By the way, your parade sucks...

After our busy, exhausting day in New York City (see previous), Sean and I decided to have a light day yesterday. We planned to sleep in, go get some breakfast, drive out to Montauk to see the lighthouse, go see "Divergent", and get some dinner.

Sleep in: Mission accomplished! We didn't get out of the apartment until close to lunch time, and even then it was slow progress.

Breakfast: Mission accomplished! Sean took me to a nearby diner, where I had delicious pancakes and bacon cooked exactly as crispy as I specified. Diners get kind of a bad rap sometimes, but I've never understood this. I've never, ever had to send my bacon back at a diner.

Drive out to see the lighthouse: Mission accomplished, but this turned out to be a little more adventurous than the quick drive we planned.

Along the way, I finally got to see the rich part of the Hamptons that they claim to show on "Revenge" and other TV shows, except that those depictions continue to be not quite accurate.

"This street, right here, this is where Jack's bar is."

"Wait, what? That can't possibly be correct. The bar is on the water, and there are boat docks behind it, and Emily/Amanda can walk there from her house..."

Television, you continue to be a harsh, disappointing mistress. Now that I've seen the Hamptons K-Mart and the track where the school bus races are held, I kind of feel like I'd really rather watch a version of "Revenge" that actually is set in the Hamptons, where Emily/Amanda and Victoria exchange seething repartee over a slice of "Fudgy the Whale" from their local Hamptons Carvel and then struggle to the death in a dramatic finale atop the local historic windmill, which seems ubiquitously located in the center of every town here.

As we got closer to the end of the island, where we would find the Montauk lighthouse, we suddenly came upon a roadblock:



The town of Montauk was having a St. Patrick's Day parade, a week after St. Patrick's Day. We cut around it, and continued to the lighthouse:



Doesn't it look exactly how you would expect a northeastern Atlantic lighthouse to? We went to get tickets to visit the lighthouse, which you must be this tall to climb:



and where, for reasons that were never articulated, cell phones are banned, and that's when we ran into the surly lighthouse keeper.

"You boys go to the parade?"

In a technical sense, yes, since we drove through it, but Sean answered, "No, we didn't know about it."

"Didn't know about it? What kind of a rock have you two been living under?"

I guess they don't give out a lot of customer service training at surly lighthouse keeper school.

"Well, I'm from South Hampton, and he's visiting from Tennessee, and..."

"EVERYONE knows about the parade. Everyone."

I bet there's a good reason why you work alone at the tip of a rock that's slowly eroding into the ocean, lighthouse keeper. As for that parade, let me just tell you...

"Let's go see the lighthouse!" Sean suggested, derailing my combative train of thought.

The lighthouse has, I guess, everything you want to see in a lighthouse. There are memorials:





ocean views:









(I like that picture a lot)

flags:



ticks:



Wait, no, actually. Nobody wants that in a lighthouse. I was kind of amused, though, that the tick warning signs were all behind the fence, as if the grass we were standing on four feet away was free of ticks because they wouldn't dare cross the fenceline.

There's also the lighthouse itself:



which contains a small museum and which you can climb.

And by "you" I mean "other people who are not me", because there's no way I'm climbing a spiral staircase with metal steps that you can see through where the only "railing" to hold onto is a rope that moves when you touch it. Even if forced at gunpoint, I guarantee that I would be about halfway up the lighthouse before I huddled in the fetal position on the staircase and wailed for someone to come carry me back downstairs. Sean climbed it, though, and I climbed to the first window (five steps up) because I thought it would make a good photo:



After Sean climbed back down, we headed to the gift shop, where we were again asked if we attended the parade.

"No, we didn't."

"Really? It's the second largest St. Patrick's Day parade in New York."

Lady, are you kidding me? I don't mean for this to come out the wrong way, but do you expect me to believe that more people truck out to the ass-end of Long Island in the off season to see a parade a week after the holiday than go to the parades in Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, or, hell, even Watertown or Rochester? I've seen more people at the Cortland County Dairy Parade, and at least at that there's more than a parade. You know what I didn't see at the Montauk St. Patrick's Day parade? ANYTHING OTHER THAN A PARADE. No crafty booths, no Irish dancing, no corned beef and cabbage stands. Just a bunch of drunk people with red cups (not even green ones!) walking around getting drunker and a parade with only one marching band. And that one marching band was in kilts. KILTS. And it had bagpipes. Presumably because Scotland is so close to Ireland. Your parade sucks, gift shop lady and surly lighthouse keeper, and I'll not be judged by you for not attending.

Rather than say any of that, I bought some magnets and a bag of taffy, and we left.

But the sentiment still stands.

Go see "Divergent": Mission accomplished! It's a long, long movie. So long that I'm no longer sure I want to read the books.

Eat dinner: Mission accomplished!

Then we came home, where I watched half of "Revenge", a television show that takes place in a mythic version of the Hamptons where all of the stores look like boutiques and everything is very fancy and right on the water, and where none of the characters attended or even mentioned the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Everyone loves a parade

It snowed!



That's the most snow that we've had since I moved here, and I was totally ready for it after standing outside in the cold for hours on Friday night. I was outside because Bryan invited Kristin and I downtown for the Knoxville Christmas Parade, dinner, and a quick stop at a gallery showing because someone he knew had photographs in the show.

I was downtown a few weeks ago when the city was setting up their holiday decorations:



but last night was the first time I've been down to see them lit up:



Thousands of people came out for the parade, and we ended up finding a spot almost fourty five minutes early because the street was so packed. Eventually, though, our patience was rewarded, and the parade began:



beneath the shining Christmas star on Gay Street:



It was pretty typical for a parade. There were floats:





and bands:



and the trolley (which we missed when we needed to head back home because we stopped to talk to Gavin when we ran into him at Soccer Taco, and we had to walk):



and... Santa's boat?



And also a truck full of the... uh... Vikings of the Smokies?



What the hell? How are there Vikings in the Smokies? Did they pilot their big dragon-prowed Viking ship up the Mississippi and then the Tennessee River until it ran aground in the mountains? No mention of Vikings in the Smokies was made when I toured the Hillbilly Village museum in Pigeon Forge, but I did kind of get the impression that they weren't being a hundred percent factually accurate there. I think everyone standing around me was as confused as I was, because the only thing that got less applause was the car for the Knox County Democratic Party:



Toward the end of the parade we decided that we were cold enough, and went to go get dinner on Market Square before everyone else at the parade could decide that they were cold and hungry, too. On our way to Soccer Taco, where I had mediocre flan, we passed by Reruns and I saw the Boozehound Gandy Dance performing their hobo cabaret in the front windows:





I had to leave to go to our table before the end, so I don't know how the show went, but it seemed to be going well, and I left a donation in the pizza box in front of the window.

Anyway, we had a good time at the parade and dinner, and then Saturday morning when I woke up there was snow! At first, listening to the emergency vehicles go by about six times, I wasn't sure I wanted to leave the house, but when I went out on the porch I realized that it was so warm that the snow would soon be gone. I headed to the university gardens to take as many pictures as I could even as the snow dripped and melted around me:





You can tell how warm it's been here by how many flowers were caught completely off guard:







We've only had one really hard frost so far this year but now, finally, we've had snow.

And I'm totally ok with us not having any more.

One fest, two fest...

On Saturday I traveled from one end of town to the other, and, festival wise, from one end of the world to the other. Well, metaphorically, anyway. In the literal sense I went about six miles, and Greece and Spain aren't really that far apart, but it sounded so much more exciting phrased the first way, right?

I started out Saturday by heading to St. George's Greek Orthodox Church for Greek Fest:



I drive past the church every day, so every year I see the signs for Greek Fest go up and then come down, and everyone in the office always raves about how fun it is. They also all mention how expensive it is, so I was rather surprised to find out that the parking was free and admission was only two dollars. Then I got there on Saturday and found out why: all there is to do at Greek Fest is tour the church, watch some dancing, and buy things.

Mostly you buy food:



It's good food, and almost every booth had a little sign explaining what the food was for people not familiar with the cuisine, but it was on the expensive side. This tray of partries, for example:



set me back about six dollars, and two dollars a cookie at a church festival seems a little steep to me. The baklava was delicious, though:



even if I did have to eat it beneath the unsettling gaze of a one-eyed centerpiece:



While eating, we got to watch a cooking demo by the guy who owns the Pizza Palace, a restaurant downtown that was featured on the Food Network a few years ago and that, somehow, I still have not managed to visit:



He taught us how to make garlic and oregano pork tenderloin, a Greek salad, and a pasta side dish with Feta cheese and brown butter sauce that I made for dinner tonight. It was really good, and super easy. There was also the added amusement of watching someone root around under the counters during the setup without realizing that a room of hundreds was watching her crawl around on the big screen TV:



That giggling, alone, was worth the two dollars of admission.

As underwhelmed as I was by the festival (why not just honestly advertise under a "Come Buy Some Greek Food and Copyright Violating Nesting Dolls



Festival"?), I was almost awed by the Church. I grew up Catholic, but we mostly went to modern, less than a few decades old Catholic churches on Army bases. Maybe if I'd gone to a church with better windows and more shiny things like this one I'd be more religious, but now we'll never know. And you wouldn't know it was so impressive from outside, either, where it looks rather plain:



The same window on the inside is beautiful:



(I'm not really familiar with the scene depicted on that window, but if I had to guess just by looking at it I'd say it was from the time that Jesus was a rock star and surfed down a mountain and over some prisoners on his cross while the crowd shook his hands. I'm pretty sure that story's in the New Testament somewhere, right?)

Anyway, the inside of the church had a lot of nice windows:







a fancy altar:



with a lot of inlaid tile mosaics:



and the most impressive feature of all, a mosaic that covered the entire inside of the church dome:



Not only was the church impressive, but it remained shockingly lightning-free even though I walked through it, and as an added bonus I can tell my mom I went to (a) church this weekend. Everybody comes up a winner, I guess.

After I toured the church I wasn't still hungry, so I left Greek Fest and drove downtown for the HoLa Festival, which celebrates Hispanic countries. It was spread all through Market Square, and as soon as I walked up from the parking lot I immediately ran into a lady from the zoo, who was educating us about barn owls:



I'm not really sure how either of those things tie into the theme of the day, but I like the zoo, so I just shrugged and moved on.

There were a lot of booths selling food and cultural items, and some things that were a mixture of both:



I also got there just in time for the parade of nations, during which representatives wore traditional costumes and in many cases performed a traditional dance. This was both educational and entertaining. I learned that Chile also includes Polynesian islands:



and that Honduras apparently has a lot of cowboys:





The costumes were all very nice, though, and the dancing was fun to watch.







There were a lot of kids in the parade, too and they looked very cute in their little costumes. I thought this one was adorable:



She was trying so hard to be serious and precise, and didn't smile the whole time. It was awesome.

After the parade, a local dance troupe that one of my coworkers is part of performed and gave a salsa lesson:



It was really hard to get good pictures of them, since they were moving so fast, so for the first time ever I took video with my camera:



They did a fantastic job, and it was a nice way to cap off the day.