John and I stayed up to watch the Vice Presidential Debate, and at the suggestion of Maman Poulet, we decided to play Sarah Palin Bingo. Suzy also offered up a feminist political drinking game, but once she and I realised that it was late and we were old and were going to have to play with cups of tea instead of shots, we decided it wasn’t worth it.

So bingo it was. And every time Palin used some predictable conservative dogwhistle phrase, I got to tick a box on my card. To my great annoyance, the woman banged on and on and on about natural gas, pipelines and energy independence, but never actually said “foreign oil.” Eventually, however, I was able to yell BINGO! with the predictable arrival of the National Guard.

The second time I got to yell BINGO I decided that I owned Sarah Palin’s ass. In the grand tradition of Alaska, I am now considering auctioning her off on Ebay, because I certainly don’t want her.

Do I hear one dollar?

While it’s good to have a goal, I’ll be the first to admit that sending out invitations for a house warming party a month away when your walls have been ripped back to studs and bricks and the concrete on your floors has just been poured is either tremendously ambitious or just tremendously stupid.

And while the invitations did say “come hell or high water” I don’t think I really understood the hell that getting to last night would entail. I’m neither a delicate flower nor a tremendous crybaby, but this last week has been seriously, seriously hard going. We moved in on Monday to a house full of builders, paint cans, generators, concrete dust, plasterboard, trowels and mountains of boxes and furniture piled into the middle of various rooms. Every day John told me to cancel this party, but every day I’d just invite more people. I invited everyone, from internet strangers to the lovely man who delivered our dishwasher.

The kitchen (and thus running water) was installed on Friday, and I was so happy to have basic services and so overjoyed with the way the kitchen turned out that I actually cried. According to the kitchen installers, this is not a typical reaction to having a new kitchen put in to one’s home. But then, this was not a typical house purchase, renovation or move in, either. It all moved really quickly, although exactly how quickly wasn’t really clear to me until this past week.

By Saturday, I was wandering around the world with that dazed look you see on mothers after really fast labours, the ones who are standing there in the produce aisle looking more than a bit shell shocked, holding a baby they’re not quite clear on how they got.

Mercifully, Deb Hadley arrived at 2 PM to take over the party planning, and she was impressive and masterful in her sheer capability. She turned out scores of multi-layered dips, vegetables, hot crab cakes and empanadas, beautiful crostini and gorgeous brownies in the two hours it took me to stand there and barely make a salad in between hiding boxes and sorting out liquor deliveries. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend or a more talented cook to turn up and bail me out at a juncture where I honestly had ceased to be able to function.

The food was tremendous, the wine was glorious, the beer was plentiful, and John and I were tremendously chuffed by all the people who turned up. It really made our new house a home to have it warmed by so many visitors. And while I know I’m exhausted and a bit weepy, it truly did feel like a significant accomplishment to welcome 20 or 30 wonderful friends into our first purchased home on our fourth anniversary after three years in Ireland.

So thank you, to everyone who helped, everyone who came, everyone who brought the bottles of booze we’ll be drinking well into the new year, and everyone who raised a glass to toast our new house.

It really was grand.

This Saturday, himself and I were featured in the Examiner’s magazine as part of an article about non-traditional weddings. John, who normally hates this sort of thing, it secretly delighted – but only because he’s able to announce he’s officially a “non-conformist” because the Examiner has said so.

I’ve scanned the story and stuck it online because once I shove it into one of the many, many boxes we are still packing at 2 AM, the chances of me ever finding it again are zero. Click for the whole thing, though it’s a bit big:

Things I learned from our “non-conformist” wedding(s):

• Wedding roles should be filled by people, not by gender. It’s OK if your best man is a woman, and by all means, you may now kiss the maid of honour.
• Your wedding party dresses themselves every single day without your help. If you leave it to them to dress themselves for your wedding, too, they will probably do a very good job (and be forever grateful.)
• If you have a child-friendly wedding and invite a lot of short people, your first dance may very well turn into the hokey cokey because they all want to join in.
• It’s perfectly fine to fire your wedding photographer in the middle of your wedding. You don’t need photos to prove you’re married.

Next weekend we’ll have been married four years. I should probably get around to having some of these photos printed and hung, but I may just frame the article instead so I can show everyone I married a centrefold.

I have learned an important lesson in the past few days and that lesson is: you cannot properly manage a house renovation project and work 80 hours a week. Attempting to do this results in the following litany of small scale disasters:

• €5000 worth of the wrong wooden windows being installed in your house.
• Selecting paint directly from the Dulux catalogue instead of using test pots and then realising you have picked the most revolting colour on God’s green earth, but only after it’s already on your walls.
• Saying “yes” to the idea of jacking up the floors and pouring new concrete without realising that whilst concrete dries very quickly, it takes months to properly cure in wet Ireland.
• Needing to wait more than eight more weeks to lay the gorgeous hardwood floors you bought ages ago because they can’t be installed until the fucking concrete dries.
• Having to rush to B&Q at 10 am to pick emergency carpet and tiles because the flooring guys are arriving at noon to cover the concrete that is now the bane of your existence in something – anything – you can live with until the bloody stuff cures.

I officially hate, hate, hate concrete.

Despite the fact that this house is nowhere near complete (and now won’t be for months – did I mention that part?) we are moving in on Monday. Working 80 hours a week also means that of course, we have not even begun to pack yet, so this weekend will no doubt be tons of fun.

The move also means that I am taking next week off, so if you’re trying to reach me, your choices are: a) drop by the new abode, find the boxes with all the telephone and computer bits, and network the house so that you can call or email me, or b) wait a week, by which point I should be a much more pleasant person to talk to.

The first option would be more helpful, though.

Sunday night was the screamingly fun Girl Geek Dinner in Cork, and although our numbers dropped from twenty to a mere half dozen, we had a great time. It was more intimate than the (also fun) extravaganzas these meetups often are, and a wonderful chance not just to meet but to really talk and get to know one another.

Martha Rotter, Katherine Nolan, Ciara Crossan, GabrielaAvram, Alana James and I had a lovely meal at Proby’s around the corner from our new house; I brought my paint chips along because lately I have taken to accosting total strangers on the street and asking if they’d like to help me pick paint. We talked about everything from transatlantic moves to TiVo, and at one point during the telly phase of the discussion I confessed a shameful, shameful secret – I am in love with the recent ads from DFS:

I love this ad not because I am in the market for a new sofa (just bought mine, thanks!) but because I love the totally ordinary people rocking out in their livingrooms. Let’s face it: we have all totally done that. And hell, who doesn’t want a bathroom big enough to play baseball in? (Or a hot tub big enough for ten, for that matter…)

Of course, in the UK and Ireland, nobody who isn’t a rock star has a living room that is as spacious as any of the ones shown, let alone one that will fit most of these enormous sofas, but that’s neither here nor there.

In any case, I love the Nickleback tune used on the ad (full video) in the same way I secretly love Hello magazine and other trashy treats. It was a great choice for DFS, because home decorating is a transparently aspirational undertaking, and the Rockstar lyrics tell a transparently aspirational story.

I am, however, more than a bit mortified to discover that I am apparently DFS’s perfect demographic target. Except for the bit where I’d slit my wrists with a rusty nail before buying any of those hideous sofas, of course.

Ever get the urge to drop everything and run for the hills? In my experience, when this happens, people either pop out for a pint of milk and turn up in Chicago 20 years later, or book last minute tickets to Paris, indulge in a hedonistic weekend long orgy, and dutifully return for the Monday staff meeting.

Personally, I’m not really prepared to start a new life with 34 cents change and a pint of milk in my pocket, and while I like Paris as much as the next European, I’m not really prepared for that level of packing either. (And let’s be honest: if you’re a women, jetting off to Paris even for a weekend requires a whole different level of wardrobe prep than catching a flight to virtually any other short haul city. It just does.)

So instead, I’ve run away to the very local seaside. Even this required a fairly heroic laundry effort, but on the morning I woke up and decided that the choices were either a) do the washing and get the hell out of Dodge, or b) repeatedly bang my head against my desk in an attempt to brainwash myself into believing that my creative well was anything short of completely dry, the washing machine suddenly looked like my very best friend ever.

When doing laundry is the good option, you know it’s all a bit dire.

Obviously, I didn’t just get on the first bus out of town. I told my very understanding husband, I reassured my very distressed dog, I checked in with our very behind schedule contractor, and I let all my active clients know I was going to be AWOL for a few days. While I was sure all my clients were going to be annoyed by this impromptu getaway of mine, nobody berated me, although they did all have the same reaction.

“By yourself?” they gasped. “Oh my God, I’m so jealous.”

Back Monday!

Yesterday they poured concrete. Today I ordered house warming invitations. Date on invitations: 21 September.

This may well be foolhardy but I’m 100% comitted to moving into the new house by the 14th of September, and 100% committed to throwing an open house to warm said house. The 21st not only gives us enough time to unpack some boxes and find the couch, but is also our wedding anniversary. While we’re not particularly sentimental about such things, it seemed a good target date for Project House Warming Party.

And so, we’re having a party, and you are invited. By “you” I actually mean you. If I’ve met you or swapped email with you, you’re invited. If you follow me on Twitter or stalk me from the weedy looking shrubs at the back of our current house, you’re invited. If you’ve never heard of me before today but will be in Cork on the 21st of September, you’re invited.

There are two caveats though. One, I need your address (that links to a form that goes into a database for label printing) to send you an actual invitation. I believe in real life dead tree invitations for real life parties; they are different than conferences or events or work dos, plus I don’t have a lot of excuses for sending pretty printed materials – I am actually aching to use stamps here.

Two, the invitation states that come hell, high water, or wet paint, we are having this party. There may well be wet paint on the walls, or possibly no paint at all. I don’t care, and neither should you. Regardless of the state of the house, there will be wine, beer, fabulous food, and the best brownies in the world. Who cares about paint?

So, really – please give me your address if you’d like to come. Don’t be shy. It’s an open house and we’d be delighted to have you there to help us warm our new abode. Plus, brownies! What’s not to love?

Popular wisdom would have you believe that buying a house is one of life’s most stressful events, right behind the death of a partner or divorce. Having just this afternoon bought a house, I have to say: this is one of the least stressful transactions I’ve ever been through. Seriously. Easy peasy. A snap. Eight weeks start to finish. Done and dusted.

Although I know nothing about buying houses and even less about buying houses in Ireland, I am generally very lucky in finding people to work with who make being clueless easier. At this point I can say with some authority that I still know nothing about buying houses, but we’ve become very good at writing enormous cheques and in return, someone has given us keys to a building we apparently now own. This is due mostly to the efforts of these people:

• Mortgage Broker: We fall into the “specialist borrowers” category so we needed a mortgage broker. I worked with Jonathan O’Brien at White Star Mortgages. He was awesome, very responsive, and gets points for answering after hours emails from his Blackberry. I found him through AskAboutMoney when bitching about our first mortgage broker, who sucked out loud.
• Mortgage Company: Springboard. They do broker-only loans but had the best rate available to us, so I’m doubly glad we went through our fabulous broker.
• Conveyancing Solicitor: I found Aileen Walshe when looking for flat fee conveyancing that wasn’t done by the equivalent of a conveyancing sweatshop. She’s excellent. At one point she got in her car and drove to the seller’s solicitor to pick up the contracts they continually failed to put in the post. Even our estate agent said she was great. She charges €995 plus VAT.
• Auctioneer: Speaking of estate agents, ours was Dermot Lynch at James Coughlan. He drove me around Cork all afternoon one day, and since he’s done a bunch of property renovations, he was very handy to have in tow. He’s also lovely and smells gorgeous.

The flip side of there being no moments of horrendous stress is that there’s also been no joyous moment of “woot!” so far. I suspect that this is because I’ve treated this whole thing like a very tentative and theoretical house buying exercise: if we can get our cash in place, if someone is actually dumb enough to loan us a big pile of money, if we can find a house in our budget, if they accept our offer, if the mortgage company actually draws a cheque, if it actually closes.

I was sincerely prepared for this to fall through at any given if, but as it happens, they all fell in line. John let me know he’d picked up the keys this afternoon with a text message that says “zOMG H0WCE K33Z!!” He’s also been running around yelling “Get off my lawn!” for practice. At what, I’m not sure, since we won’t actually have a lawn, but I suppose “Get off my concrete!” doesn’t have the same ring to it. He’s really digging home ownership.

Me, I’m convinced the whole building will collapse during renovations, taking at least two adjoining neighbours with it. More than that, while I may be new at this, I know one thing for sure:

It isn’t the house buying that will kill you. It’s the house moving.

Apparently my RSS feed and Pat Phelan’s RSS feed decided yesterday to run off to Jamaica together. For about 20 minutes during a server hissy fit, his site re-directed to mine, and his millions of loyal follwers got my posts in their Pat Phelan feed.

We thought the problem was resolved after 20 minutes, so I’m test posting to see if this is still occurring or if our feeds have returned to their respective marital homes.

If you are a Pat Phelan reader, I apologise unreservedly for what must be a very confusing feed reading experience. If this issue is still occurring, there may be a subsequent post here to check the next fix has worked. Again, apologies.

Absolutely ages ago, the absolutely fabulous Aoife tagged me for a Six Random Facts meme, and I completely dropped the ball because I couldn’t even keep track of the six things I had to do before lunch. Better late than never, though, so here are mine:

• I have prehensile toes, meaning I can (and do!) pick things up with them. Oddly enough, in all my years of writing about sex and sexuality, it is this single fact that resulted in the strangest and most fervent fan mail. Moral of the story: absolutely everything is somebody’s kink.
• I am mostly indifferent to insects – no girlish spider screeching here – but I used to passionately hate woodlice. Unfortunately, we have a very damp garden and thus, woodlice. I now perpetuate a very satisfying daily holocaust on the dozen or so who creep in the back door and am no longer squicked out by them. I am however disturbingly addicted to this little smashing ritual, and my husband has begun to look at me a bit oddly.
• On the other hand, I actually really like slugs. I find them terribly impressive and sort of endearingly dinosaur like, and I especially love their little horns. Since at least two slugs a night end up in our back hall (eating dead woodlice) or on the bathroom sink, this is a good thing.
• I like films but I’m not a huge fan of cinemas. I have not actually been to a cinema since 2005. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith merely confirmed my suspicion that cinema tickets are not the best way to spend a million quid.
• I am addicted to the smell of detergent. I have no idea why. I just love industrial perfumes. I have an unnatural fondness for Dove soap, and I use Dove deodorant, and if Dove made perfume, I’d probably wear that, too.
• I like my husband so much I married him twice.

Now, according to the rules, I’m supposed to sic this meme on six other people but so much time has gone by that I think I’ve pretty much blown that one out of the water, and I’m not a huge fan of obligating people to play. Instead, here’s a simple curiosity request: show everyone where the magic happens.

We’re about to (fingers crossed) buy and renovate a house, so for the first time ever I’ll have some scope to design my own working space. I’m very excited about this, and I’d like to see yours. Home office, co-working office, actual office: just take a photo of where the work gets done and post it somewhere. Clean, dirty, it doesn’t matter; I just want to see it.

Bernie Goldbach, Damien Mulley, Jackie Danicki, Martha Rotter, Maryrose Lyons, and YourNameHere, I’m looking at you.