'Twas the night before St. Patrick's Day

...when all through the house, not a dish or sock was clean, not even a blouse.

'Blouse' is on the do-not-use word list.

Tonight we shall eat our corned beef and cabbage. It is an organized effort whereby each member of the family must be consulted about a time they can come to partake. My mother, who assembles the meal each year, is not even remotely Irish. The rest of us probably are a smidgen. We were more Irish before I found my genealogical blunder in January.

I like corned beef. I also like the Reubens that result from its leftovers. My brother was so excited he volunteered to purchase the sauerkraut. (Now, is a Reuben German or Irish? Sauerkraut certainly does not seem to be Irish.)

Yesterday we were going so stir-crazy at work that we -- the editorial assistant and I -- decided to give the 'new' (two months) lady a tour of downtown. This consisted of making a bee-line for the assistant's favorite coffeeshop and quickly marching past everything else with a half-baked explanation. Tomorrow, one of them later said, we will need to make three coffee runs (asst. usually does one, yesterday two). It seems unusually dead with the reporter gone -- there are six cubicles, and she was in the middle row, and the other person in the middle is the sports guy who's never in 'til mid afternoon. So we're always standing up now, hollering over the walls to each other, bored and unmotivated. This will come up to bite us quite soon as we start trying to cover the extra beats.

Clouds again today.