I'm back

Bluebells on the forest floor in County Clare. 

I've been blogging only very occasionally for the last few months, as I've been finishing a graduate degree at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Thankfully,  I finished this week, and hope to resume my writing schedule as before. 

The Girl, my daughter, will be 15 in a few weeks. She sang and danced in her secondary school play (high school to Americans), is still shooting archery once a week, and is making friends. She's taken part in many s still teaching horseback riding to children on the weekends, and has taken part in several hunter trials in the last year -- trials in which teams of riders gallop through an obstacle course on the Irish countryside. 

We voted last Friday here in Ireland, and thankfully we have a brilliant voting system that, unlike the US system, allows third parties to easily exist. I'll write about that more in the next few weeks. 

This is the lovely time of year here, when we start to enjoy the lukewarm summer before we plunge back into the nine months of winter. 

As I mentioned back in January, I had the honour to spend the day with Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, who urged me to start pulling my writings into a book, and now that my teenager is self-sufficient and my graduate degree is ended, that's exactly what I plan to do. I'll start posting things regularly here and other places, and will send more details as I finish them. 

The Girl some ten years ago.