St. Patrick's Day and Tax Time

St. Patrick’s Day was the inspiration for another fun theme week here at the continuum care complex. It followed another theme week I didn’t write about because I’m not into “churchy things” like doing the Stations of the Cross, Ash Wednesday. Lent and a series of classes to study Bible events leading up to Easter. I didn’t even do the buffet for Mardi Gras night because while I like some Cajun music I didn’t trust the iconic food that goes with it not to kill me with hidden shell fish. I did, however, love the paczki’s served on Fat Tuesday before Lent started and the Mardi Gras beads that were free for the taking draped all over the public areas. Best paczki’s I’ve ever had in my life and we used to have some great Polish bakeries in my area.

St. Patrick’s Week started on Monday with a viewing of a PBS documentary The Ireland’s Wild Coast and it featured what they called the most beautiful coastlines in the world. It had some breathtaking photography of a chain of Man-free, wild islands with millions of nesting birds and ancient ruins that are surrounded by waters filled with breaching humbacks and other sea life. I’d love to see another video on how they filmed such amazing close-ups of hatching birds and mating animals. At one point one of the guys shouted out as two seals were mating, “This is my kind of movie” and I mumbled, “Oh gross, you’re into animal porn!"

Irish Happy Hour was my favorite happy hour so far but then I said the same about the Hawaiian Happy Hour. They served my all-time favorite alcoholic drink---Grasshoppers. Back in my dating days when someone would take me to a nice restaurant I always ordered a Grasshopper for dessert which is made with equal parts of ice cream, crème de menthe liqueur and crème de cacao liqueur served in a cocktail glass with dark chocolate power on the edge of the glass. I hear tell they mostly sell Grasshoppers as shooters today which hardly seems worth the effort to get the blender out. I was so hung up on Grasshoppers back in my day that I even made them at home. After awhile I narrowed it down to just the crème de menthe over ice cream and called it good enough. Anyway, the theme happy hours here are bringing back some great memories. Wouldn’t it be fun to be young again, especially if we knew how short-lived our carefree days would be before adult problems would take over our lives.

They also put on an Irish buffet with the best tasting, most tender corn beef I've ever had in my life. (My mom used to boil the flavor out of it and it still cut like leather.) And yesterday afternoon's entertainment was filled with live Irish music, a fiddle player who was really good and he sat in front of a large screen while drone footage of Ireland played in the background.

This week I also managed to run errands and I put more miles on my car that one day than I did in the entire month of February. That’s a fact verifiable by Google because they track me where ever I go in case I decide to take up the hobby of writing reviews of, say, the car wash I went to, the shoe store, the CPA’s office or the bottom of the river that I used to fear I’d end up in some icy winter day where I used to live. No river to fear down here and I managed to navigate the streets and traffic I’m not used to doing just fine. I’m going to take a page out of another blogger’s life (Living Richly in Retirement) and declare one day a week when I explore my new area. The jury is still out on whether I should get a GPS app. I usually just google where I’m going, then print out a map from point A to point B. I have a smart phone but it's maxed out on apps so getting a GPS presents a problem.

Tax Time: I get my income taxes done by a CPA and have for as far back as I can remember. It’s over-kill now that it’s just me and no businesses. But old habits are hard to break and the idea of doing my own taxes is not worth the worrying about making a mistake and going off to tax jail. Ya, I know, that’s not going to happen. We once knew a tax evader and it took seven years before the IRA came crashing down on him and, boy, did they come after him with literal guns blazing. Damn fool tried to hold off several law enforcement agencies in an armed attempt to hold on to a large farm with his underground bank of guns and ammo. Damn Fool could have sold off some acres to cover what he owed but instead he lost it all and earned himself prison sentence for his siege.

The inside of his house was a hoarder situation. A well organized hoard with one room dedicated to just post cards in filing cabinets so close together you could hardly walk down the aisles. At the time we saw the house I was trying to build a set of woman’s suffrage cards and had been at it for several years. I had just one card left to complete the series of 12 and the guy (one of Don’s work friends) invited us out to see the card. He had many duplicates of the exact card I needed but even offering him $200 for the 1909 Dunston Wellers postcard that, at the time, usually went for $100 wouldn’t get guy to part with one of his. 

After the siege everything he own was auctioned off for pennies on the dollar to pay his debts, losing a farm that had been in his family for four generations. He didn’t believe in paying any form of taxes; he had owed the county, state and federal governments back taxes years before they came prepared with a coordinated effort to haul him off. Oh, ya, I never get past tax time without remembering that crazy, old fool. ©

I did finally complete my set, framed them and now my suffragette postcards are hanging in my half bathroom. Their values have fallen in the past five years---thanks, Marie Kondo---but I still love the memories of hunting for them. (Sorry for the poor quality photo. The colors are bright like the ones at the top. I grabbed that picture off an auction site.)

Time for Fun and a Reality Check

 

St. Patrick’s Day came and went with the usual stories on the local news---green beer at the bars, green cakes in the bakeries, the churches that were servicing up corn beef and cabbage dinners at their fund-raisers. Yadda, yadda yadda. My husband got practically giddy on St. Patrick’s Day. He loved his Irish heritage and it’s funny that I didn’t even know that I’m one quarter Irish until this past winter when I did my genealogy. All those years when he’d haul out his green t-shirt with the “proud to be Irish” logo on it, I could have worn a matching one. Well, at least I could have had green underwear or something to pay homage to those Irish genes that reside alongside my Italian (1/2) and English (1/4) roots. 

The senior hall had their St. Patrick’s Day luncheon this week and you know me, I had to go. It’s such cheap entertainment. Six dollars for dinner, a floor show and people watching 109 souls all wearing green plastic beads and sporting green tongues from eating the contents of the candy cups that lined the tables. If you had the luck of the Irish at your back---which I didn’t on Tuesday---you could even win of one of the fifteen loaves of Irish soda bread they handed out for door prizes.

The floor show was comprised of a fiddle player and a singer/guitar player who did all Irish, Celtic and Gaelic music. If you can picture a big guy with a silly grin and salt and pepper hair that reached to the middle of his back, the top layer of which was tied back into a low ponytail, that was the singer. He also had a long mustache, twinkling dark eyes, a peg leg and he wore a traditional, eight yard tartan kilt and horsehair Gaelic sporran. When the senior hall director introduced the guy in the kilt she said she wanted to talk to his wife because he needed some lessons on how to bend over while wearing a dress. He did it while setting up his equipment and he exposed his whole backside. What fun we had! Mr. Kilt Wearer would stop often in the middle of a song to explain the ancient lyrics or define what certain Gaelic words meant. The two of them got everyone clapping or singing a few times and more than once they’d stop mid-song and back it up because they liked a particular verse (or screwed it up) and “wanted to sing it again.” Crazy, silly stuff like that kept us all laughing. I was lucky enough to find a seat surrounded by six ladies who I know well enough to carry on easy conversations with and that was the frosting on my afternoon cake.

I did find one disagreeable woman at my luncheon table. She’s known for knitting her way through every event she attends at the senior hall which, Tuesday, sparked a conversation about knitting and crocheting projects several of us had worked on over the winter. I made the comment that I’ve tried many times over my life to learn how to crochet and I just can’t do it and I blamed it on being left-handed. She’s says, “That’s a royal crock of bull! I’m left-handed and I learned how to do it.” I responded, “I even took a class last year and it didn’t stick any longer than it did when I was a teenager trying to learn from my mother.” “Bull!” she says again, “you’re not trying hard enough.” I didn’t want to get into a fight with a total stranger so I didn’t get snippy back at Ms. Disagreeable and I’m glad I didn’t. As the afternoon progressed I realized that she didn’t have a good thing to say about anything, including the very entertaining singer and his side-kick fiddle player. I hope I never grow up to be like her. Does she ever listen to herself, ever see herself in the mirror? Of course, not. She’s too busy knitting to see herself through the eyes of those around her.

Change of Topic---well, sort of: My niece came back north from spending the winter in Florida and we had a long conversation on the phone in which I told her I’d be very proud to call her and his sister my daughters. They’ve both turned into such great women, raised good kids and are such a pleasure to be around. She said, “Then we’ll have to come up with a new term like niece-daughters.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as sister-wife but I love the idea. I have the young friend I call the-son-I-wish-had so I’m going to start introducing my nieces this way: “This is my niece, the daughter I wish I had.” After talking with my oldest niece I texted my other niece and informed her of her new title and she texted back, “Very cool!” I love my family and I just wanted to give them as much space in this post as I gave to Ms. Disagreeable. But I still wish someone or something would give Ms. Disagreeable a reality check that would penetrate her narrow mind with this message: Cheerful, loving people trump the disagreeable naysayers of the world and they always will. Nana nana nana. ©