House Hunt

This week Lee Ann was here. We rented a car and spent some time driving around trying to identify neighborhoods and towns we would like to live in, where the cats and kids would be happy, and finding houses large enough and with enough bathrooms to accommodate guests. It's time consuming and difficult to satisfy most, let alone all, constraints. The picture above is from a place a little bit North of Dublin. We like that area a lot, but the affordable places are far enough from Dublin's center that commuting would be a problem.
There are trains going into Dublin, but they are not very fast or very frequent. We don't know yet where Lee Ann will work, but city center is a high likelihood. Driving in there and parking is a nightmare! I wish they turned the center into a huge pedestrian zone and established park and ride spots around it. Then the buses would become useful. Now as it is, the buses get stuck in rush hour traffic just like everything else.

This house in Skerries is not for rent but it is typical for that area. Walking distance form the town square, the ocean, and a number of restaurants and shops. It's really not that far from Dublin, but we would spend 40 minutes in a train or in traffic.
We'll have to spend more time looking and exploring. It helps to know what the neighborhoods look like and where they are so that when a house becomes available, we can pounce. It seems the nicer ones that are affordable go fast, and sometimes don't even get listed on daft.ie.

There was a house for rent near the Skerries Mills, but it was too small. Europe is freezing, but Ireland is nice and balmy (relatively speaking ;-) Unfortunately, it was also raining quite a bit this week. We still have long dark Winter days which makes house hunting even more depressing when you can't find quite the right thing.

I have also started investigating getting a car and Lee Ann and I spent Friday afternoon looking at a bunch and test-driving a couple of them. Sometimes I think maybe we should just get a boat. The coast is nice and there are plenty of rivers and canals. Maybe the commute will be a little longer, but a lot more fun!

We parked near one car dealer and on our way to the store we walked by a building that had the statue below in almost every window. Some of the figurines were painted or were dressed, but they were all the same, and lots of them. After we drove away from that area we saw more of those ladies in windows.

Found here

It was a little surreal and we were wondering what the reason behind that window decoration was. What do they mean? We are not the only ones wondering. On this bulletin board there is a long thread of people trying to guess where these statues come from and why there are so many in the windows.
Part of the answer comes in the form of a short video documentary. The film won a price at the Dark Light film festival in 2010. During the making of the short film, the maker asked for help finding windows that had the statues on display. People responded and created a Google map of lady sightings.
It seems to me that this is something like those pink plastic flamingos on wire stilts everybody used to have in their front yard for while....