We're in Dublin

Sorry for the late post. We arrived Saturday afternoon, and Phil, Kristi, and Madelyn have been taking excellent care of us ever since.

Saturday night we had an all-hands-on-the-cooktop dinner party for Phil's business associate Zizi from Morocco. Kristi had anned to make seafood, but upon arriving at the market she found a note that the fishmonger was out due to a death in the family. So we improvised. I oversaw some chicken (a variation on my usual chicken-under-a-brick recipe with some very nice fresh thyme), Zizi supervised broiled lamb chops, and we all whomped up some salad and wild rice and who knows what else. Dessert was fruit cooked in a scary amount of Irish butter, with Irish ice cream, and it was wonderful.

And the company was as well. It is always a pleasure to spend time with the Thompsons, and the erudite Zizi ("the smartest oil consultant in Morocco," whispered Phil) was cery interesting and charming as well.

On Sunday we and new next door neighbors Stefano and Paola from Milan piled into two cars and drove to the extraordinary Powerscourt Estate. It's enormous, beautiful, and as we discovered, tremendously crowded on Mum's Day, which falls in March here.

We explored until it got cold - well, colder and less sunny, then drove down the road to a ace less crowded for a snack. As this snack was all we'd had since breakfast and it was late afternoon, it wound up substituting for both lunch and dinner for us. Phil and I both had the Guinness stew, the perfect restorative at the end of a chilly and hungry day. Stefano and Paola treated us all, and we are going to have to work hard to think of some way to repay their kind generosity - as wrll as to spend more time with them, as they were a very enjoyable couple.

Overnight it grew shockingly cold, and more is threatened for today. But so far it's sunny and calm, a great day to go out for tea at the luxurious Dylan hotel from which Kristiana has just blogged a photo.