Wearin' Of the Green

OK, so I'm not wearing green today. I'm not Irish but I'm married to an Irishman. My kids feel Irish on St. Patrick's day so we have always celebrated and more often than not I wear green and the Irish husband doesn't.

When I was young, it was a good excuse to drink and stay up late. When the kids were little, it was a good reason to make a cake or cookies with green icing. Today, I'll get taken out to dinner and will probably have a beer.

We are eating out not because it's St. Patrick's day but because our son is looking for a house and once in a while he wants our input. We're glad to do it and appreciate that he still respects our opinion. He's not had the Irish luck though unless it's bad. Everything seems to be going wrong but I have Swedish optimism and tell him to keep looking on the bright side. Today we'll see if it pays off.

Our daughter bought us all an Irish button for today. It says "Member of the Irish Drinking Team." I am the token Swede on the team. She named us that after we came to visit her and found we all had something in common--wine tastings and beer tastings!!! Not too shabby! We all think it is pretty funny! We'd all have better figures if we were members of The Irish Hiking club but Fate has handed us this commonality and we're going with it.

If you are Irish or not, a drinker or not, a hiker or not, have a happy St. Patrick's Day and remember on this day, everybody is Irish. Welcome to the team!

It's So Taxing

OHMYGOSH!!!!!!!!!! I hate doing my taxes. I always have a giant stomach ache while I do it and I really shouldn't. It is so easy to e-file these days and I keep all my receipts and I never have much of a problem.

Even if you goof, it kind of catches you and you can re-e-file with no problem. Can you guess that I goofed this year?? It was just a misunderstanding of a term so I am not in trouble or anything but my stomach feels like the IRS is going to come pounding on my door at any moment. Honest mistakes are forgiven right??

I never did our taxes while I was still working but since I retired and since you could do it on line and basically be walked right through it I started doing them about 4 years ago. I've done fine too. Even this year.

I thought I would feel a whole lot better if I wrote about it but the funny thing is I don't really. I should probably erase this whole thing and stop thinking about my shortcomings but this blog is about what is on my mind and believe me, this is on my mind!!

I have to give myself a giant pep talk and try to accept my foibles and mistakes and move on. Think I'll move on to Florida in a couple of weeks. Yep, that's the ticket..and I'll have my refund to keep me warm(in case FLA has crappy weather while I'm there)!!

A Swing and A Miss

YIKES!!! What were these women thinking?? Poor Charlize Theron looks like somebody played a trick on her and put those mittens over her boobies...and she wore it! Have to give her credit for guts.

The girl from Avatar looks spectacular from the knees up but what is with the stuff at the bottom of her gown?? What is that stuff?? It looks like fake leis from the craft store....except giant. I don't know how she even walked in it.

The woman from Up In The Air just looked plain old ugly. The dress may have been beautiful in real life but it wasn't for her and she should have left it on the hanger.

Remember yesterday that I said I think some of the stylists hate the stars?? I'm pretty sure these ones did!

Dressing Up

Dressing up is not my thing so I admire when the stars do it well. A lot of the gowns were beautiful but these were my favorites. Kate Winslet was my pick for the best. I thought she looked beautiful. It was simple and elegant and let her beauty shine.

Queen Latifah is always one of my favorites. She is such a beautiful girl and the dress she was wearing was so gorgeous. Her lovely lavender dress had just enough glitz and the glitz curved around her body in a most flattering way.

My biggest surprise was Gabourey from Precious. I have only seen her in very casual, college type clothing so it was wonderful to see her so dressed up and looking beautiful. She is a big girl and that dress was very flattering and the most lovely shade of blue. The bling was there but in just the right amount.

Some of the older women made a big splash too. Meryl Streep was gorgeous and age appropriate in her white gown. Helen Mirren also hit the mark in her dress. I loved the glittery but sheer sleeves. She looked lovely.

Sometimes I think the stylists hate the stars and convince them to wear something that is totally ugly or inappropriate but these women had stylists who respected them and their bodies.

I'm all for that.

Losing Face(book)

They all said that Facebook was not for my generation but did I listen?? I had friends my age who were on--my sis was on--what could possibly be the harm ? Oh, I should have listened to them because now I lost face on Facebook and it's my own fault.
Really, it's the fault of some stupid app and my own ignorance of apps. It asked you to answer a bunch of real silly questions about your facebook friends and the upshot was you could see what they said about you. Well, you had to answer 50 questions(or so I thought) and there were too boxes under each question which said-don't contact my friend(or something like that) and the other one was Post this as a poll. Well, I didn't want to put a bunch of crap on my friends pages so I clicked no and I sure didn't want to start any polls so I checked not to do that either...or so I thought.
I answered those really dumb 50 questions-skipped the really inappropriate ones-and then I had to answer 50 more and didn't realize you had to check the boxes AGAIN! So I accidentally posted some polls which I never wanted to do or meant to do and they were so stupid I was totally embarrassed. One was about a student at my old school who I didn't even have but I remembered him, ran into him recently and became Facebook friends. His poll was Did you think he was strong?? Lame, right? One poll was about a friend of my daughter--if you thought she was funny. I didn't even know it was posted until she kidded me about it.
I was able to remove some from my page(Thank the Lord for that) but because of the one about my daughter's friend I'm not sure how many got out before I started checking those damn boxes again.
SO my face is red. I accept the responsibility for those dumb posts and if I can do anything to make it better just let me know right here at this blog and I will try to make amends.
Just sign me Faceless on Facebook!

So THAT"S Why They Call It A Puck

During the USA/Canada hockey game, I became fascinated by the game. How does anyone ever keep up with what's going on?

That puck goes so fast and unpredictably I can't believe that anyone can even find it let alone hit it.

I noticed that it is the only sport where hitting it to the opponent wasn't a tragedy. As a matter of fact it happened more often than not.

They were spitters too. Just like baseball players. What is up with that? It looked like they were spitting little pieces of ice but I'm sure it was something else.

Plus there was some violent behavior but it didn't seem so bad when the players were dressed in so much padding. Actually, I love that about hockey--the fighting and slamming, I mean.

I only watched the last 4 minutes of the last period and the OT and I had a headache from keeping up with the action. When the Canadians scored the last goal and the announcer shouted that he scored all I could think was "He did?" Good thing they show the replays from different angles!

Not to be a traitor or anything, but I'm glad that the Canadians won. It seemed so important to them. The USA team should be proud too. A silver medal is nothing to sneeze at.

Anyway, all that said, I know why they call it a puck. You know Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream? Puck is in that and he is everything a puck in ice hockey is. He is an unpredictable little scamp that shows up wherever he wants and flits from one person to the next and you never know what he is going to do next. Sound familiar?

PS I am aware the pic above is not from the game. It was the only action pic I could find.

PPS Of course I found one right after I wrote the PS and here it is