Got the other trees into the ground yesterday, as I was hoping to have them planted before a whole pile of rain comes drifting into our area. It was…weirdly warm and today got into the mid-70s. I’m not complaining (much) but I have a feeling that we’ll be paying for it later on in the year.

Remember when you were grousing about the heat? How do you like this, good sir? as we watch the mercury drop even further and our faces hurt from the air.

We have our assignments but are under a strict embargo until they’re announced by our bishop. They’re his prerogative, so he gets to make the announcement which, I think, will be this weekend. Until then, lots of quiet preparation and prayer. I’m teaching OCIA tonight and our subject is The Liturgical Calendar, which is unquestionably the critical hinge point on which the entire creed rests. It will be a barn-burner, I can tell you. There may or may not be levitation; you’ve been warned.

I will, as in years past, start with a small explanation of what liturgy is and isn’t, what it requires and what it most certainly does not require. I also have the opportunity of maybe going down one of my favorite rabbit holes, which is the dating of Christmas and the inevitable questions around who cribbed from who in terms of the winter solstice. If you’d like to know more, take a look at Calculating Christmas by William Tighe or the very excellent The Origins of the Liturgical Year by Thomas Talley, who is Tighe’s main source. It is…exhaustive, and also magnificent.

As long as we’re at the outer limits of nerd, I’m writing this from emacs org-mode. Why? I’m still not entirely sure yet. The organizing tools intrigue me, and I’ve made an embarrassing number of attempts to learn emacs over the years before inevitably returning to vim for editing stuff; org-mode seems like an interesting use-case for which it might be worth learning…all the rest. The jury is still out, I’m afraid. I want to try to get calendar syncing working, at least in read-only mode before I take the big plunge. Writing here and posting directly to the blog is something I was able to do in VSCode too, both functions thanks to Claude who wrote the plugins/scripts/doo-dads to make it possible.

Postscript: class went well. Nobody asked about Christmas, which was fine.