Christmas/Holidays 2024 Newsletter

I've now been in Ireland for two years! Well to be exact, it will be two years the first week in January. And the longer I'm here the more sure I am that I made the right decision.

At the beginning of the year I renewed my visa for the first time. It took a bit to figure out where to get the correct form, have my income certified by an Irish accountant and print out lots of documents (45 pages by the end). After getting all the paperwork together, I sent it off to the Immigration Services office in Dublin in November.

My initial permission to stay ended on 30 January (notice how I now use the European way of stating dates 😁) and I didn't hear back that I was approved for another year until February! It was making me really nervous. My postman, Eugene, said not to worry, they would hide me 🤣

I finally got the approval, and my permission to stay now goes until the end of February. I just sent in all the paperwork last week for my second extension, for my third year. It will be interesting to see how long it takes this year to get back my approval.

WHAT I DID THIS YEAR

THE GARDEN

I'm still completely enamored with my garden. I finished the major clean-up that I started last year, and the garden is now so beautiful and wonderful to hang out in.

A few highlights

I have a flamboyance of flamingos

I've been experimenting with flowers having no idea what I'm doing. These turned out to be an inspired purchase at a garden center. I bought them just because they had really interesting looking leaves. The flowers were a very nice surprise.

Love my sheep.

Milo has his own little house

The out buildings were covered with old dead ivy. It looked like it might come alive and kill me in my sleep. I started removing it myself, but my ladder slipped and gave me quite the scare. My neighbor Tim came and helped me. He had a much taller ladder and a very clever way to insure the ladder was secure by bracing it against the tire of my car.

You can see how much better the out buildings look with the cleaned off roofs. I learned how to make a living willow fence and it grew like crazy all season. It's now just sticks with Winter, but it will hopefully all grow back in the Spring.

And I just love my little bridge

TRAVEL

I got several short trips in this year. I went back to LA to celebrate my very dear friend Steve's birthday.

Loved seeing him and other friends but navigating LA once again really reinforced that I made the right decision to move to Ireland and to live in the country.

I did a week long tour of County Cork with the New Ross Active Retiree group I belong to. It's the second tour I've done with the group and Maura, our tour coordinator, does an amazing job.

Then in the Fall I helped celebrate my wonderful friend Fern's 90th birthday by going with her to the French Riviera. We went to Nice and did a day trip to Cannes.

I got to see the red carpet where all the photos are taken for the Cannes Film Festival

And Fern came with me back to Ireland to see my new life here.

I did one short trip to England to celebrate my friends Ben and Alex's birthdays and am just getting ready to go back over to celebrate Christmas with them and the rest of my 'second family' there. It's so wonderful to be part of a family Christmas again.

GOT MY DRIVERS LICENSE

I've now finished my last piece of Irish bureaucracy (I hope 😟)

Getting a license is quite the project here. I had to start from scratch because a US license is not recognized here. I had to first take a written test (which has a 50% fail rate) to register for a learners permit. Then I had to take lessons - which actually turned out to be quite helpful as some of the things that will fail you on the practical drivers test were not intuitive at all.

The whole thing took more than six months. When I finally got an appointment for the test, I took some remedial lessons to try and make sure I could pass. The practical test has an even higher fail rate than the written.

All was going pretty well except for one required element. You don't have to parallel park, but you have to back up around a corner (which is supposedly about changing directions). I could not get the hang of it. You couldn't go too fast or too slow! You couldn't be too close to the curb or too far from the curb! I thought I was doomed. And if you fail, you have to wait six weeks to try again and pay for it all again.

So on the day of the test I drove over more than an hour early and backed up around 30 or so corners 😂. It finally started working at about corner 25! I was able to hold onto the skill long enough to take the test and I passed on the first try!

THE WEATHER

I actually rather like the weather here. It doesn't get too hot or too cold. It does rain a lot, but most of the time is a light floaty rain that really isn't a problem to be out it. There are grey days but it makes the sunny days feel special -- as opposed to LA where you get tired of the sun and no clouds and wish for a change.

We have had some pretty bad wind storms.

My plants at my back door took a big hit during one wind storm and three trees have fallen. It is good though that the house is really solid and the windows don't even rattle. But it can get a bit scary when the winds get really high and the trees are swaying like crazy.

THE BATHROOM

I just did a whole blog post about my new bathroom, but it's such a joy I have to talk about it again.