Greetings, everyone on this St. Patrick’s Day! I’m writing to you from the other side of a seemingly long (though actually kind of short) week. Not so much at work, though that’s had it’s own drama (it’s not every day the CIO of an organization gets shown the door seemingly without warning mid-week – I’m still waiting to see how the fallout is going to affect my corner of things), but due to the the rampant illness around the house; my wife *finally* seems to have yanked herself out of a flu coma as of yesterday afternoon, after being down for the count since Saturday night. I’ve also got a teenage boy down with a similar affliction, including a nasty, painful sounding cough.

As a result of this, I’ve had my schedule all kinds of shaken up; I took Monday off because it was clear my wife wasn’t able to care for herself, and have shifted my schedule ahead about 90 minutes most of this week in order to make sure the non-ill (knock on wood or whatever surface is handy) children get off to school with clothes on and lunches packed (also driving the still-gimpy eldest). This, combined with running them off to various after-school activities and the time change last weekend have thrown my equilibrium off (to the point that I ended up sitting down on my bed for a few minutes after I got home on Wednesday and had to be woken up three hours later to take a kid to the dance studio).

But as far as I can tell, I’m not sick.

As it’s St. Patrick’s Day week, the girls do have a couple of Irish dance events around the community here and there, but not as many as I’d expect (that’s next weekend, with both the Church Hill Irish Festival and the Virginia Dance Festival on deck). Our big dance event this weekend didn’t involve my folks actually performing, but heading out as a group with a pack of maybe 80 other folks from HoI heading out to the Carpenter Theater to catch Rockin’ Road to Dublin, a touring Irish music and dance revue run by a friend of the company.

photo courtesy of my wife

It was a good show, with many talented performers and dancers, and really well put together, although the sound mix was, unfortunately, way off; for a show with “Rockin'” in the title and a big medley of classic rock tunes in the middle, you ought to be able to hear the band beyond the fiddles – I know the focus is on the dancing, really, so maybe not turn the guitars up to eleven, but at least, say seven or eight (and if the band was cranked, the “sweetening” the show pipes in to support the hard shoe stuff wouldn’t be as obvious). We had a good time, everybody was terribly impressed with the skill of the performers, and everybody enjoyed a night out, regardless of the plague rolling through the family (both mine, and the extended dance family).

Anyway; I hope you all enjoy your St. Patty’s day weekend, however you choose to celebrate (or not). I’ve got some music-y stuff to do (I’m hoping to knock out some quickie “live ’round the mic” JHX tracks on Saturday morning so we have at least something to sell to the adoring fans for the upcoming gigs), an oil change to have done, and ideally, some quality couch time at least starting Iron Fist on Netflix (reviews be damned, I’m still watching) and maybe catching up on some of the classic MST3K riffs that just showed up online. We’ll see.

Anyway, here’s some music; the music out of the Pandora mix seems to skew heavily toward innocuous 80s pop this week, which I guess is okay:

1. Sunglasses at Night – Corey Hart
2. Ashes to Ashes – David Bowie
3. Pygmy Twylyte – Dweezil Zappa
4. Manic Monday (extended remix) – The Bangles
5. I Am Over Here – Eerie Wanda
6. I Get Weak – Belinda Carlisle
7. Your Love – The Outfield
8. Treacherous Cretins (live guitar solor) – Frank Zappa
9. Turn Up The Radio – Autograph
10. Dog Days Are Over – Florence + The Machine
11. The Hunt – Grand Magus

Have a good weekend, everybody!

Sláinte!