November gone, December here

November passed by in a flurry, and now December is here.
November is called  Mí na Shamhna in Irish/Gaelic, literally ' the month of Samhain', a word which comes from the Gaelic and which means The end of Summer.
So truly summer is over.
December is called Mí na Nollag, the month of Christmas, with Nollaig being the Irish word for Noel.

The weather here at the moment is wet and cold but not so cold as to threaten snow. We had some frosty mornings last week, the car windscreens had to be scraped, but the roads around us were not very icy at all, thank Goodness.At present, the weather is back to rain. I just hope we don't get the bad winters we had 2 years ago.

My laptop broke, turns out I need a new internal drive for it, which I will probably sort in the next week or so; but I bought myself a new laptop in the meantime. I also got a gadget which allows Wifi in the house for up to 5 devices at a time, before this I had only one dongle to allow broadband on one device at a time.

My van broke down on Saturday just gone, when I was in Tipperary town, with my daughter for her orthodontist appointment. The appointment only took 8 minutes, the van breaking down meant we were in Tipperary for almost 4 hours. Shiverrrrr, it was getting cold by the time the nice mechanic,  whom the Insurance company sent to our assistance,  finally got the van onto his towtruck and got us all home.
I got the van back today, turns out it was a faulty thermostat, thankfully it wasn't a blown gasket or damaged radiator. I am so pleased to have the car back! And I think my Dear Swedish Husband is also delighted that I have my van back, as I borrowed his car today and he had to get a lift to work.....

We are rehearsing a  musical Nativity play at work with the children, which they will perform for their parents in a week's time, in the local church. The songs are so joyful that they are easy to teach.

Sara, who has a lovely heart-warming blog about her adventures in a wooden house in the woods in Sweden, has asked me to write a little about my childhood in Ireland.
Well, here's a tiny snippet: I am the eldest of 8 children, (3 girls, 5 boys). I was born in the mid 1960's. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father worked in a large hardware shop in town, ie Limerick City.
I went to school either when I was 3 and 11 months old, or when I turned 4, as my mother just took me to school with her, and the rules were not so strict then. In school, the younger children wrote on small blackboards, (chalkboards) with chalk. We called them cláiríní, meaning small boards. The school building was very old and draughty, it was surely 100 years old when I was there, a stone building, with thick stone walls, dusty wooden floorboarsd and  tall windows that started well above eye-level. There were only 3 classrooms, the toilets were in an outside block.
We didn't wear uniforms then, although most schools now do have uniforms. I remember wearing a duffle-coat to school and if you fell in the mud in winter time, you were put standing in front of a gas heater with your coat on, and wet muddy trousers off.
I also remember picking rose hips in autumn , lots of them they were being collected to make Rose-Hip syrup, for some reason. If you took a rose-hip and opened it up, there were short hairs under the skin and if you put that down a person's shirt, the hairs would itch like mad. We called rose-hips Itchy-backs!