St.. Paddy's day....almost

Faith and begorra, the little people are about to have their day!
As a youngster St. Patrick's Day was a big day in the Rhode household. My mother was half Irish and half Scottish so Gaelic traditions were big for us. On March 17th we would wake up to a breakfast of green cereal with green milk and green sugar. We wore uniforms to school so we had to wear green underwear and use a shamrock tie clip to keep the tie in place. For dinner we would have corned beef and cabbage and if we were lucky and one of my great aunts was coming over we would have black pudding which is a kind of hard pudding made with Irish oatmeal and blood. Ma always made a big deal about her Irish ancestry and the Irish holiday traditions but barely mentioned anything of the German side of me so I didn't even know about Fasching, which is the German equivalent of Mardi Gras, until I lived in Germany for a year while in the Army. Boy! did we miss out on a lot. When I started my own family I tried to carry on some of the green theme of my youth but my kids were too smart. NO WAY would they eat or drink anything that wasn't supposed to be green.

I started work on a new website last week. I volunteered to maintain the Willow Health Organization web page but some of the stuff the President, Nina, and Treasurer, Mary, wanted were not available to us on that site. First I created a new site on my web server at home which was OK for some things but the way it is done hides it from search engines so it was not a perfect solution. I then looked into registering our own domain and starting a whole new website. This actually works out much better and really isn't that expensive. We now even have our own email domain so that makes it kind of neat. It also has a wizard for web creation so the new site looks much more professional then what I was doing on either of the old sites.

The new car I helped Scott with a few weeks ago ended up being one that had been in an accident at some point in it's life. I noticed when I drove it home for Scott that the airbag light didn't go out. He finally had a chance to have a mechanic check it out and found the airbag had been replaced with one from the junk yard and really didn't work. The wiring harness for the heater was also shredded so his heater didn't work right. Otherwise, the car seems to be great. He even appologized on his blog for driving the Civic for the last few years without studs and holding everyone up during the winter.

Mary is getting ready to give a class on making a quilted backpack to women in the Willow area. It is a back pack she made from plans that her sister Pike sent her. She completed her's around Christmas and has had many compliments on it.

Today is animal food day. I have to go into Wasilla to pick up animal supplies which is kind of a big deal since I almost never go even that far anymore. I've got a whole list of stuff that I have to do so I had better get a move on it.