tinkering with photo stuff

I think I may have found a way to share pictures. for now they're on a website which you can access by going to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilsep33/
the last batch of pictures I put on the computer are pretty good, but I haven't uploaded them just yet. I'm trying to figure out how to mesh that site with this one, so people don't have to flip back and forth, but that's not a project for tonight. they're also not organized in any way, especially not chronologically. it'll get better, I promise.
this weekend was good. tara is an experience, though it's easy to see why some people would come away from it a little disappointed. it doesn't have any stone structures like cashel or clonmacnoise, and there's not a lot of information posted ot tell you what's going on. it mostly consists of what conor newman calls "landscape archaeology." it might sound kind of boring, but when you realize that the huge embankments and ditches and mounds were made up to 4000 years ago, they're pretty impressive. from the top of the hill you can see into 13 counties (on a clear day), and you can understand why the site was chosen for important ritual purposes.
we also visited kells priory (one of the places where the book of kells was worked on) and saw some fabulous high crosses and a nice round tower. I'd like to get back there some time, since we didn't get to spend much time there.
part of the excitement for the day came when we went to a couple of the more out of the way monuments in the area surrounding the hill of tara and we had to climb over barbed wire and electric wires to get into the fields adjacent to them. we had a couple people grab the electric wire on accident, but no serious damage was done. I must have been getting complacent though, because when we were climbing out of the last field I made it over the fence and wall alright, but then I slid down the opposite side of the wall. it wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the blackberry bushes. one of them gave me a bit of a scratch on my left hand, but, even worse, it caused a small tear in my less-than-two-week-old columbia jacket. sigh. I'm going to bring it in to a dry cleaners or something tomorrow to get it fixed, since it seems like the kind of thing that is better taken care of right away.
other than that, though, the weekend was good, though I have been tired today from waking up early yesterday and all the walking. oh, that reminds me, if you do go to tara, you will get sheep droppings on your shoes. it's unfortunate, but there's no way to avoid it. you might prefer that they keep the sheep out of the main enclosure, but they're the one's who keep the grass short, which is much better for preserving the site than lawnmowers or tractors. also, there was a guy out following us around with a camera man and a microphone, taping parts of conor's talk. he's trying to do a documentary on the hill of tara, which he wants to sell to the history channel or something like that. so, if it doesn't actually happen, yours truly will probably be in said documentary. not talking or anything, but just in the general crowd following conor around.