Shamrock Club Picnic 2026

 

Today I worked from home again, but my coworkers have been going in for half a day, so tomorrow I will try. In the evening I went to the annual Shamrock Club picnic alone, since this summer Travalon is working very late on Wednesdays. It was a very hot day, but there was a breeze in the pavilion where a band called the O'Darbys played Irish tunes and I sat with my buddy and the guy who dresses as a leprechaun. The couple we see everywhere was there, as well as the couple we saw at the yacht rock concert, and a very cool couple I don't remember meeting before who live in France and only come to visit for a few weeks every summer. Since they didn't have a car, I ended up giving them a ride back to their place. I brought our favorite Late July tortilla chips, but they weren't even opened. Fortunately the desserts were store-bought and not tempting, but I still went way over my calorie limit today with the deviled eggs and pasta salad and those little sandwiches like what they have at funeral luncheons. I did not stick to the Mediterranean diet tonight! After coming home, I took a walk in the neighborhood and loved how this purple clematis looked in the twilight.

Contrast that with this photo I took of Jolly Bob yesterday. It looks like a Dr. Seuss plant now. It used to have more leaves - I'm not sure what happened. I was looking back at photos of my big plants from fifteen years ago, and they all had more leaves. Now they are all so leggy. Do they not get enough light anymore?

They are also like three times as big as they were back then, besides having one-third the number of leaves. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but what?

Here are some photos Travalon took in Ridgeway last Thursday. I believe these are the old depot, an old caboose you can go into, the church where we once went to a spaghetti dinner with Cecil Markovitch, and some graffiti.

I don't know what the money-eyed lizard represents, but I feel like I've seen him before. If you see enough train graffiti, you start to notice patterns. Around here, it's always "Puck" or "Amor" or "4AL." Maybe they are local artists. I did look up how to make a tag, and wouldn't you know that Google tells you how to do it? I swear that you can find anything on the internet.

Famous Hat