Green

No time for reflection and deep-but-meaningless entries today. I’ve unexpected company, and have to pull the Pretty Polly tour guide routine out and dust it off this afternoon. We’ve got an important visitor who’s never been in our type of facility before, and who is supposed to be auditing us. I’m supposed to give a grand overview of what we’re up to on this side of things.

I look forward to it in a way, though I loathe this part of my job. It’s a chance to show people what we really do here, and what steps we take to ensure the highest quality results. Whatever I say about my company, company politics, and coworkers, it’s still a wonderful place to work if you believe in doing your job right and with a conscious. And I get few chances to toot my horn about it.

The snow hit here, right on schedule, yesterday morning, and then decided it liked conditions too much around these parts to change over to rain the way it was supposed to. We accumulated several very wet inches of snow, which changed to slush and then ice overnight. Once I got out of my apartment complex’s parking lot though, it was a very straightforward drive in, with only the impatient idiots in their suburban tanks making for any real kind of road hazard. We’re supposed to get more snow Thursday, perhaps. The Socialist is once again waxing poetic about balmy California 80 degree days. I’m willing to bet a California 80 degree day never felt as good as the first good, true spring day that awaits us in only a matter of weeks.

Saint Patty’s Day seems to be making very little splash this year. Perhaps it’s the snow, or maybe it’s because nobody wants to go out and drink green beer on a Wednesday night. I’m not seeing the green shirts and sweaters that people usually wear as their token bit of Eire today, and there weren’t even any green donuts at the cafeteria this morning. I guess if Hallmark can’t make it into a real holiday (with cards and gifts and touching commercials about said-same), it isn’t worth the effort.

My own offering to the Green Gods is the corned beef I’ve got incubating away in a crock-pot in my kitchen. Corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes for diner tonight … how trite is that? Still, it’s what my mother always made every year on St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m nostalgic this year for some reason.

Mom would have been 82 yesterday. The sting of loss is gone, replaced by an empty spot that only surfaces sometimes, when I stop to think for too long. I went to bed feeling it though, and feeling guilty I didn’t make an effort to visit her grave, or even take out some pictures and look at them. Her birthday was the day before St. Patrick’s Day, so she absolutely believed she was part Irish (she was German/English by descent), and St. Patrick’s Day was on of her favorite holidays, right behind Christmas. Food was her way of celebrating: corned beef, cabbage, potatoes (sometimes boiled, and sometimes whipped with green food dye), Irish potatoes, green snake barley candy, green dye in the milk. I think I’ll skip the green dye in the milk tonight.

Oops, nearly forgot! And this is by far one of the nicest things that happened in the last 24 hours, too! I got a surprise postcard from a faraway country yesterday, just because someone was thinking of me. When the postcard came, I immediately started to try to make a list of people I knew who were traveling somewhere. It was a short list – nobody I know is on the road at the moment. The post office had affixed a white sticky stripe to the bottom of the postcard, and it blocked the name of the sender. Once I actually stopped wondering and started reading, though, I figured it out soon enough. I was going to scan the picture and put it in my diary, but THE DAMNED SCANNER ISN’T TALKING TO THE DAMNED COMPTER AGAIN.

I hate it when people type in all caps.