Will Gets His Irish Up

So it ends for Mrs. Stroock's Nittany Lions. A good game but a tough loss to Notre Dame. Oh well. We've agreed that we'll be pulling for the Fighting Irish next week. Had the Fighting Irish lost last night, we'd be telling a lot of bad 'IRA ran away' jokes this morning.*

Related...going through Thatcher's War yesterday, we realized we need a whole chapter that talks about Irish, Irish government, and IRA characters. These would include Charles Haughey obviously, Jerry Adams, Martin McGuiness? Research, or re-research has resumed. We approach the task with - you guessed it - great fear and trepidation. There's a lot of toes to step on and details to get wrong. We almost wonder if we should drop this project. 

Also...while watching Penn State vs Notre Dame, and reading about the Troubles, we decided we'd have a drink. We poked around our liquor cabinet and found a bottle of something called Blue Spot Irish Whiskey.**We have no idea where this came from. No idea. We put three ice cubes and a splash in a glass and poured three fingers. Blue Spot was smokey and robust almost like...in fact, exactly like a decent scotch. The Irish distilled themselves some scotch. Weird.*** 

Anywho, the scotch worked. We imbibed because we were a nervous wreck all day yesterday about our basement, the sump pump, and the water heater. We're talking some real Thursday Downer crap here, people. [On a Friday?-Ed] On a Friday. We couldn't stop thinking that the water alarm was going to wrench us awake at 3:30 AM again. It didn't, but still. We're much better this morning. [Hey, maybe like, nine cups of coffee a day is a bad idea. Maybe you should cut back on the caffeine. What do'ya think, love?-Ed]

*A European friend on FB wonders, 'Why you Americans cannot play a game in which someone simply had to put something in a net?'

**We're not going to link to the Blue Spot Whiskey website because every time you go there it wants you to enter your birthday to prove you're 21. This feels like something Leo Varadkar would mandate. He seems like a white wine spritzer man to us. 

***Only amateurs drink whisky neat. Ice and a splash bring out the flavor. Yes, we used to know a lot about this.