A carnival of technology

I haven’t given much thought to St. Patrick’s Day yet this year.  Tuesday is kind of an awkward date for it.  I guess for some last Saturday made the most sense for the Irish stereotype celebrations, but I don’t know.  It seems like pushing things that early could be bad luck.  I’ve got all of the ingredients for the traditional Irish-American meal, so I figure I’ll just toss those in a crock pot on Tuesday and watch The Quiet Man.

I wasn’t wearing the green this Saturday, but I did start drinking at noon.  A friend from high school made a trip to the A this Saturday, which began with tapas and sangria for lunch and ended with me going home with an IKEA bookshelf and the new Lily Allen CD.  There was some other stuff in there too, I think.

As for the rest of the weekend, I think I’ve hit the point where my misplaced ambition as far as plants has gone far enough.  Last year I did pretty well with growing basil and oregano, I did ok enough with a mint sprig I bought from the grocery store and got to take root, and the garlic that I planted way too early, aiming for this year (it didn’t occur to me that first freeze in Georgia doesn’t mean it’s going to stay frozen) grew some scapes that made a nice extra touch in the stuffed squash I made for Thanksgiving.  So I’ve proven that I can grow some things that can be used to delicious effect, and obviously that means I should completely overdo it this time around.  I now have parsley, rosemary, thyme (no sage, at least not yet), cilantro, the mint from last year, some oregano cuttings from the old plant that I’m hoping will root, some basil, tomato and serano peppers planted from seed (not sure if the basil is going to work, I’ll just buy another plant if not), a couple of decorative plants that are supposed to do ok inside in low light, and some more garlic.  I don’t know what’s going to come of all of this, but I bet it’s going to taste fantastic.

These past couple few weeks sure were miserable.  But I don’t want to talk about all the miserable things, like how I got ripped off by the car dealership because of a gas tank design flaw and because I want to pass emissions in a couple of months; or how the call center the dealership uses for surveys woke up my ass up on a Saturday morning and didn’t leave a message, and then continued calling all through the week until I finally picked up and gave them a good rating since I know if I don’t they’ll just call again to ask why; or how I forgot that I need to swerve toward the traffic lane on the way home in order to dodge that pile of jagged debris on the city border—detritus that may have been cars in some past and is now ignored by a pair of municipalities hoping that it’s the other one’s problem—and slashed right through the kevlar threads on one of my expensive German tires; or how I haven’t been able to get to my checking account, since my old card is disabled thanks to the Heartland breach, but the PIN for the new card was lost in the mail. or how the nicer weather means that I have to deal with the lycra-wearing assholes—the lowest and most obnoxious form of human life—any time I get on a bike.  I want to talk about happier things.

There are a good number of roads around here with bicycle lanes, but they tend to be pretty busy.  I usually avoid them because they don’t go where I want to go, and the Lance wannabes avoid them because they can’t get away with riding 15 abreast.  We both often end up on a road that goes mostly parallel to the railway, a relatively flat north-south street with light traffic.  I noticed that for some reason the carbon-fiber lycra brigade usually turns around at a particular point, and I have no idea why.  Maybe they all have their cycle computers set to a particular distantce.  I don’t know.  I decided to keep going.  I kept going until I ran out of road, and at the end of the road there was a bearded man wearing overalls and selling vegetables.  Then I went back.  At the other end of the road, just before the final turn toward home, there is a shop that sells strawberry ice cream and Orange Crush made with real sugar.  So today was pretty nice.