On This Day We Celebrate:

The Marine Corps Birthday

The United States Marine Corps is 237 years old today. Marines are very big on Tradition and Decorum (at least at official functions) and so this day is quite often celebrated with a fancy dinner and dress ball. OO-rah! Semper Fi, Devil Dogs!

Padraig Pearse's Birthday

He was an Irish patriot, and also a teacher and a poet, who wrote rather lovely poems in Irish Gaelic. Here is a translation of one:

The Wayfarer

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,

This beauty that will pass;

Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy

To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,

Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,

Or little rabbits in a field at evening,

Lit by a slanting sun,

Or some green hill where shadows drifted by

Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown

And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;

Or children with bare feet upon the sands

Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets

Of little towns in Connacht,

Things young and happy.

And then my heart hath told me:

These will pass,

Will pass and change, will die and be no more,

Things bright and green, things young and happy;

And I have gone upon my way

Sorrowful.  

And I just noticed that this post makes my 100th post!

And since today was a beautiful cold day, with several inches of snow on the ground, a changeable sky that would be grey and foreboding one moment, and bright blue the next, and the last golden leaves of autumn still clinging to the bushes and the trees, I decided to take a picture of what I can see in the bit of yard outside my hobbit-hole of a house. Happy sigh.... I just love this time of year!