Short lived Domestic Bliss in Dublin

I helped Kassandra make her way back to Dublin to retrieve her cat Astrid from my mother's home, and to pick up Nevermore as well. I learned from Aisling and Nevermore that between the two of them, they were able to keep mom calm and that they all managed to keep each others spirits up these many months.

"Well, that and the steady supply of Jameson's..." blurted Nevermore, who then covered his beak with his wing in embarrassment.

I looked over at Aisling with a look of disapproval and she looked back at me and said "What!? I didn't do it, yer Ma did. Besides it did calm his nerves. He does genuinely worry about Laurel, you know."

"Aye, he's a fine feathered friend...for an Englishman, anyway.", I said with a laugh.

Aisling, though used to the time dilation of various Terra Incognitae, still missed me deeply and was very demanding of me...emotionally, temporally and physically. In between spending quality time with her, I also managed to put my divine abilities to the test vis a vis languages...I had Aisling watch Italian Art films that were sappy romantic comedies, and we also watched the best of Pedro Almodovar's work. I also tuned into BBC Radio Cymru and took in hours of Welsh programming and also watched lots of Japanese Anime slice of life anime with romantic twists, which Aisling also enjoyed...I kept the subtitles on for her, but each time after an hour I found I no longer really needed the English subtitles for myself. In fact I started to notice certain liberties taken with the translations on some. I still couldn't read or write Japanese to save my life, but I found I could easily understand it now when it was spoken, and I could speak it back acceptably well. No doubt, my written Welsh looked very odd and misspelled, since basically I was using the Irish writing style to convey the sounds of Welsh. Not entirely incomprehensible, but definitely amusingly wrong somehow. Also, I listened to a lot of Spanish news broadcasts out of Madrid and Barcelona on my shortwave radio set, mostly tuning in for more info about the worldwide earthquake phenomenon. When I practiced speaking Spanish aloud, I could definitely detect the Castillian lisp...My newly acquired Spanish definitely sounded European, in contrast to Gunnar & Laurel's Spanish, which was decidedly Mexican.

The domestic bliss in Dublin was short-lived, however, as before long I got an urgent call from Nate that he needed to get into Mag Mell to speak to his Divine Father, Hachiman, as soon as possible, and would like me to accompany him to let Derek know everything was cool and all. I said fine, I'd meet him at Shannon airport and we'd head there together. I said my goodbyes to mum and Aisling and I was off again to the other side of our little island.