Sucat the Leprechaun

Janice's family is here for a bit renting a condo near Navy Pier. It has a great view of that and the lake from the 33rd floor. Susan and I went over there friday night to eat and play cards with her fam along with Laurie and Chris who just flew in for their week stay (a friend and her husband, she graduated from NW). It was a pretty fun night, good food, laughs, and free laundry.

Today was the big day for the Irish. ok. probably more accurately for the tourists. The river was dyed this am. We had really good spots on the stairs down to the river (we did get there over an hour early...) and it was of course awesome. :) It starts out as an orange powder and there is another boat to mix it up and afterwards kayakers aka stirsticks go out too. Its a pretty sweet shade of green though I'm not sure how worth the trouble it was (cold and waiting so long for a five minute process)

left to right: Betsy, Susan, me, Amanda, Karyn, Betsy
This is pre-green river. by the end of the day we (minus the Betsy's who went home after this) were more festive with a ton more beads and nice plastic green hats

The first sweep. Check out all the people. And the orange changing to yellow changing to green. the smaller boat on the left is one of the stir-ers.

We then walked further down Michigan Ave to watch the parade. Quick pitstop for coffee/warmth and we actually made it quite close to the front lines. Our spots kept getting better as time went on also because the people in front of us had kids and it was cold and they have short attention spans :) We got way too much free stuff and saw way too many green things: beads, hats, stickers, buttons, wigs, etc. People go crazy! The bars on our street opened at 7-8am and if they weren't drinking they were excessively covered in shades of green in every place imaginable. I tried to put American consumerism out of my mind in order to just enjoy the onslaught of free goodies.

Susan and I came back to the apartment and watched a movie for a little down time after having been on our feet for 6 hrs. After a short catnap we headed over to the girls' apartments down the road and hung out there for the rest of the night.

We made lots of friends today: First, I made friends with a special ed teacher near us at the river, she encouraged me a lot with how and what I am doing/teaching which was fun. A couple of the other girls, Karyn and Amanda, made friends with one of the younger, better looking cops, of the 50 that were standing around. And we also were gifted $5 from a guy that jokingly told us we looked like we needed it. Amanda really just had her bright green plastic hat held out in homeless-fashion, he said he was just going to support our college fund and dropped a Lincoln. In testing our college smarts he asked how much we would each get being 4 people and $5.. don't worry, I was on the ball and happily shouted $1.25 before he could go further, ergo he named me leader :) There were also a few really funny people near us at the parade, one with a green wig, and the other with a green beard. Green Hair had a brown paper bag can of beer and was quite a happy, festive guy. Made for good laughs.

I will post more pics of these festivities here when I have uploaded them
Oh and ps. Sucat is Saint Patrick's real name, he wasn't however a real leprechaun, unfortunate but true.