This is a test

With blog-hood (even of the occasional variety, which appears to be my style) come new challenges, so please bear with me as I explore some of the things I want to do with this medium. Tonight, I hope to add an image. To those of you who are tech-y types, this may seem like the work of a moment, and an accomplishment like adding an image something you could have done practically before you were out of diapers. Not so for me. I want to test adding an image because, when I next write a proper post, I want it to be accompanied by a picture -- the very picture that will save me oh, about a 1000 words of explanation. I had first tried to add an image when I wrote about the Leonids, but after considerable frustrated effort, I had to concede defeat.


Meanwhile, If I succeed with this mission, tonight's photo is one chosen completely at random from a disc I happened to have here in the atelier: the disc contains the photographic record of my trip to Ireland last May. This photo was taken on one of the Aran Islands: a number of us from the party of wedding-goers at Corofin in County Clare made a day trip to the Arans on a rare, glorious, sunny day in early June. I have to remind myself again and again that the day was a unusual one, because otherwise I want to drop everything and move there immediately. But according to the lady at the post office, "such a day as this might come along once in a summer ... or never at all."

My companions had holed up in the pub because it was "far too hot to be out." Knowing I was unlikely to have such an opportunity again any time soon, I dared the heat and walked around the town and found any number of lovely places to sit and stare at the ocean, or to study the wonderful grey stone with which many structures were built. It felt truly incongruous to be regularly re-applying sunscreen ... in Ireland.

What you see is the remains of a little church, surrounded by a cemetery, all quite close to the beach. Apparently, the action of the wind and shifting sands nearly buried the church, though now efforts are being made to reclaim the site. Most of the graves in the cemetery were from the 19th Century, though a number of the semi-legible tomb-stones appeared to be from the 18th. On the day I was there, it was deserted of any humans, though there were all sorts of birds (most of them strangers to me) and oodles of butterflies, careening about in the sunshine as though they could not believe their good fortune. I felt the same way.