Just because I"m not Irish doesn't mean I can't enjoy

Angel #4 and I went to the Friends of St. Pats/Maple Grove Fall Festival again this year.  This is the 3rd year we've gone, the first one we went to happened shortly after we moved to this area and we thought it would be a good way to get to know the area.  There's a silent auction, musical entertainment, dancing, bake sale and some simple games.  Nothing extravagant and all home grown, done entirely by the Friends of St Pats.  St Pat's is the name of the church where the event takes place.  At one time, it was a thriving Catholic church - there's a sister house and a school also on the property.  The church and nun house are both closed now and are marked as historical buildings while the school has been converted into a home.  Today they did  cemetery reenactments and tours of old family farms in the area. And since just about everyone who lives here (but me, apparently) is Irish, so we had young girls doing traditional Irish dancing, Irish stew on the menu and a whole cemetery full of O'Leary's, Lorrigan's, O' Haloran's, Donohue's etc.  To change things up ethnically a bit, they were also making kolaches on site.  Kolaches are more Czech than Irish (they're like a danish) and the whole church smelled like rising dough and baking bread.  Yum yum!

I found Harry and Adeline's gravesite, they're the people who used to live in our house and Adeline's ghost is the one I blame whenever anything goes missing around here - I forgot to ask her what she did with my Mouli.  I also found out that they raised 7 kids in our house, 6 boys and a girl. I don't know how they all fit in here and I really  don't know why, if they had all those kids, they didn't finish off the 2nd floor room over the living room.  We call it the attic room, but it's not like you've got to go up through the ceiling or a ladder to get to it, it's just a room off the hall upstairs, there's a door there and everything, so it's not like it would have been difficult to make it part of the living area. Our plan is to make it over into a master bedroom/bath, it's almost as big as the rest of the upstairs put together.  Really, if you had 6 boys, why wouldn't you want to stick them all in a big room to themselves?  Oh well, to each their own.  But, from now on, when my kids complain that their bedrooms are too small, I'll just remind the how the O'Connell kids must have been stacked like cordwood up there.

I talked to Hubs and Angel #2 this afternoon.  They're hoping to arrive in Houston early this evening.  They were just crossing the border from Louisiana to Texas when I was on the phone with them.  They met some old man at a convenience store in LA, getting in and out of his car was difficult for him, so while Hubs ran inside to buy a gallon of milk  for the guy, #2 sat and chatted with him.  She'd told him they were wanting to go someplace for seafood for lunch.  He told them he knew where the best place to go was and they should follow him.  Hubs isn't sure exactly where they were, but it was somewhere deep in the bowels of Louisiana. Apparently the guy was right and they had a wonderful meal of gator bits.  Yep, I guess if you're in Louisiana, you've got to eat alligator for lunch.