For a while I hope to go into neutrai, no deadlines, no code. I'll have a camera, and a netbook. We'll see what happens.

We'll be going back to the ancestral home, to the county my grandparents left, separately, before meeting and mating in America. My parents traveled the world, but never went to Ireland.

The rain will be warmer this time. Dublin weather is 10 degrees behind Rhode Island's, with highs of 64 and nighttime lows of 42, and a chance of rain forecast every day.

And we'll be going to Inis Meanin, in the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, sometime home of Irish playwright J.M. Synge:

http://www.theatredatabase.com/20th_century/john_millington_synge_003.html

In his travel-book, The Aran Islands, we find the following passage: "... He often tells me about a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow of a spade when he was in a passion, and then fled to this island and threw himself on the mercy of some of the natives.... They hid him in a hole ... and kept him safe for weeks, though the police came and searched for him, and he could hear their boots grinding on the stones over his head. In spite of a reward which was offered, the island was incorruptible, and after much trouble the man was safely shipped to America.

"This impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west. It seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feeling of these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime, that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion which is as irresistible as a storm on the sea. If a man has killed his father, and is already sick and broken with remorse, they can see no reason why he should be dragged away and killed by the law.

"Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, 'Would any one kill his father if he was able to help it?'"