B f L Day 13: Happy Day o'the Green!

I'm not Irish. And I don't drink beer. And bright green isn't really my color. So why on earth am I doing a St Patrick's Day post?

 [Ignore the 40 days of blogging pressure, and scraping bottom for ideas...]

 Because it's a really cool story, that's why!

 My 10 minutes of research has proven that this Saint Patrick had a very interesting life! Let's look at some of it, shall we?

  1. This tradition dates back to around 400 a.d. That's a long freaking time ago, and yet the legend continues!
  2. At 16, Patrick was captured by pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland. His owner was a pagan priest of Druidism. He escaped after about six years of slavery.
  3. He entered the priesthood in France, and after about 20 years, was allowed to go to Ireland to convert the pagans there. In his years there, he converted thousands to Christianity.
  4. He is said to have used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the holy trinity. 
  5. The legend that St Patrick banished all the snakes from Ireland is usually discounted because snakes don't live on islands that were glaciers at one point. But it's a good story.
  6. March 17th is widely believed to be the date of his death, and is widely celebrated with feasting. And green beer. 
"If they can dye it green one day, why can't they dye it blue the rest of the year?"
There ya go -- a little trivia for your St Patty's day celebration. I hope you're wearing something green!

And let's all hope that this really IS the sign that spring is almost here!

Comments

  1. TanveeMarch 18, 2014 at 5:25 AM

    We never celebrated St Patty's day back home now that I am in London people celebrate it and I was just reading all about it, very interesting and people do make it lot of fun...thanks for sharing :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Calories and Weight Watchers.

What I've never understand about the Weight Watchers program (in any version, and I've done them all) is that it does not count calories. Anyone who has ever dieted has memorized the "calories in/calories out" mantra, but here's a hugely popular and successful program that completely ignores the calorie count of food. How can that even work? [For anyone who has not tried or read about WW, the current system counts fat, carbs, fiber, and protein, and assigns a point value to the serving of food. You're given a set number of points to use per day, with additional ones for activity minutes, and a bonus bank for the week. Stay within your points, and you'll lose weight.] So I tried an experiment. For about a week, I tracked my food on WW and on sparkpeople (dot) com -- an awesome FREE site that I highly recommend. I entered the same foods, the same quantities in order to see what, if any, correlation there might be. WW gives 26 points a day. Sparkpeople ...
Read more

Cheese, glorious cheese.

Image
I totally love cheese. On stuff. By itself. Any kind (except Limburger, of course). Melted, cubed, sliced, crumbled. If it weren't for cheese (oh, and bacon) I could probably be vegan. But anyway... If you've been on many diets, and especially if you've done Weight Watchers, you already know that cheese is not exactly friendly to most point-counting or calorie-watching plans. It does have an offset with protein and calcium, but I realized it's probably worth a little research.  First, a visual. This is one ounce of each of these cheeses. Generally, an ounce is a serving size - a sandwich slice, a string cheese stick, those single serve snacks in a bag -- most of those are one ounce. It's a little hard to tell in a picture, but the "bars" like Gouda and Havarti look like about the same amount in an ounce, but parmesan looks like a much more when it's piled up like this. Lesson #1 : All cheese is not created equal. It's hard to tell by ...
Read more

All the food!

Image
Hello, strangers on the interweb! I'm still alive! I still have my Blogger account. Now you can all breathe a little easier.  There are probably a dozen topics I need to write about, including how the child decided she was adult enough to move out of my house to college, of all things, but I can't do that one yet. Maybe in a couple of years.... BUT, apparently, I decided to cope with that change by cooking all the food...and eating all the food...and taking pictures of all.the.food! Here's what's been cooking at the hacienda.   I'd love to tell you that I just made all these up myself. Then I could start a new career, but this was way easier than that. I clicked a random link one day -- gatheredtable.com is my new life-saving menu planner site! You really should check it out. I've not made anything yet that we haven't liked. You can import your own recipes or ones from anywhere on the web and they'll work into the rotation. Cha...
Read more