Saint Patrick's Day 2015

St. Patrick's Day festivities are behind the tinsel screen

We've often been in Florida on March 17, but it still feels odd to try to keep a beer cold in the hot sun. I don't celebrate much, partly because I've usually had to work the next day and I've never been able to go out on what I still think of as  "school nights". Of course, there have been a few exceptions, including an evening of far too many Irish coffees at the Ritz Carlton in Montreal, way back in the early 70s. The terrible hangover was a warning that some of us should stick to tamer beverages, drunk in moderation, even on a day of crazy excess like St. Patrick's Day in North America.




St. Patrick's Day afternoon in Gulfport

Bob likes to have corned beef and cabbage, as he did for many years with his brother-in-law Larry Longley. A group of the guys used to go out together for the parade in downtown St. Paul and do a kind of pub crawl, which included corned beef sometime in the evening. When Larry moved to New Mexico, I became the "next best" parade companion, so I'd take the afternoon off but our pub crawling was limited. I started making the corned beef and cabbage myself. Times change.

Yesterday we drove across Boca Ciega Bay to Gulfport for lunch, where the bay area was crowded but not raucous. Here in Florida, people prefer outdoor tables so we easily got a table indoors at O'Maddy's. Since we spend most of our day outdoors, I enjoy the cool break from the sun. We split a meal of corned beef and cabbage, and I was surprised that it was so tasty. The green Bud for Bob was an unpleasant surprise, but my Guinness was refreshing and good.


Peeps for the day

The people in the tent outdoors were mostly retirees out for a quiet afternoon, dressed in the paraphernalia of the day. They didn't seem to are that most of the music wasn't Irish at all, though it was live and not too bad. It was pleasant to have room to circulate and a place to sit down in the tent or on the benches outside, facing the bay. We topped off our afternoon with a beer at Woody's, where we had spent a rainy St. Patrick's Day last year.

Bob's afternoon wound down on the deck with a cigar. The pool was too much for me to resist, especially as the sun moved to the other side of the building and the sunbathers left the area.