I went on a journey yesterday to find an Irish flag to hang from the mount outside our front door: I’m Irish, my future bride is Irish, and soon our Irish kids will be running free, terrorizing the neighborhood. I thought that it would be an easy thing to find a seasonal flag on St. Patrick’s Day—surely Target or Wal-Mart would have some kind of aisle full of green plastic derby hats and paper shamrocks to decorate your bar, pub, or keg, right? Wrong. There was no recognition of this noble day, this ancient tradition of inebriation, in either store. Aisle upon aisle of sickeningly sweet pastel Easter candy, clouds of perfumed sugar sucking all the oxygen from inside the building, but nary a leprechaun to be found.

Instead of seasonal flags, or even a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of countries, there was the same pathetic collection of cutesy ‘welcome spring’ type flags, the ones which employ every primary color in a headache-inducing pattern loosely resembling a bunny, or a rainbow, or a flower. They were at most 2″ wide, which is about as welcoming as a kick in the groin—I’m looking for something that screams PRIDE, one of those magnificent rippling car sales lot flags that could cover a football field and blot out the sun.

So I consulted the phone book, and found one ‘Irish and Celtic’ store on the other side of town. I talked to a man on the phone with a thicker accent than Shane McGowan, who told me they had a flag for sale that was $25. Excitedly, I drove up there to see Mr. McGowan, figuring they would be beating the people away, this being St. Patrick’s Day, and he being the loveable, toothless frontman of the Pogues. Instead, I found two pimply-faced kids behind the counter and a quiet store—which suddenly made sense: If I were Shane McGowan and I owned a store, I would have been piss-drunk in the pub by 8:30AM and had my kids watching the place too. Handing over my debit card, I got a 3′ x 5′ nylon flag printed with orange and green. I’m not happy about this, and I’m pissed at Shane McGowan. How could a fellow Mick sell me this shite flag? For $25, I was expecting a three-panel flag sewn together, and at least twice the size. How can I be expected to show my Irish pride if I can’t stop traffic with my flag?

Progress. I’ve spent the last couple of days washing, sanding, and mudding the office ceiling, and it’s beginning to come together. I mixed a batch of plaster and replaced the huge swath of water damage from the roof last night, and rembered exactly why I hate working with plaster in the first place. The hole is patched, and the walls look less like an alley in Beirut and more like a flat surface every day. Here are the new pictures.