the day after

I’m going to post a slideshow from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. You can see it is the usual madness. What fun. We always hang out in from of Patrick’s (where everybody knows your name…). You can also see that it’s hard to tell when the parade ends and the audience starts! It was a hoot.

Emily, Ella, and Alex came down. Ella loved my get-up but Alex was scared of me and would not even look at my face without the glasses. I think it was disconcerting for him to see his Popop with a redhead.

We stood next to a bunch of crazy young people. They were attired in all manner of green wigs and green face paint and green whatevers. Every time a band or float would pass by, one of them would jump out in front of it and be the drum major only using a beer glass for a baton. Hilarious.

We traveled to Mankato for the LepreCON. I was a little disappointed but I think I had built this up in my head to be the lollapalooza of all time and it just wasn’t. And for people who work at a costume company, they were decidedly unimaginative in their costumes. It looked like they grabbed something on their way out the door. I was over-dressed. Ah, well.

I went to the bar and ordered a glass of pinot grigio. Oh, the party was at the chicken wing place downtown. Won’t be going back there anytime soon, believe me. So, the bartender brings me the glass of pinot grigio and asks if this is some kind of French drink. WTF. I don’t get it. He explains that obviously I am Irish (really?) and he can’t understand why I am drinking French wine. I can’t even begin to sort out what the heck he was thinking.

The service in this place is horrendous. It’s located downtown amongst the college bars so I don’t know if their philosophy is that the servers just wander around until you tackle them, but we had a young woman who did not bring us anything. We always ordered at the bar and brought our own drinks and food back to the table. It was like McDonald’s.

Regis went back to the car to get his phone and found two people rummaging in a dumpster. He gave them five dollars. He said he thought about us sitting in a nice warm restaurant eating whatever our hearts desire and here these poor folks were hoping for some dumpster find for dinner. Oh, my. Life can be hard.

An online friend of mine lost her job Tuesday, on her birthday. She works in a corporate environment which I don’t know very well, but I know job suckage when I see it. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are, this blows. Someone tried to tell her it’s all about the bottom line. If we have reached a point where human beings don’t matter and money is the only thing that matters, I wonder what kind of society we have created. When some people make millions and others have to dig in garbage dumpsters to eat, what kind of society have we created?

There are many reasons to be cynical and I have to fight them every day.