Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday
02/16/2010
I’m not doing anything much in the way of Mardi Gras partying this year. Not that my wife and I ever do much of that, not being real party people, but this year we aren’t even going to any parades: for one thing, she’s back in school and has to spend a lot of time studying, and for another we both have grown somewhat tired of the parades. Besides, it’s cold.
However, I have uploaded some pictures from Mardi Gras 2009 to my Picasa web album, which I haven’t really used before. I decided to put them there instead of on Facebook (yes, I finally joined Facebook a few weeks ago) so friends and family who aren’t on Facebook could see them. I posted several of them here last year, so if you were reading the blog then they’ll look familiar.
Tomorrow I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: spend Ash Wednesday in fasting (rather mild), prayer, and spiritual reading. My experience of Ash Wednesday has always been that it arrives suddenly, when I’m not ready for it, and I spend it at work, so that it becomes just another day full of distractions and annoyances, with the added bother that I feel a little sick from not eating the usual amount. So tomorrow I’m taking a vacation day and staying home. Usually the first week or so of Lent has passed before I’m really giving it much thought, and I hope this will make a difference.
When I say “silence” above, I mean, principally, no music and no Internet. So you won’t hear anything from me between midnight tonight and sometime Thursday morning—unless I happen to be awake at midnight tomorrow, which I don’t plan to be.
Comments