Today you get two pictures. St. Patrick’s Day is a weekend long in this town. Then again, this is America, you don’t need much motivation to hold a parade. Everybody gets in on the act and that is why I was looking at a pedal pub a while back. Here’s some sidewalk painting that would be vandalism other times of the year.
I tried to get Dave-O to go watch the parade, but he’s still recovering. They block off downtown and the actual parade is an hour long. How many pipe and drum corps are there in this area if our little town can have six at once? I did notice, mind you, the advancing age of the marchers. Nobody under 50, I’m sure. The military presence was around ten percent. At the other extreme I saw combat veterans who looked maybe 21 on average. They kind of looked like the crowd you’d expect at a beach party on Spring Break. When will we ever learn? It was a perfect day for a parade, partly cloudy, 72 degrees, wind from the west. I had originally went up to Home Depot and, duh, forgot to set my clock ahead. So when I got up at 7:00 AM, it was already 8:00 AM.
That’s partly why I ran into the parade on the way back—I was expecting to go for coffee, then see the parade. Some people look like they had partied straight through since last night. There were no bleachers, so the reality of the matter was only the people standing in the front row got a full view of anything.
Here’s soldiers of what I took to be local volunteers. I have full respect for soldiers, but none for politicians who send them to war. Notice how the columns lack stiff precision, one soldier is visible actually out of step. One expects a certain unit pride, particularly marching down hometown main street. I guess war is not what it used to be. “I used to date a beauty queen, now I love my M-16.”
I’m not the type to stay outside when there is nothing to do. That is, you’ll find he walking cross-country or riding the beach drive, but no sitting around on the patio watching the street. It was the parade, then back home for a glass of ice tea. I have to cancel most trips for the next eight months, giving me time to calculate what a quart of ice tea costs.Work with me. Publix tea identical to Lipton is $2.29 for 48 bags. Sweetener is $3.59 for 100 packets. ReaLemon is $0.99 for enough to make 96 cups. These are 8 oz cups, anyone confused by this is nuts, since a cup is a unit of measurement, not a size. There is no such thing as a small, medium, or large cup. For those who read back far enough, this tea calculation I perform about once per year. It works out to $0.75 cents per quart, or $0.0939 cents per cup, to be exact.
Mind you, I prefer to drink my tea in 6 oz servings, because a full cup gets cold on me before I finish. Thus, my tea costs $0.07 per serving. Also, I make iced tea a lot, which is half as strong, but I drink twice as much. Compare that to a can of Publix diet soda, at $0.25 per 12 oz can. I’ve never graphed the inter-year changes, since such prices have never raised any alarm. Now we know about the price of tea, here’s today’s poser: why isn’t rice in the ethnic food section?
I’ve exhausted my reading material on electronics. Most of it is repetitious beginner’s stuff and a lot of it contains errors, as if the proofreader had no understanding of the basics. My supply of books includes what they have at the local libraries, I have not gone up to Ft. Lauderdale, with the better facilities. But if they have any free parking, I can’t find it. The two branches near here are useless unless you are looking for an awful, awful, lot of self-help books, know what I’m sayin’?
That is why I need a comfortable home base to operate out of. That’s where one can read without interruption. This morning I pretended nobody ever told me deep-fried corn fritters slathered with butter were not diet food, so I ate all dozen for breakfast. What? I left out the egg. Because I didn’t have one. Quiet, or next time I’ll make a cherry pie. If I'd known these were to be restricted on my diet soon, I would have done two dozen.
Now that I’ve got working amplifiers again, I’m considering practice with Jag. Like many performing musicians, I tend to let practice slide when I don’t have any paying gigs. Providing Jag doesn’t mind riding passenger on the scooter, there is no limit to how much time we could put in. He completely grasped the model that we form a tight rhythm duo and the rest will take care of itself. But we never had time to get the adequate mileage behind us. You have to play a song repeatedly before it “becomes your own”.
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