Progress of Folly:

It should be wearable by the end of the week -- if I weren't teaching late tomorrow, I might well be wearing it Thursday. Would be nice to wear it before the winter's actually over. Once it's done, oh Readers Who Advised Prudence, I'll go back to "Queen Anne's Lace."

Winter, by the way, isn't over today -- snowstorm hit at 5:00 AM and now the turnpike's closed down on account of accidents. Ah, March.

And since I'll be teaching late tomorrow, we'll have our St. Patrick's dinner tonight. Corned beef and cabbage are in the slow cooker now -- and yes, I do indeed know that corned beef and cabbage do not an Irish dinner make. My stance on this is that if, whilst my ancestors and various 4th cousins were eating grass by the side of the road, they had had a chance to eat corned beef and cabbage, they would have been Extremely Grateful, and would not have mentioned the un-Irishness of the dish. Our special charity focus for St. Pat's day is always the victims of famine. We aren't them right now. We keep that in mind.

Also on St. Patrick's day we like to be grateful for the soy concentrate which I drink regularly. I've mentioned before that some women get hot flashes, but I get screaming fits followed by uncontrollable sobbing -- way too dramatic to actually live with -- and the Last Great Screaming Fit before I started the soy concentrate was on a St. Patrick's day a few years ago, when I found myself yelling at the child, "Your great-great-great grandfather was 6 years old when The Famine hit County Cork! Eat your g*damned potatoes! They're the food of your g*damned people!"

Well, that was the last straw. If the black cohosh isn't enough, you have to start the soy concentrate. Now the food of our people.