Tag: st patrick’s day

Boston Holidays

March 17th is a big day for the city of Boston. As most people know, it’s St Patrick’s Day and Boston does love to get its Irish on for a day. For me personally, I am of Irish descent (with the red hair to show for it… for now). My father’s mother’s family came to the US from Ireland. My mother’s parents were from New Foundland (before it became part of Canada) but prior to that we believe the family was in Ireland as well. My father’s father’s family was from Nova Scotia (I think) and before that the family was from England. I guess no one is perfect.

While St Patrick’s Day is the big deal for most of us around here, people in Suffolk County also have another holiday today. Evacuation Day. George Washington placed the cannons stolen from Fort Ticonderoga onto Dorchester Heights, where they could threaten the English warships in the harbor, thus breaking the Siege of Boston. When I was a kid I was insanely jealous of the kids in Boston because they had the day off from school on March 17th and those of us in Middlesex County did not. They didn’t have to go to school on St Patrick’s Day and we did. What a rip off! There were people from the Merrimack Valley fighting with the Continental Army during the siege, why don’t we get the day off to honor them too?

It wasn’t until I was 21 or 22 years old and going to school at Northeast Broadcasting School in Boston that I got to have Evacuation Day off. Better late than never, I guess. As for today, happy St Patrick’s Day. Most of Boston drank themselves into the annual stupor over the weekend, so there isn’t a lot of actual celebration today. We used to have Corned Beef for dinner on St Patrick’s Day, but I think tonight we’re just going to have chicken. Maybe we’ll do something next weekend to celebrate. I am wearing a green shirt today though. Not because I chose to wear green today, but because a green shirt just happened to be on the top of my laundry pile. Call it the luck of the Irish.

Happy St Patrick’s Day

Happy St Patrick’s Day, everyone. Today is the day where the population of the United States who are not descended from Irish immigrants pretend that they are of Irish descent and celebrate like drunken stereotypes. Personally, as one whose family did come from Ireland but who does not drink at all, I am all for it. Pretend away, my friends and neighbors. For this one day each year you are more than welcome to join our club.

Sláinte!

Go raibh maith agat!

Go n-eirí an t-ádh leat!

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!

Go here to find out what those four phrases mean.

Music and Money

I’ve mentioned that at the start of March I decided to curb my post-RPM Challenge blues by doing another RPM Challenge.  I’m still working on it though it is very easy to be distracted by other things right now.  I’ve got two songs done, six more partially done, and I still need two more.

This morning there was a post on the RPM Challenge Facebook group (I didn’t check the actual RPM Challenge website, it might be there too) suggesting we all take advantage of being stuck at home indefinitely and do another RPM Challenge in April.  Good idea!  I mean, I was already planning on it, but I don’t have to do it alone.  Why not?  Why not use our stay-at-home time to do something creative?  I’m all for it… but I would have been without a global pandemic to lock me in the house so I guess I’m not the target audience there.

Turning to politics, remember when Andrew Yang was running for president and proposed giving everyone in the USA a $1,000 stipend every month?  I thought it was a good idea.  A creative way to help those in need as well as to stimulate the economy.  I also loved the implied, “you think Sanders is a socialist?  Wait till you get a load of this” vibe.

Yesterday Mittens Romney threw out a similar proposal.  Today Joe Kennedy did as well, though he provided some actual details with his idea.  Now it sounds like the fucking white house is jumping on the wagon.  They may be considering a plan similar to Yang’s.

First off, let me get it out of the way… if the dickless president really wants to make being anti-socialist a platform in his campaign, then giving away money isn’t a good way to do it.  I expect that anyone who ever said a negative word about socialism should refuse that money, right?  Just like they refuse public schools and public fire departments, and trash pick up, and police, and snow plows, and highways, and all of those other socialist things.

Second, can we just make Andrew Yang president now?  Like, let’s all vote today and just give him the job.  The proposal he made that everyone laughed at could very well be law within days.  Good work, Mr Yang.  Smart leadership is what we need and it is literally the furthest thing away from what we have.

So as for the social distancing, today is my second day working from home.  Yesterday felt like a normal telecommute day.  All day long I had this idea in the back of my mind that I would be back in the office tomorrow, same as any other telecommuting day.  It really wasn’t until I got up this morning and didn’t drive to work (I drove to the super market instead) that it really started sinking in.  Things are different.

There is a little sense of stir craziness, sure, but mostly what I am feeling today is the sense that this is going to be really hard to do.  Some how removing the commute and the office from the work day equation is going to make things more difficult?  I don’t get it, but that feels like where this is heading.  I wish I could explain it, but I can’t.

There is so much wrong with the world right now, and I’m not even talking about that textbook nazi prick in the white house.  There is so much out of wack that I can’t figure out what to focus my worries on.  I’m trying to only worry about things I can control like stocking the pantry and working from home and making sure everyone has what they need to do their work/school work without driving each other to drink (wink).  I don’t want to worry about all the other shit.  I don’t want to worry about the projections or the infection rates, or the mortality rates, or the stock market, or layoffs or closings, or the fact that I am weeks overdue for a haircut and now can’t get one (anyone want to lend me their flowbee?).

Positivity used to be the hardest thing in the world for me before I met Jen.  It’s still not easy, but it is closer to my normal mindset.  I am trying real hard to stay positive through all of this.  I may need to bash my guitar around in order to pull it off, but I owe it to everyone to do my best to keep the ship upright.  (I typo’d ship as shit and somehow that sounds better to me, hehe)

So keep your shit together, planet Earth.  I have faith in you.  You can do it.  Now let’s all celebrate St Patrick’s Day in our self imposed isolation by listening to some Irish music.  No, not U2.  No, not Makem and Clancy…

Rory Gallagher (I wanted the Irish Tour album but those pukes at Spotify don’t have it)

So Much for That

I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean.  I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff.  Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs.  I didn’t know that WordPress could do that.  So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it.  So much for a clean start.  If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too.  It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here.  Again, so much for a clean start.

So it’s St Patrick’s Day.  Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day?  My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness.  Har har har very funny.  I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner.  Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please.  Today though, I did something fitting.  Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist.  The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car.  The jury is still out on the show.  I don’t really like marshal arts stories.  This feels like that kind of thing after one hour.  The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series.  They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist.  That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute.  The cool thing?  It was three Irish guys.  They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.

My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow.  My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon.  We have to come up with something interesting to do.  I have no ideas at this point.  I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube.  I’ll let you know what we come up with.

Happy St Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all.  Today is the day when people all over the United States celebrate their Irish heratage, whether they are Irish or not, by getting sloppy, fall down, pass out in a pool of your own vomit and piss, drunk!

I’m not sure how, or even if, people who are actually in Ireland celebrate and I really don’t care.

Bostonians in particular are well known for their St Patty’s indulgences.  I expect at least 50% of my company to call in hung over sick tomorrow.  It’s tradition.

I will celebrate this special day with my own personal tradition of being the only male of Irish decent in all of greater Boston to not get  sloppy, fall down, pass out in a pool of your own vomit and piss, drunk.  Someone has to be that guy, right?  Why not me.

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!

Boiled Dinner

We went all Irish around here today. We don’t have the kids for St Patrick’s Day so we had a corned beef boiled dinner today. Jen’s mom and step father came over too. A good time was had by all. Youtube clips of the Tonight Show were viewed and enjoyed as well as the Lego Movie and a small mountain of corned beef.

Mondays Suck

Today was the third Monday I’ve worked since getting promoted (already?) and losing my second telecommuting day. It’s the first one that hurt though, for two reasons.

Jen and I over slept this morning. Not much, just a little. Hell, it wasn’t even enough to make me late for work. I left at the usual time, but I had to skip packing my lunch. The kids were at their fathers this weekend. Had I been able to work form home today I actually would have been able to stay in bed for two more hours. That hurt. That hurt in a big way.

The second way not telecommuting hurt is sillier. Season four of The Walking Dead is winding down. On a tele-Monday I would have watched last night’s episode before work. Even with driving in today, I still tried to watch before work. I said I left home at the normal time, but today is St Patrick’s Day as well as the Boston-only holiday, Evacuation Day. Traditionally it is an easy drive day. I downloaded last night’s episode onto my phone in the hopes I’d get to work fast enough to watch it in the parking lot.

The file is 43 minutes long. I parked in the lot at 8:20. Ssssssso close. I started watching, but after 17-18 minutes I stopped and went inside. It was cold, the screen is small, the show was dark (literally as well as figuratively) and hard to see. I watched the rest when I got home. I’m glad I waited for a bigger view.

Oh. My. God. That was the most difficult story since Sofia came out do the barn. Mind blowingly awesome. Brutal and terrible and heart destroyingly painful, but awesome. Television does not get any better,

So now I sit here, in between periods of the Bruins vs Wild game. Wishing I’d gotten an extra chunk of sleep and wishing I’d watched some great tv in one sitting. I miss my second telecommuting day. Indeed I do.

Corned Beef Dinner

We had a scheduling conflict with the Irish.  St. Patrick’s Day happens to fall on a day that we do not have the kids.  Therefore we had a mini-St Patrick’s Day dinner this weekend.  We invited Jen’s folks and my folks.  The kids told riddles while we ate corned beef.  My father and my step son continued their on going string of cribbage games.  My step daughter somehow managed to read two large books cover to cover (more or less).  It was a nice time.  Thanks to both sets of Nanas and Papas for coming over, and thanks to my amazing wife for the fantastic dinner!