had an Italian roommate in Dublin (Carlo was great), then in Cork and Belfast there are large groups doing something (Lord knows what) under the auspices of some program. When I was in Derry there was another group of Continentals, that I assume was Italian based on deductive reasoning since their speech sounded like a romance language, but didn't sound like Spanish or French. The most annoying thing that all the groups have in common (not Carlo, like I said, he was the man) is their proclivity toward being out of doors while using voice decibel levels incongruent with whatever time of day it is. Perhaps I'm becoming a curmudgeon? Who knows.

I will say that the current crop of Italians in Belfast obviously didn't get the memo that the 80s are over. Numerous people, male and female, are rocking serious mullets. You can tell that these mullets are carefully stylized coifs and not the result of some brooding passive-aggressive spite. These are by far the worst mullets I've seen since I've been here, and there are a lot. How do Europeans not think that mullets look completely ridiculous? I blame soccer players.

Also, I've noticed that people, at least in Ireland, have an aversion to picking up after their dogs. Not only have I espied dog shit on numerous sidewalks, but yesterday I had the benefit of stepping in a huge pile of it. Granted, in Chicago no everyone picks up after their dogs. I've noticed some repeat offenders on our street, or at least people who walk their dog on our street. I have a feeling they do so at night. That, or their dog has an affinity for stealth crapping. But even so, they tend to crap on the grass, which, although still gross and not good for MY dog, it off the actual footpath, thus greatly reducing the chances for people to step in it. Not in Ireland. It's as though they're afraid to spoil all the green that surrounds them with dog poo. I don't even see people carrying plastic bags when they walk their dogs.