The old fashion way

Welcome to the "Frozen Pipes" club, as our heating is a boiler and it will not start if there's no pressure into the system - which is suppose to come via... the pipes!

Dublin is running out of water. The City Council is putting the system down a bit - they turn the water on in the mornings, for 2 hours, then turn it off again for the rest of the day, turning on again in the evening for another couple of hours... a disaster! Authorities are also asking people not to let their taps open during the night - to avoid the pipes to become frozen, but the problem is when there's no much water running, either the pipes can freeze or the boiler system can run out of pressure and consequently not burning the gas for hot water and the central heating...

At least we have a few electric heaters and hot water bottles, the old fashioned way. It was -11 yesterday morning...

What Agglutination!

ed·u·tain·ment
n.
1. The act of learning through a medium that both educates and entertains.
2. Any of various media, such as computer software, that educate and entertain.
3. (Social Science / Education) the presentation of informative or educational material in an entertaining style.

When I first read this word in an email a friend sent me, I though he was kidding with my name - edu(ardo) + (enter)tainment. What agglutination!

In linguistics, agglutination is the morphological process of adding suffixes and/or prefixes to the base of a word. Here, it was taken from edu(cation) + (enter)tainment...

Icy Dublin

Roads are frozen. Local authorities say they are doing everything they can to fix the problem - bring more salt to the country, pulverise the roads - as soon as possible. The Minister of Environment said it would be for the next day or so... How come?

Minister excuses started saying that main roads are OK (barely OK, I'd say), and they are the priority. Well, they may be the priority, but what about the traffic jam which in regular days, when all back roads are clean and unblocked, is already a chaos? What to say now with blocked back roads and main roads in icy conditions?

The Minister continues daying that if you watch the UK news you'll see that they have the same problem. My understanding - actually the first thing which comes to my mind - is that the Minister wants the british disgrace to act as consolation to us... jeez!

To be honest with you, I'm delighted with this weather! I'm brazilian! We have all the good weather there, and this is quite exotic to me! It's a shame the authorities don't provide people with the infrastructure they need to enjoy the season.

2o1o

It's been a long (and winding) time I din't write anything here, in my english space... 2009 has gone, 2010 has come - I've wished (in portuguese) to everybody a lot of LUXURY. Once what defines luxury is the sense of scarcity, I wish you all loads of SIMPLICITY, HUMILITY, SOLIDARITY (the most noble felling of the human been) and COMPASSION!

Happy New Year!

M50 @ 60km/h

Traffic planners must be kidding. The speed limits on M50 between N3 Blanchardstown and N2 Ballymun are set to 60km/h. To be fair, this is too much during the rush hours, when the maximum you can drive is 40km/h, but during the weekend... I did it myself today - drive at 60Km, and I was almost pushed out to the hard-shoulder! Literally nobody drives there at 60Km/h.

If the authorities really want drivers to keep their speed at 60, they should do something more efficient, or change the limits to something more realistic.