Apologies

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Alright then, I know, I know, St. Patrick’s Day is not about the beer. Ok, I apologize for that. Here is what I was able to unearth about the much maligned and misunderstood St. Patrick. The History Channel has a bit of info about the man behind the myth. It appears that through some convoluted happenings St. Patrick came to Ireland around 430 AD as the second bishop to Ireland. Of course there weren’t really many Christians in Ireland at the time, but he saw to that straight away. He spent 30 years converting people and adapting the Catholic religion so that it would be more user friendly to the Celts who had a nature based religion. He used the shamrock as a way of explaining the trinity and celebrated Easter with bonfires, he is also credited with the Celtic cross, adding the sun symbol to it since the Celts worshipped the sun. Among other things he is credited with raising the dead and the ever famous sermon on a hilltop that drove the snakes from Ireland. There you have it folks, almost everything you ever wanted to know about St. Patrick.

For your further amusement I include a link to the schedule of festival events occurring in Dublin from March 11th thru 17th. The link is to a PDF file so be patient it takes a little while to download and you have to have Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Alright since I’m in apology mode here is a good one from the past. On September 19th I gave you all a link to La Poste and challenged anyone who cared to, to figure out the site. I recently had need to mail something ‘return receipt requested’ and being the anal control freak that I am, I was not going down to the post office without knowing exactly what I needed to say. So I went to the web site and READ it, and you won’t believe what I found, buried deep in the website there is actually a French/English dictionary of terms. I know I was blown away. So here it is my formal apology for disparaging the site without truly checking it out. Oh, you want the link to the dictionary? Now, what kind of friend would I be if I just handed you the answers?

Sally: I'm a journalist. I work at the News. Harry: Great. And you're with Joe. That's great -- You guys have been together - what? - three weeks? Sally: A month. How do you know? Harry: You take someone to the airport, it's clearly the beginning of the relationship. That's why I have never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship. Sally: Why? Harry: Because eventually things move on and you don't take someone to the airport, and I never wanted anyone to be able to say to me, 'how come you never take me to the airport anymore?'

So, yeah, S does a lot of international travel. And when he has flown to Hungary or Turkey or Romania or South Africa or even locally to Lyon, I've always driven him to the airport. It's no big deal I’m not really doing anything and it saves him about 20 minutes on each end of his trip and also it saves him parking fees. On Tuesday, however, when S was flying to Lyon just for the day, I begged off and didn’t drive him.

Well, the thing about S’s flights is that they always seem to leave at 6:45 in the morning, which means he has to be there by 5:45, which means we have to leave the house by 5:30, which means that I have to be up at 5:00. So yeah I’m lazy and I just figured that for one quick day I could opt out. I know what S was thinking though “After only 12+/- years the ‘beginning’ is over”. Sorry babe.