St. Paddy's Day bucket list

For 2017, I made a bucket list of things to do for every holiday, and the things on the list for St. Patrick's Day had to be accomplished between February 15 and March 17. St. Patrick's Day is my second-least favorite holiday, since it seems a little pointless, but there's still something fun about it. Here are the ways I accomplished the items on the bucket list. (As I often do, I like to take a theme and then fit everything that happened within that theme. So forgive me for the tangents.)

Wear green. This one was very easy; early on in the season, I fulfilled it by wearing a green tie. But I can't let it go just with that. Twice this week (once at a St. Patrick's Day party and once at a free BYU Vocal Point concert) I was decked out from head to toe. I bought some prescription glasses with green frames from the internet. I don't love how they look, but oh well. On previous St. Patrick's Days, I would wear these old Taiwanese glasses with green lenses--but I got those in 2006, so you can imagine how hard it was to see in them. I opted for clear lenses this time. I have two different green t-shirts (one is a four-leaf clover that says "May the road rise up to meet you" and the other says "Irish-ish* *When I'm wearing this shirt"). I have some poor-quality green pants that I got in 2012. I have green socks with Irish flags on them. And I have neon green Vans shoes that I got three years ago! (Seriously, it blows my mind what happened three years ago. That's when I graduated from BYU! At the Vocal Point concert, they said that all of the members of the group were born in the 90s. I was born in the 80s. I feel old. Also, three years ago, my mom broke her leg. My dad would tease her by limping, and it got so it was a habit, and he still often limps. Yesterday, he broke his foot, but I am so used to seeing him limp that it is hard to remember he is actually injured.)

Pinch someone not wearing green. There's only one day when it's socially acceptable to do this, and that's March 17 itself. I was a little worried about finding someone not wearing green who I could pinch. Well, at work I was invited to a luncheon in honor of the 175th anniversary of the Relief Society. An editor who I used to work with sat by me, and as he admired my green glasses, shamrock tie, and green slacks (different from my other brighter green pants), he remarked that he wasn't wearing green. So while we were standing in line for food, I explained my bucket list item while I pinched him on the ear. At the luncheon, we heard from Rosetti Bahati, the Relief Society president of Salt Lake's Swahili branch, who is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was certainly interesting to spend a holiday celebrating a white culture by hearing a talk translated from Swahili and hearing a choir sing hymns in Swahili while decked out in traditional African dresses and head wraps. (Most of the people were African, but there were a couple of white women also wearing the same style of clothing.) It was a really neat experience to hear firsthand the story of a refugee who went through a lot of hardships.

Go to an Irish concert. At work, a few employees get together during a lunch hour around in March to play Irish music. They're just amateurs, so the quality isn't the greatest, but it's free and convenient and fun enough. There was one old man there whose phone started ringing during the performance, so rather than just silencing his ringer and ignoring the call, he actually answers in the middle of the performance and says, "I'll call you back!" I'm pretty sure this same man did the same thing during a different presentation, and that was even ruder, because someone was speaking rather than just playing music. It would be easy to dismiss it as a generational thing, since he didn't grow up with cell phones, but I don't think that's right, because most people of his generation wouldn't do such a thing. Why, even in the pilot episode of Get Smart, Max's shoe phone went off in the middle of a concert, and he went out in the hall to answer it, and that was even before cell phones. (But maybe that wasn't for politeness but rather so he wouldn't blow his spy cover.)

Go to a St. Patrick's Day parade. This is the only item I didn't actually accomplish. But I tried. See, while I will celebrate holidays a month in advance, my celebratory traditions take the form of "When it's over, it's over." And breaking with years of tradition, they decided to hold the Salt Lake St. Patrick's Day parade after the holiday, March 18, when I've already moved on to Easter. (I don't like the holiday enough to go the day after.) In fact, all St. Paddy's Day parades in Utah were scheduled for March 18. So I began looking into other parades. I thought about San Francisco and taking my nephews, but I didn't think my nephews would like it, and my brother would make fun of me, and getting to downtown S.F. sounded like a big hassle. I honestly began planning a trip to Spokane, WA, my old stomping grounds, but I was running out of time and couldn't find anyone to go with me, and I was feeling nervous when I thought about it. I guess it's just as well, since I was pretty cynical when I went to Salt Lake's parade in 2012. However, even if I wasn't going to see an actual parade, I did decide to celebrate on St. Paddy's Day by going to the parade route.

I walked through the Gateway where they had already closed parts of the road. And near where the parade was to start, there was a green line on the road. I'm not sure if it was there for this parade, but I assume it was. They clearly were setting up for the parade, and I went there in my green clothes from work, so it kind of counts for my bucket list. That was actually the second time this week I was at the Gateway--my cousin Tammy was in town, and so my niece and I joined her family at the Mystery Escape Room. It was fun, though I didn't feel terribly helpful. We escaped with 20 seconds left, but I think the host was helping a bit too much at that point, so maybe it wasn't quite fair.

Eat green-dyed food. In the last few years, I've started making corned beef and cabbage, but when I was growing up, we would always just dye our food green for Paddy's Day. In the last few years, I've preferred unique flavors that go with the colors, rather than just the colors. So I had a variety of green flavors throughout the season, including mint,

 pistachio,

pistachio on the left, mint on the right

 apple,

 avocado,

 and pickle.

But seriously, that packaging is the stuff of nightmares.

See shamrocks (or similar plants). I saw alfalfa growing as a weed on Presidents' Day, and that counted as a "similar plant." But on St. David's Day, I bought this shamrock plant. After I got it home, I worried, because it had wilted pretty quickly. But then I discovered something interesting about it. When it was sunny, the flowers would be wide open and the shamrock leaves would be spread out, but when it was dark, the flowers would close and the shamrock leaves would be limp. Neat, huh?