Happy St Patrick's Day

As I write this blog, it is, in fact, still St Patrick's Day in Hawaii. It gave me a good excuse to have corned beef and cabbage for dinner, since the Shepherd's Pies we had last night weren't as good as we had hoped (a minor blip in the quality control of the shops where we usually get our dinner pies).

You can see there is even enough of food left for a post-celebration lunch.

Despite the busy week and attendant disorganisatoin, we did manage have (several) shandies in the green freezer mugs that Heidi gave us and while we don't have any green clothing, I wore shamrock earrings. I wore blue tonight, which according to some information I found on the internet, was original colour for St Patrick's Day. I suspect it has to do with the original liturgy, but I'd have to do some real research.

Oops, I'd better go put my Sullivan clan pin on quickly before Hawaii runs out of holiday.

It's raining hailstones

We had an enormous storm system run through the area yesterday. Winds, rain, and huge hailstones were the order of the day.

I don't have any cool pictures of hailstones, because they managed to fall in the city, rather than here. The neatest pictures show hail lying like a blanket of snow on the ground, but then the downside is that hail is rather destructive. There was quite a bit of damage to homes, buidings and cars, major events were cancelled, and flooding abounded. Even some friends of mine got caught in the downpour, and got nicely bruised, cut and soaked.

Amazingly, we received 2/3 of the month's worth of rain in just 1 hour yesterday. We're hoping that the enormous amount will help the dam levels.

Events of the weekend included a trip to the Ham Radio club on Saturday, hiding from the weather yesterday, and a day off today (labour day) with and Andrew busily constructing a new mobile table for the bbq, after the second-hand, non-outdoor particleboard trolley it was on disintegrated after a year and half of sitting in all sorts of weather. The new one is actually meant to be outside. I'll bet it's probably hail-resistant, which means it can be used during these major storms...as long as we have our helmets, knee pads, elbow pads and face-guards!