but…uh…

There is something in the water.

This was ordered for my birthday 6 weeks ago by the best girlfriend ever and it finally arrived on Friday. That’s right, it’s an entire case of sauce from the most scrumptious BBQ joint on the planet. Apparently, they were completely out and the order was delayed while they made a fresh batch. I don’t care if it arrived more than a month after my birthday. It was SOOO worth the wait. The ribs I made today were to DIE for.

I’m already freaking out that I only have 15 bottles left now. Mabe it’s time to reorder?

If you’ve been seen my quest for Shamrock Shakes, you may be interested in an update from McDonald’s on why they can be hard to find in different parts of the country.

Hello Aaron:

Thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald’s. We appreciate your interest in our Shamrock Shake.

The Shamrock Shake is a “promotional” product offered for a limited time only. Since the decision to offer promotional products is made on a region by region basis, I have forwarded your comments to the McDonald’s regional office in your area for their consideration in deciding if they will offer the Shamrock Shakes to their customers next year.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald’s and sharing your comments with us. Hopefully, the Shamrock Shake will be offered at your local McDonald’s next year.

Tina
McDonald’s Customer Response Center

So, there you go. If you want to see shakes where you live next year, I guess you’d better start sending some feed back now.

So, I just realized that St. Patrick’s Day is on Friday. When did that happen?

For some reason, my thoughts turned to McDonald’s and their Shamrock Shakes. I haven’t had one of these in YEARS! Of course, since I never watch commercials I had no way to know if they had them or not. I thought they must, but to save a trip I looked online. There was no sight of them at the McDonald’s website. Ever since Supersize Me, though, their marketing has focused on the “healthy” aspects of their food and the benefits of exercise.

Yeah, whatever, clown. Give me a nuclear green shake and shut your fry hole.

So, if they won’t tell me about what they are ACTUALLY selling, I knew that Google would save me. A quick search for shamrock shake turns up this site. Bring Back the Shamrock Shake. WTF? According to this guy, they hadn’t made them in up to 10 years. Am I really that old? That’s crazy.

So, I dutifully clicked on the link to send some feedback to Ronald McDonald and I gave him a piece of my mind.

Bring back the shamrock shake!

I was about to get up and go to McDonald’s just to get one and a quick search on Google tells me you haven’t made them in years. What’s up with that? They were the best thing EVAR!

I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to whip some up for this year, but maybe next year you could turn it around and everyone will be happier. I know I would be. And so would my friends.

Luck o’ the Irish to ya,

Aaron O’Hurley

OK, so my last name isn’t O’Hurley, but I thought if I mick’d it up a little with an extra O’ I might garner more sympathy.

Not long after sending off my note of concern I see ANOTHER page on the same site saying that Shamrock Shakes have been spotted at McDonald’s in various parts of the country. Well, now there’s a mission. A chance. I don’t care if I end up driving to Ohio, I’m going to get a sweet sweet minty shake. I will not be denied.

Turns out, I wasn’t. 2 miles down the road at the closest McDonald’s I could find, they had them right there on the menu board. They didn’t have any big posters or anything on the building. They reserved those for the selling their Apple Walnut Salad. (Come on. Who do they think they are kidding?) You can click on the photo below to see the whole adventure. It may not have been as difficult as originally envisioned, still, it was so thick, and frothy, and just so shamrocky.

They are so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

Well, it’s blogging time again. 

As you may know I’ve been ridiculously busy lately.  Aside from all the work things, I’ve been rehearsing for a play since Thanksgiving.  It’s come along quite nicely and we opened last weekend to much larger than expected crowds and a great audience response.   My understanding is we’ve almost sold out Saturday’s performance this week, too.   People really do seem to love The Lion in Winter.

If you’re in the Boston area this weekend or next, stop by America’s oldest community theater, The Footlight Club, and check it out.  It’s great fun and I get to play a bad guy.  What’s not to like about that?

If you can’t make it, at least click on the link below to watch me pimp my show on this week’s DriveTime. 

Did you know it snowed in Boston on Saturday? Well, it did. Sure, it might have been almost 70 on Sunday, but on Saturday it was the first real taste of winter.

I’m sure that many other more-hardened Bostonians are jeering the early winter wonderland but I’m most ecstatic. I know there will be much more of this sort of thing to come, but a pre-Halloween snow fall is quite a contrast to the years I spent picking out costumes that wouldn’t be too hot in the muggy Florida nights.

Besides, cold weather means more sweaters and more baking. Who can argue with that?

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Just taking a quick minute to send along holiday wishes from my dad’s house in Florida to all of you and yours wherever you may be.

The travels to Memphis, California and Florida in the last couple of weeks have meant that consistent internet access has been a challenge. I do vow to spend more time spewing forth here in the future so don’t delete your bloglines subscriptions just yet. I’ve got lots of fun stories about man bags and lost luggage, gift cards and holiday celebrations.

More bon mots to come…

No, I haven’t died. I’m still here but working like crazy to finish things before the holidays. I have lots of things I plan to write about here but I’ll get to those when I have more time. For now I’ve got just a few minutes while projects are rendering so I’ll do a brief bit of catching up.

I was busy before last week started but, in the interest of seeing if the candle has more than just 2 ends to burn, I decided to take on 2 new projects last Tuesday evening. Both were smallish and should have easily been completed before Saturday. Of course, both projects have now become bigger, more involved, complicated and just will not die!

The first was to make a simple 3 minute football video highlight package for my neighbor, Vanderbilt University, to show potential recruits how wonderful and hard hitting 2 win football team can be. Seems easy enough. But as these things tend to do, the ideas changed, more people got involved and it just got out of control. It’s now an effects filled extravaganza with hundreds of edits distilling about 100 hours of football into 181 seconds. If all goes well, I’ll be delivering the final DVDs this afternoon.

The other was a far more boring HTML image search application. At least it was. It’s now become a full fledged fuzzy-logic search engine for multiple databases (including ones that are decades old and malformed) that also happens to displays pictures.

At least I’m getting paid by the hour.

At 3 days we definitely need some sort of CNN news crisis theme music. Something heroic enough to give us hope but mournful enough so as not to betray the gravity of the situation.

As you can see, I didn’t leave for Nashville yesterday but I will today. I swear. For now, I’m catching up on my bloglines (which I HIGHLY recommend) at Otherlands and I came across this article on Wired which comforted me. It’s nice to know you’re not alone.