It's almost 1am now and I can still see the lights.  The movements are pretty unpredictable, as if someone is playing with them.

I was walking around Wexford at night just an hour ago and saw a circle of spot lights radiating out from some point to the south, lighting up the clouds. I saw them change angle once, and saw one of them flicker as if someone had stepped in front of it.  I'd like to think it is a rehearsal at Johnstown Castle!

According to Susan they already started filming today (without us!):

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnnl8awnZ8M/

The New York Trad Fest 2018 was just announced:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnUDcVxn4iC/?taken-by=newyorktradfest
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnUDVL6HlN3/?taken-by=newyorktradfest

I already bought tickets for the November 10th show.  I couldn't figure out how to buy tickets for November 17th.

It is organized by Tony Demacro, a Celtic fiddle player who runs a seisún every week at the 11th St. Bar in New York City.  Here is a picture of me meeting him there for the first time in August 2018.  He says that he once jammed (is that the right word?) with Máiréad Nesbitt and has nothing but good things to say about her talent.

--David

For those following the thread, Celtic Woman tweeted out the album art for Ancient Land today:

https://twitter.com/Celtic_Woman/status/1037060275839623176

The castle in the artwork appears to be Johnstown Castle in County Wexford, where the DVD will be filmed on September 13 and 14.

In the tweet, they also said "this will be our first full new album of original music since our Destiny release in 2016".  So we can expect lots of new music, yay!

I watched the "Behind the scenes" footage for the Slane DVD the other day.  They actually "wined and dined" the audience before the filming, so maybe we would arrive before 7pm for that.  But I think it's hard to predict what they are going to do this time since so many years have passed.  I'm still anticipating a future email with more details.

the plan is still for my friend and I to get into Wexford about mid-day on Saturday.

Oh no, you'll miss the whole Celtic Woman show on Thursday and Friday.  😱

Wednesday, Sep 12: My plan is to get to Wexford on Wednesday evening.  That will be a relatively busy day for me, picking up a rental car in Dublin, taking a tour of Powerscourt, and driving down to check into my hotel.  On Wednesday night I'll probably explore Wexford and see what's going on.

Thursday and Friday, Sep 13-14:  I don't have any plans for Thursday or Friday mornings yet.  Maybe I'll try to have breakfast at local hotels like the Maldron Hotel and Whitford House Hotel and see if I run into any Celtic Woman celebrities there.  Or check out various tourist attractions in the countryside.  Meeting you guys for drinks after the shows sounds fun.

Saturday, Sep 15:  I'll drive back to Dublin and probably check out Slane castle on the way.

--David

Let us know what you find out, Tom!  I bet John Walsh would know where to get the EP.  And maybe the LMFM radio host still has a copy of it.

GlenS:  Maybe you could try changing the forum software and database to use UTF-8?  It really is the standard encoding that most new software in the world uses if it cares about special characters, so if we can use UTF-8 on this forum instead of more limited ISO-8859-1 then it should fix a lot of issues.  I still have not figured out how to post Chloe's name with two dots over the e in a way that shows up properly.  While there are workarounds for some browsers like Tom mentioned, it's annoying and needless to force users to switch browsers and employ those workarounds.

For the forum software, there is probably some administrator control panel where you can find a "charset" or "character set" setting and change it to "UTF-8".  Looking through the source code of SMF, it really seems like it does support using UTF-8.

I'd recommend that you also make sure that your database is configured to use UTF-8.  If you are using MySQL, remember to specify utf8mb4, not just utf8.

--David