St. Patrick (Swayze) Day

I don't drink beer.  Therefore, I don't drink green beer.  The common college student would presume that I'm therefore excluded from the national college holiday of St. Patrick's Day.  That college student would be wrong.  It's just more dangerous for folks like me, who have to stick exclusively to Irish Whiskey.

In college, I always had something going on.  During the weekdays, I'd actually go to class on the holiday.  I rarely missed class.  I'm one of those people.  The one time it fell on a Saturday, I managed to have 3 separate obligations.  One included lecturing middle-schoolers on nuclear weapons, so I knew it my duty to not show up all stinky and staggery.  Annie did not find herself in these obligations, so I regularly saw her at about 11am on St. Patrick's Day every year, just as she was about to pass out for the first time of the day.  Not that I didn't let loose a little come nightfall, but everybody was either way too drunk (think how drunk you'd have to be for me to say that) or everyone was starting to hang over.  Like 4th quarter at a football game.

I like to think that people think of me carrying around a bottle of peppermint schnapps and a bottle of chocolate syrup all day (my infamous Peppermint Patty shots).  No, that was just at night.  And it was really hard to catch up to everyone.  Now that I'm done with college, I've managed to spend the last two St. Patrick's Days making up for lost time.  Last year, I had such spectacular moments as:  laying down on the platform of a San Francisco subway station, wandering off to find mozzarella sticks at a diner by myself (and not telling anybody), and my green shirt / vest combo.

This year, though again on a Saturday, I managed to have some commitments.  I started the day by teaching Zumba.  Then, I went off for a few hours at the tasting room of the winery where I work now.  I was notified that a group of friends was going to be meeting at my place for dinner before hitting the town, and I managed to get home just 45 minutes before the crew showed up.  I had made a pan of pastitsio for Annie and I to consume before drinking, but it turned into a good dinner to have on hand for a group of people.  We drank wine, and started with some shots of Jameson, and then we called a cab and headed to downtown Lexington.

We started at Molly Brooke's Irish Bar.  It was way too hot in there.  A little too crowded, and a very unenthusiastic group.  Glad we started there, instead of finishing.  We then walked down to McCarthy's Irish Bar.  The place was a little roomier.  I believed I danced with the waitress upon entering, which is probably the best way to greet me somewhere.  This place was better, it was easier to get alcohol, but our plans were to progress to check out more bars.

I'm pretty sure that we walked past Rosebud (a really cheap bar) and past the bar that Annie and I have regular'd since moving here, Cheapside.  We made our way to Chase Taproom.  Things were starting to get messy here.  This bar was better than the last in terms of space.  I felt like our group made up half of the customers upon entering.  I remember buying a beer for a guy sporting a Lehigh Rugby jacket, after their upset of Duke.  Plus, he was big, so I figured it'd be nice to have him on my side if the night got out of hand. My favorite memory was when a typically tight-lipped, cheap friend of ours staggered out to the front door to sloppily ask the bouncer which bar we were at.

From there we moved on to Penguin Dueling Piano Bar.  I had no clue where we were, and I was a little offended that we were being asked to pay a $5 cover.  We were in Lexington.  I had just moved here from California.  Fuck covers.  However, we paid, and they shoved me inside.  I was transformed to a drunken Rob paradise.  It was fairly empty and extremely easy to get drinks.  There was plenty of room for dancing, and the dueling pianos were amazing.  Again, I had no clue we were going into a dueling piano bar.  I had tried on several occasions to go to a dueling piano bar, but it never worked out.  This was my first time, and it was so much fun.  Unfortunately, things just got drunker.  At one point, I was dancing with some chick, when I spun myself and slammed my drink into a dude.  It hit the ground and shattered, to which the dude said, "You know I'm a bouncer, right?"  So, I quipped, "It's OK, I'm a good person."  Classic.

They cleaned it up, and I think I tipped the person who cleaned it up.  I felt bad.  I also realized that I should probably cut myself off, since I had a full shift at the winery the next day.  I looked into my wallet and realized that I burned through all of my cash.  So, I found Annie and told her I wanted.... needed to go home.  Right now.  She said to wait like 10 minutes and we'd all leave.  That was, apparently, unacceptable.  So I walked out.

I ended up walking a little over 3 miles home, in the rain.  I absolutely hate it when drunken friends walk home.  I've actually heard that it's more dangerous to walk 1 mile drunk then to drive 1 mile drunk.  So many bad things can happen to a staggering fool, and I feel especially anxious about girls who disappear from a party.  But I'm a hypocrite, and we should all know that from over a year of this blog.

I made it home, but not without a little effort.  I believe I peed on the Ashland Estate.  I also slipped and fell down a small hill on the wet grass between the Shriner's Hospital and my neighborhood, since there is no sidewalk.  I woke up the next morning to find my car parked in by a friend who needed to take that cab home.  I also got to play that fun morning-after game of "Oh, that's where my shorts ended up." "Ahh, there's my watch."

All in all, the bars got better as the night progressed, and so did the stories.  The tight-lipped, cheap friend ended up passing out at a table at Penguin.  Then waking up and vomiting into a trash can until the bouncers could kick the whole crew out.  Spectacular.  There were some drunken texts and calls trying to find me, but I was having trouble seeing my iPhone in the rain.  (I'm lying, the rain had nothing to do with my inability to use my phone at that point.)

Once again, I made it to work on time, and I woke up feeling great.  Almost too great... again,
~RoB

St. Patty's Day in San Francisco

Let me start off by saying that I was never one to go over-the-top in my participation in St. Patrick's Day.  I don't drink beer, and I was really good about going to class to learn, not to make a drunken fool of myself.  However, this was my first year since turning 21 that I was not a college student.  It was time for me to let my hair down and party with everyone else, which I certainly managed.

I started by bringing a dozen mini-cupcakes to work.  I ordered them from one of my favorite cupcakeries from the SF Cupcake Challenge.  Annie and I each took a dozen to work, so we split an order of Peppermint Patty cupcakes and Guinness & Bailey's cupcakes.  I meant to take a picture of how cute they were, but I ate them too fast.  Peppermint patties do have a close place to my heart on St. Patty's Day, since I used to roam around with peppermint schnapps and chocolate syrup and make people get on their kneees for peppermint patty shots.  That kind of debauchery hasn't happened in years, though.

Skip ahead to the end of the work day.  Annie and I met at home, grabbed a bus to BART, and took off into the city.  We didn't have any specific plans, but we had heard that parts of the city get crazy, and we were just going to join the crowds.  We knew that we wanted to go by the Irish Bank, since it would be the epicenter of the Irish foolishness, but we didn't really expect to wait in line to get in only to wait for drinks while touching 30 other drunken frat boys.  And we didn't.  It was indeed crazy, so we walked around the corner to our first pub of the night, Rickhouse (though I called it Mickhouse until looking it up today).

Rickhouse: Irish flag means it's legit!

They had some crazy Irish whiskey concoction, so I ordered two, grabbed Annie a Guinness, and we found somewhere to stand while listening to Irish folk music.  Our bartender, though arguably drunk himself, had the cutest little Irish gettup on, complete with a bow tie and suspenders.  We finished and decided to progress somewhere else.  We got in line and walked into another Irish pub across the street.  It was so dense with people that we immediately walked back out.  (I'm gonna count this as the second place in our pub crawl, even though we didn't drink anything.  We drank enough later to make up for it.)

Annie had once played trivia at a place called Elephant & Castle, so we used our Smartphones to wander in that direction.  There were points where we thought of just following drunken groups of people, in hopes of catching up on the festivities, but they always walked too slow or got sidetracked.  Elephant & Castle is probably my new favorite bar, since it was huge and, for some reason, made me feel like I was back at Michigan.  (Not that it matters since I rarely go to the bar.)  Here's where things got interesting.  I just went for straight Jameson on the rocks, and Annie and I did shots of Jameson.  This place had March Madness on, so we were able to check up on scores and watch UCLA finish off State ('If you can't get into college...').

We might have done more shots, I'm not sure, but we then took off to find the Royal Exchange.

Royal Exchange Block Party

Apparently, the Royal Exchange gets a whole street blocked off (not just alleys like the Irish Bank).  It must have already been too much for SF denizens, because cops were there lining the streets.  Oh well, it looked fun, even though we couldn't find anywhere to get a drink.  We instead walked across the street to Embarcadero Center and found a bar on the 3rd floor where Annie once watched a Michigan hockey game.  (Strange that Annie sounds way more like an alcoholic at the end of this.)  What was important is that we ate here, but also drank more whiskey and beer, respectively.

Finally, our bar crawl ended at a place called the White Horse, where we found our roomie!  I got Jack on the rocks (I was sick of Irish whiskey), but I feel like people kept rotating drinks around so that I wouldn't realize that I wasn't drinking much of it.  I had a crazy craving for Mozzarella Sticks (good ol' Midwestern boy comes out), and took off by myself to find a diner.  The diner across the street was closed, so I went off to find another.  I remember walking in one diner, where there was a line, asking for something to sign my name on (meaning get on the wait list), but responded to the funny faces I was getting by leaving.  I eventually found a diner, ordered mozzarella sticks, and enjoyed them with ranch and a strawberry shake.

Somehow, when I walked outside, Annie and our roomie were there.  There might have been some texting involved.  They dragged me off to BART.  Here's how that went:

This is what I felt like.

This is apparently what I looked like (complete with a vest to look like a Leprechaun).

And these pictures pretty much sum up the rest of the BART ride (except our roomie got digits from a drunk guy playing mandolin [who also plays fiddle]).

Our roomie's friend was sober and picked us up at the BART station in Oakland to drive us home.  I may have offered to blow him in repayment of his transportation services...  Oh.  Though I don't remember it, Annie claims that at one point I was laying on the platform on my back, sprawled out, at the Powell St. BART Station.  If so, that's simultaneously disturbing and embarrassing (albeit awesome).

Hope you don't remember your entire St. Patty's Day either,
~RoB

P.S. Made it to work the next morning on time.  I felt great when I woke up.  Almost TOO great...