Tidbits?

The title is intended to mean that I have a whole bunch of short thoughts running around in my brain this morning – we’ll see how short I keep them, eh?

My friend, not knowing that I have written a big nasty terrible rant about school administrators and police – made the most profound comment to me yesterday. It isn’t our job to protect our children from everything; it is to prepare our children to be adults. OMG WOW! She is so absolutely correct, I’m going to use that all the time now – It absolutely conveys my feelings, I just never knew the words before.

If you haven’t been back to the hotty list at Very Soxy – you really must visit again, she has it updated and damn, what a way to take the morning coffee out of the equation for a nice wake up.

I like Mary Roach – she writes a short little humorous (usually humorous) article for Reader’s Digest every month. She’s sort of a modern day Erma Bombeck, and I like her self-deprecating (and hubby deprecating – can you deprecate someone else?) style. Well today I got to her article in this months edition (okay… it might be this month’s, it might be last month’s, it might be next month’s – it’s the one on the back of the toilet in our house for the current month) and it was a tremendous let down. It wasn’t funny, had a lot of potential, some good jumping off places – but no follow through. And she totally left me hanging – it was like a dropped cell phone call… I flipped furiously through the following 14 pages of pharmaceutical ad and all the fine print that goes with to confirm that the little red box at the end really did indicate that she left me hanging.

Being Orange in a green world – yes today is the wearin o’ the green – and Denver has one of the biggest celebrations around – which usually inspires me to a silly display of greenness and a fake brogue for the entire day – but I ALWAYS wear a bit of orange to honor my Irish relatives (who did NOT absolutely did NOT celebrate this Catholic holiday). They were Orangemen, and I always feel the need to wear orange just to make it clear to ME that I am not betraying my heritage or something. They probably would still see drinking green beer and running around saying Top O’ the Mornin’ to Ya’ as a betrayal, but I do my part.

Speaking of Green – (and I hesitate to do this, lest there be a shortage – it has happened before believe me) – March is fabulous, and you know why – because there are Shamrock Shakes! Let me wander around and preface and frame and all that I do to make a short short comment into a big long story – because this is my blog, and that’s me –so pffft! When we moved to our current home, my husband loved to tell people that we were within 15 minutes of 9 (I think it was nine, and I don’t feel like counting) golf courses (ha! They also have green, weird irony there). Well for purposes of this story let me tell you that we are also within 15 minutes of at least 11 McDonald’s – not ordinarily something anyone in their right mind would give a damn about, but… when they begin to run dry of Shamrock Shake syrup, or their shake machines break down, it becomes critical. And we have driven a full 30 minutes away to find a shamrock shake on the 17th, because it is that important. We begin (the kids and I, hubby still prefers chocolate, poor misguided man) on about February 25th to seek them, we drop by McD’s and ask if they’ve got them yet – then we have them oh a couple times a week all month – eventually some of the McD’s in our area run out of the syrup or whatever it is that makes this heavenly concoction – we obviously believe that it is all due to our compulsive addiction. We will continue to try to run them dry into April, though the last two years we have had difficulty finding them anywhere even during that last week of March.

Please, if you are in our area, confine your consumption to the ordinary flavors, we cannot afford for you to use any of our syrup!

Erin Go Bragh!

~~update... upon a google search of 'shamrock shake', I find that there are markets that are without them... this is hideously unfortunate and we should all write to our congressmen to ask them to force the now trans fat free restaurants to correct this atrocity~~