Saint Paddy's Day Parade

Yesterday we took the kids to see the parade in Old Town Alexandria. It was a little cold, but we had a good time, and the kids got to see their first parade. Overall it lasted about an hour and a half.

The parking in Alexandria was atrocious. Part of that is because I'm a moron when I get into a city as I have no idea how stuff like that works. The place was loaded with cops directing traffic, and it was a free-for-all for parking spaces with our caravan of two vehicles. Contrast this with the VA state fair last year where the VSP did an outstanding job not only keeping the immense amount of traffic moving smoothly, but also kept a large but subtle force in the park for security.

Anyhow, my shoulders went numb from having a 28 lb weight sitting on them for an hour and a half, and I loved every second of it!



Apparently, the Empire is full of Irishman!



My wife tapped me on the shoulder just in time for me to snap a picture of an anti-gun protester that was later seen on the news in front of a Starbucks in Alexandria:



Sooooo. . . .why hasn't it been a disaster so far? These people act like Americans just started carrying guns in Starbucks the other day, just because they announced that they respect the law. I've carried in Starbucks and everywhere else for years.

But be very affraid my fellow gunnies; there were at least a dozen of them! No mention in the news about the tens of thousands of everyday gun owners who didn't protest, but otherwise spent some hard earned money in Starbucks in the regular course of their day.

I do hand it to this protester though, he saw me standing there in all my OD Green and 5.11 glory and proudly let me take his picture. He must have known that I was not in agreance with his views, although he probably had no idea that I was about as armed as one man can possibly be; and I also had the feeling that I was not alone there on the sidewalk.

I found it odd though that while they were picketing in front of Starbucks, none of these guys open carrying found it in their black hearts to start shooting, stabbing, or slicing through the hundreds of thousands of little children that lined the streets:






You would be hard pressed to find an Irishman there yesterday who was not armed. Virtually everyone of them had a flask, a sword (which in contrast to firearms, which were designed to fire cartridges, a sword was indeed designed to kill people), and most had a dirk down in their sock. None of these bloodthirsty men and women stabbed anyone in the face with these deadly tools:



Weird.

Maybe people are not so bloodthirsty after all!

There's supposed to be another parade next week in down town Fredericksburg for anyone interested.