Loving my Saturday job

Motherhood seems to make people feel guilty. And I should probably feel guilty too, because I benefit a lot from the guilt of the Mom I work for on Saturdays. Because she's busy in her boutique, I have to watch her kids, and because she feels bad about not spending Saturdays with them, she generally arranges for my to do fun things with them, and now that I've kind of got the knack of keeping them reasonably well behaved, I enjoy those fun things too!

This weekend, for instance, I'll be taking them to the The Ark to attend a sort of artist-in-residence thing which sounds like I'll likely enjoy it even more than they will! I love that place. Everyone is always so over-excited there, and that's just the grown-ups.

Now, I can't draw a straight line, but I've been getting a lot more into art lately. Since finishing up my MA, I find it hard to read. For one thing, I'm very, very busy all the time. For another, I feel like I overdosed on books in the last year. I don't even want to read newspapers or magazines these days. So I've been looking at art more, and living downtown as I do, it's easy to pop into one of the big or small galleries just to see what's going on. My favourite big gallery is also the one that's closest to my place, the Hugh Lane. It's free, so I can just pop in for 10/15 minutes, which is usually enough for me. It's a very peaceful place; I love it. And last time I was there I got all excited about this amazing-sounding workship they have going on soon, before I realised that it was, ahem, for ages 6-10!!!

Anyway, I let it slip to the kids that I watch that my MA was about gothic literature and when they asked further, told them a bit about Bram Stoker's Dracula. Well, I went right up in their estimation! They know consider me a vampire expert extraordinaire!!!

Speaking of literature, one of my favourite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, will be speaking at the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoighire, and I won't be able to go because I'll be working! It's really not fair. Here's hoping I just bump into her in the street, or she comes to the restaurant where I work.