The Hole, Flooding & A Visitor

It's a stormy and wet Sunday morning and I have just finished reading "Under The Dome", the latest Stephen King novel and what an amazing book it is! If you generally like Stephen King you'll love it, it has everything a Stephen King fan expects and while you are reading it you are taken into a different - and typically Stephen King style - disturbing, upsetting and weird world. His characters are so alive and real and some of them so evil and others so nice, you live with them and you live in their world for as long as you are reading. But even the longest book ends at some page and that's why I feel a bit lost at the moment (as I always do when I've read a book that really caught me) and there is this hole I need to get out of now. Before I can start a new book I will have to shake off the world of Tarker's Mill (the setting of "Under The Dome"), so it's maybe not a bad thing I have some housework to do today which will slowly but surely bring me back into the real world.

And parts of this real world are flooded at the moment. Not where we live in Renmore and not Galway City, but parts of County Galway and also Cork in the South of Ireland. My colleague couldn't make it to work on Friday because she had to leave her car a mile away from her house on Thursday and a neighbour brought her and the kids to their home in a jeep. Her husband didn't make it home at all and had to stay in a hotel in Galway Thursday night. Many streets are impassable, among them the main roads from Galway to Dublin and Limerick. Bus services were cancelled and even trains from Galway to Dublin couldn't operate. An entire town in the east of County Galway (Ballinasloe) was shut down and they even had to cut the electricity there for safety reasons.
Of course I am glad we are not affected here in Renmore, but I feel sorry for all those people whose houses and businesses are flooded and also for all the animals out in the fields. There are lots of farmers in this country and some people have sheep and cattle as a hobby, I am not sure they were all able to provide a safe place for them.

I hope the situation will have eased by Wednesday, because that's when Daniela, my friend who moved back to Hamburg, is planning to come to Galway and I am so looking forward to seeing her! She moved only 2 months ago and even while she was still living in Athlone we sometimes didn't see each other for weeks, but we always knew we could, and that's what makes the difference. I don't know when I will see her the next time because apart from the 3 days we will be in Duesseldorf for New Year's Eve it might be a while before we go to Germany again. There's just never enough time (and money), but I think that's the same for all of us.

So please, all of you, keep your fingers crossed that she'll be able to make the journey to Galway on Wednesday!