St. Patrick's Day

I don't remember when it all started but I have been a huge fan of St. Patrick's Day for quite some time.  I'm not Irish, I've never been to Ireland, and I'm a teetotaler.  But my love for the color green makes up for all of those things and so I just get REALLY excited when March comes around each year.  I think it's just a fun, silly holiday too.  I like the folklore with it all.  It's just awesome, ok?
I try to wear green every day of the month leading up to the 17th.  Thanks to my mom I have enough socks to make that possible even at work.  I heard about a 5k race at one of the parks here in town and told my friend Larissa about it.  She was really excited about doing it but then I was kind of wimping out.  First of all it was gonna cost a whole $15 - but you didn't even get a shirt (that's basically why I like to do races, or at least pay for them).  So I kind of was having second thoughts about that.  Then she found out about another one through a different gym.  Two St. Patty's 5k's.  In Williston.  I was extremely impressed.  Well, long story short, the second one was free but you could pay for a shirt (they didn't have extra's anyways).  In the morning it was like 7 degrees and I again was rethinking my desire to go.  But she was already up and at 'em so thanks to her I got out of bed looking forward for a chance to wear every ounce of green I could.

It was a very informal race - not timed, no official start or finish line - but it was fun to see people there and some dressed up.  And I was happy Williston was putting some stuff on.  Hopefully over the next few years we are here we will see more of things like this - with even better turn out and more legit!

Sunday morning I woke up to a leprechaun surprise!  I got Tanner a green goodie bag filled with green snacks and a cool green golf shirt.  He got me something I've been wanting for quite some time...

So awesome and thoughtful of him!  He's really hoping for some green at the golf course so he can be lookin' good with his new shirt!  I hope that day happens soon.  I think we all could use more green in our lives at this point!

The other great thing about Sunday morning was green waffles (except Tanner doesn't do artificial coloring so his was normal but they were both still DELICIOUS!)

Last year Tanner gave me a sweet green skirt for our anniversary - I think in hopes that I'd have a cute green thing to wear and not have to dress up ridiculously.  It didn't quite work out in his favor.  He gets a little embarrassed by me.  Don't know why... 

I didn't wear all of this to church though, just in case anyone was wondering. 


 I like to sucker other people into celebrating too as much as I can so I like to have green parties.  Our single wide trailer isn't the most conducive to partying, so I got our friend's the McBride's to agree to put on a party with me and have the party at their house.  Nikki is a master at stuff like that anyway.  I went over the week before to help make a rainbow pinata.  All things were set to go until the snow came again to Williston and cancelled Nikki's flight back into town.  Her husband Mike was still game for throwing the party so we went with it, while Nikki enjoyed warmer days in Denver ;)  There was a great turn out and we had a lot of fun!

 Getting all lined up for the pinata part of the evening.  It was a little chaotic with all of the kids but Mike handled it like a champ and the kids seemed to enjoy it.  The pinata was filled with all manner of gold chocolate candies (rolo's, kiss's, snickers, reese's cups) and looking back - chocolate all over the place with little kids warm hands probably wasn't the best idea, although it worked nicely as a pot of gold. 

The picture at the beginning of the blog is from the party too.  Nikki made that sweet backdrop so we took pictures of almost everyone's families that came in front of it.  I need more photography skills because I couldn't get my camera to compensate very well for the less than perfect lighting.  Oh well.  It was fun taking pictures.  All in auto mode.  I should start making more time to study photo and practice and such.  I'd love to get a little better.  Maybe after I've mastered spanish and memorized the piano songs I want and improved on the harmonica and so forth.  Williston isn't even bad because there's a million things that I want to do that it doesn't even matter where we are.  Now if work could just get out of the way ;)

Finally - just a little fish update.  We've had some further mishaps in our water baby world.  We lost another little blue glo fish.  And both our crabs.  Those are like the coolest things to watch.  But they kept trying to get out of the tank.  They'd spend a lot of time up at the top of our filter.  Then all of a sudden one just was dead.  Then the other day we came home and saw this...

We pushed him back in and he wandered around and did his thing for a few more days.  But then this  morning Tanner found him D-E-D dead.  Wonder what we're missing with this crustacean business.  Maybe we better do some investigating before dumping a few more in the tank. It's been a little bit sad actually.  I kind of get a bit attached to the little things.