welcome to my mind ...

We welcomed Spring with a lot of rain and high winds. Then it turned in to sunshine and high winds. It's fucking windy today.

Work started out interesting. We arrived for day shift to find out that a pipe in the garage had ruptured and water was pouring out like a waterfall. Luckily it was in the garage and not in the building itself. It also flowed in to a drain so there was no pooling to worry about. It took a few hours for the engineers and contractors to get it plugged, but it was interesting so I spent at least a couple of those hours just following the guys around. I pretty much just stayed out of the way and added color commentary. Nothing else of consequence happened once the pipe was plugged up.

So... St. Patrick's Day. The morning started out kind of iffy. I was slightly hung over from the night before. I really need to make sure I drink more water and eat more food when I'm indulging in alcoholic beverages. Also, it seems that the gay bars out here tend to make their drinks a lot stronger than straight bars. It was determined during a discussion we were having at work today.

I digress... I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon just sleeping off and on, making sure I drank water every time I woke up. Shortly before we headed out, I started feeling better, but I knew that I would be sticking to beer so it wouldn't be as bad. Also the funds were limited so there would be no opportunity for excess drinks; not that I had excess the night before ... I only consumed two ... on a nearly empty stomach. . .

We headed out around 6:30ish and got a couple pints of Guinness when we got there. Jacob's friend met up with us about 45 minutes later. If we had known she was going to be that late, we wouldn't have left as early as we did. We stayed and ate some Irish dishes: bangers and mash, shepherd's pie, some kind of pulled lamb sandwich and a black and tan brownie with Guinness ice cream. It was all tasty. I like the bangers and mash and the brownie best. The shepherd's pie was okay. Nothing terribly special.

While we were sitting there enjoying ourselves, this guy stumbled over to our table and made himself comfortable. He apologized, but said he needed a place to sit for a minute. We didn't mind. He introduced himself and we discovered he was from Ireland. His name was Tadhg {pronounced like tiger without the er} and he was a good conversation for a little while before he went off to converse with others. It was pretty cool meeting an Irish person from Ireland on St. Patrick's Day. He came back once more, but didn't stay for very long the second time. He told us he had been drinking since 10 in the morning so by the time he stumbled to our table, he had been drinking for about 10 hours.

After a little while we decided to head over to a different pub. It was around the corner from where we were, but the atmosphere was more enjoyable. More like what I would picture for an Irish pub. Or any pub for that matter. Fado had more of a restaurant feel to it than bar and pub. The Owl'n Thistle was cool, but we only stayed for about an hour. Jacob's friend had to go to work and I decided to hitch a ride with her back home since it's on the way to the highway. Jacob stayed out until the pub closed.

And that was my St. Patrick's Day.

I think this will be the last of the long entries for a while. I picked up an extra shift this weekend to make up for taking this past Sunday off and I'll probably be working quite a bit of overtime next week and the week after. So unless anything exciting happens at work, I won't have much free time to have anything else exciting enough happen to me that I would write about.

Until tomorrow. . .