Top O' The Llama To Ya

We have children and therefore do lots of things that I didn't exactly ever plan on. For example, I never foresaw that I would need to explain to someone why you wear shoes on your feet instead of stuffing them in your panties, or come up with elaborate stories of why animals really love to sleep right next to the highway. I have played more crappy board games, touched more of the unfun bodily fluids and sat through more talent-free music recitals than a Shanghai river has dead pigs, all in the name of love for AD and the RM. This weekend I added attending the Atlanta St. Patrick's Day parade to that list of sacrifices.

I am not a big parade person in the first place, but since AD has always loved them we've hit a few here and there over the years. We've never taken the RM to one simply because we try not to take her anywhere, that child is just barely fit for public consumption, but Saturday we decided it might not be a terrible idea. The weather's been gorgeous and we had a great spot for viewing - complete with parking, food, bathrooms and alcohol - plus Duke got spanked on Friday night so suddenly our weekend schedule is wide open. We could do worse, right?

                           (On our way downtown. Everyone knows a Pinkalicious crown is the only acceptable parade headgear.)

I don't know what to tell you. This parade did not seem to be very well acquainted with St. Patrick's Day at all. It's like maybe they met in the hallway a couple of times or had a Spanish class together one semester, but they certainly wouldn't consider themselves good friends. This parade didn't even come close to touching SPD's boobs, much less have any true intimate knowledge of it. To be fair it did start off appropriately with flocks of Irish dancers fluttering down Peachtree, followed by a group of irritated looking people wrangling giant shamrock balloons. Then came about eight million fire trucks and police cars, including what we all agreed must have been the entire Sandy Springs fleet; if you had mayhem on your mind on Saturday, then Sandy Springs would have been the place to unleash it because you'd have gotten away handily. I don't exactly understand how any of that's SPD-y, but "Backdraft" had definite Irish undertones as well as a hot lesser Baldwin, so that's good enough for me. After our civil servants came the bagpipers - Scottish, technically, but I get it.

Things started getting a little off topic when the Shriners and their itty bitty cars showed up (when AD saw them she yelled "Mom, those are the people who BURN CHILDREN!" which made me very sad because she really shouldn't believe everything I tell her) and went south quickly from there.

Unless I'm badly misinformed, the llama has traditionally had nothing at all to do with Ireland. Neither have the fake Blues Brothers, Wonder Woman, that bald Six Flags pederast or the random unmarked Jeep that had two canoes strapped to it that came after them. After Baby New Year and a group of Storm Troopers marched by, JHP said "they need to give up the St. Patrick's Day pretense and just call this the 'Let's Day Drink and Watch Random Shit' parade. They'd probably get bigger crowds." What in the hell? Has the modern parade lost all sense of discipline? I can accept the incongruity of an Uncle Sam at the Dragon Con parade because that's random by design, but stay away from my SPD. You already have your own day, sir, stop being such an attention hog. To add insult to injury we didn't even get any candy, not one damn piece. The total haul from the day was a mini Frisbee AD immediately bit a hole in, green beads that we had to confiscate because the RM kept putting them in her butt, a drunken JHP and this thing

It's not even Newcastle (which would have been nicely on point) it's from some industrial materials supplier that I shall, given the chance, boycott the shit out of for their encroachment. Next time I build an office tower y'all are in some dookey, son.

The good news is that the girls actually had a fantastic time. AD was all about hanging out with her friends and taking advantage of the hot chocolate machine and the RM loved that she could be disruptive. She's also somehow decided that the Oldcastle mini-cone keeps monsters out of her room so that's a plus...I'll have to tell AD it will protect her from those firebug Shriners, too.

I hope everyone else had such an entertaining weekend. May the St. force be with you.