Friday is here. But you knew that. You’ve been counting down the minutes all week long.
Roads afford safe and easy passage. There are still a few icy patches here and there, but generally those are small patches easily recognized as dark, wet pavement. No big. No fog… no snow. There’s a little breeze, very mild at the higher elevations, gutsier and gustier farther downhill. Rocks could possibly present a hazard, but on my commute I saw nothing larger than say, a hamster-sized stone on the road. Of course, those lil’ adorable ones can be harbingers of bigger things to come, but bigger things hadn’t come yet, at the time of my own descent.
Aye… ‘tis almost that time o’ the ‘ear… Blimey, St. Patrick’s Day falls upon the weekend, and I’m green over it. There are no time changes, no math-nerd days to observe, no Easter, no solsti or equini, no national conventions, no seasonal switches. But, we do have the excuse to drink green beer, make Irish jokes, recite terrible limericks, and wear green. I mean, you can do those things any other time of year… but on Sunday, it’s even more O’kay.
Speaking of green… random reminiscing here. When I was kid, my dad—rest his soul… glad he’s actually still happy and healthy, though—used to bake. He was locally very famous—no, sorry, I mean he was very locally famous—for his creations. However, one thing I remember most fondly was reserved just for our household, and ours alone… Dad frequently made green bread. He’d drop a solid dose of green food coloring into a batch of dough, and the magic happened. We were a household exclusively of men for a while (think, “Brady Bunch,” before that one day when he met that very special lady, and they knew that it was much more than a hunch…), and some of those men were as young as six or so. Men, aged from six to about 150, enjoy things such as green bread, because, green bread. Anyhow… Thanks, Dad, for the green bread. It was one of the many things that made my childhood memorable and fun.
I monkeyed with color at other times in my life, too. I spent some time in the military, where regular urinalyses were administered. The standard procedure included a bunch of guys sitting around in a room, drinking a lot of water, and waiting their turn for the, uhh, faucet to be ready. Then they’d enter the booth, fill up a clear plastic cup, and walk back through the room with the evidence that would eventually prove whether or not they’d been toking on the ganja recently, before handing it over to the testing personnel.
Well, I thought it would be GREAT if I could somehow find a way to produce a sample that was blue. I’d walk through the room, nonchalantly, cool as a cucumber, casually carrying my cup of BLUE FREAKIN’ SAMPLE… then if—no, WHEN—somebody hollered, “Hey! That guy has BLUE in his cup!” well, I’d just pretend like I thought that was the usual color… and I’d express amazement if anybody told me that it was typically a DIFFERENT primary color.
However, I was never able to succeed at my brilliant and colorful scheme. I DID drink an entire bottle of blue food coloring ahead of one test, assuming that this would make it all go blue… well, make ME go blue. Unfortunately, I can testify that my “urinalysis fluid” never turned even a hint of blue. But, there were other things that I produced later that very day that could have presented a pretty convincing argument to prove the existence of Smurfs. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of thing you can proudly display… or even discuss on a family-oriented website.
So, enjoy thee a weekend St. Patrickal,
Don’t get yerself into a pickle.
Yer beer may be green,
whilst my rhymes be obscene,
…but I say blue poo is hysterical!