Paddy's Day!

When I was 23, I lived and worked in Ireland.

It was a bit of a mess.

This was the house I lived in:

This was one of my Irish roommates:

And this was one of my American roommates:

(There was another Irish roommate and another American roommate, but there was some bitchiness, and I don't have nice pictures of them.)

There were some good times:

"It's 'Emil,' not email." — Emil, clarifying his name

And some ridiculous times:

Crystal: "Crap! Now my crotch is going to smell like beer!"
Becky: "That's a sure sign of a good session."

Some times that defy explanation:

"Your receptionist has the most lovely Scottish accent!"
— client, to an engineer, re Becky's stellar (American) phone personality

And some times we'd rather forget:

"I lost the Yanks!"
— one Irish roommate to another

In Ireland, American and Irish culture blended:

But overall, it was good time!

It was a time when I only quasi-ironically hung a poster of Colin Farrell above my bed:

And a time when my boy drama was recorded in a journal with the Playboy logo washed across each page:

And it is, of course, a time in my life I look back on every year on St. Patrick's Day:

So here's a lovely seventeenth of March to you! May you wear green today, may you drink within Irish moderation (which is to say, not at all), and may you wake up tomorrow with a bit more memory than I did the day after ten years ago.  (The state of me!)

Happy Paddy's Day!